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Vaněk Plays
The Vaněk plays are a set of plays in which the character Ferdinand Vaněk is central. Vaněk first appeared in the play ''Audience'' by Václav Havel. He subsequently appeared in three other plays by Havel (''Protest'', ''Unveiling'', and ''Dozens of Cousins''), as well as plays by his friends and colleagues, including Pavel Landovský and Tom Stoppard. Today, the Vaněk plays are among Havel's best-known works. In English, they are principally known through the translations of Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz. Origins Ferdinand Vaněk first appeared in the play ''Audience'' in 1975 as a stand-in for Havel. Vaněk, like Havel, was a dissident playwright, forced to work in a brewery because his writing has been banned by the Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovak Communist regime. In the course of the play, it becomes clear that the brewmaster has been asked to spy on him. A long, rambling, comic dialogue proceeds, in the course of which the brewmaster eventually becomes a sympathetic figur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Václav Havel
Václav Havel (; 5 October 193618 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and dissident. Havel served as the last List of presidents of Czechoslovakia, president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 31 December, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of either country after the Revolutions of 1989, fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays and memoirs. His educational opportunities having been limited by his bourgeois background, when freedoms were limited by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Havel first rose to prominence as a playwright. In works such as ''The Garden Party (play), The Garden Party'' and ''The Memorandum'', Havel used an Theatre of the absurd, absurdist style to criticize the Communist system. After participating in the Prague Spring and being blacklisted a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pavel Landovský
Pavel Landovský (11 September 1936 – 10 October 2014), nicknamed Lanďák, was a Czech actor, playwright, and director. He was a prominent dissident under the communist regime of former Czechoslovakia. Biography Landovský was born in Havlíčkův Brod in 1936, and after finishing his studies at the secondary technical school of mechanical engineering, he tried four times to enter the Faculty of Theatre in Prague, without success. He started his acting career as a supernumerary actor in the regional theatre in Teplice and continued to perform in regional theatres in Šumperk, Klatovy, and Pardubice. The first play that he wrote, ''Hodinový hoteliér'', premiered at the Činoherní klub theatre in Prague on 11 May 1969. In 1971, the communist regime banned him from film and television. He continued acting at Činoherní klub and other theatres. Landovský was one of the initiators of the human rights petition Charter 77 and along with Václav Havel and Ludvík Vacul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard (; born , 3 July 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical bases of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the Royal National Theatre, National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was Orders, decorations, and medals of the United Kingdom, knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997. Born in First Czechoslovak Republic, Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing German occupation of Czechoslovakia, imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz
Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz (born Markéta Götzová; 15 February 1927 – 6 November 2022) was a Canadian scholar and translator, best-known for her work on Czech literature. Born to a German Bohemian mother and a Czech-Jewish father, she won the 1988 Ordo Scriptores Bohemici prize, 2000 Medal of Merit, and 2016 George Theiner Prize. Radio Prague International described her as Life Markéta Götzová was born in Liberec. From 1935 to 1948, she lived in Místek where she studied at a German School. Her father was Jewish and survived Theresienstadt. In 1948, her family emigrated to Toronto. She studied German philology and graduated from University of Toronto, and Columbia University. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the 19th century German novelist Wilhelm Raabe. From 1959, she taught German literature at University of British Columbia, and was best known for her scholarship on samizdat and dissident writers such as Václav Havel. In 1965, she married Polish-born political sc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland became part of Nazi Germany, while the country lost further territories to First Vienna Award, Hungary and Trans-Olza, Poland (the territories of southern Slovakia with a predominantly Hungarian population to Hungary and Zaolzie with a predominantly Polish population to Poland). Between 1939 and 1945, the state ceased to exist, as Slovak state, Slovakia proclaimed its independence and Carpathian Ruthenia became part of Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946), Hungary, while the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed in the remainder of the Czech Lands. In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II, former Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš formed Czechoslovak government-in-exile, a government-in-exile and sought recognition from the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samizdat
Samizdat (, , ) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because printed texts could be traced back to the source. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship. Name origin and variations Etymologically, the word ''samizdat'' derives from ''sam'' ( 'self, by oneself') and ''izdat'' (, an abbreviation of , 'publishing house'), and thus means 'self-published'. Ukrainian has a similar term: ''samvydav'' (самвидав), from ''sam'' 'self' and ''vydavnytstvo'' 'publishing house'. The Russian poet Nikolay Glazkov coined a version of the term as a pun in the 1940s when he typed copies of his poems and included the note ''Samsebyaizdat'' (Самсебяиздат, "Myself by Myself Publishers") on the front page. ''Tamizdat'' refers to lit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pavel Kohout
Pavel Kohout (born 20 July 1928) is a Czech and Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet. He was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, a Prague Spring participant and dissident in the 1970s until he was not allowed to return from Austria. He was a founding member of the Charter 77 movement. Biography He was still a devoted communist upon graduating from secondary school in 1947, and graduated from Charles University in 1952, with a degree in theater and aesthetics. He then became a member of the Central Committee of the , serving until 1960. It was during this period that he began writing plays and poetry. He was also a member of the . In 1956, he was briefly employed by Czechoslovak Television as a reporter and commentator. From 1963 to 1966, he was the dramaturge at Vinohrady Theatre. While there, he became attracted to the reform movement and resigned from the Union of Writers due to questions concerning his "cultural-political orientation". In 1967, follow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jiří Dienstbier
Jiří Dienstbier (20 April 1937 – 8 January 2011) was a Czech politician and journalist. Biography Born in Kladno, he was one of Czechoslovakia's most respected foreign correspondents before being fired after the Prague Spring. Unable to have a livelihood as a journalist, he worked as a janitor for the next two decades. During this time, he secretly revived the suppressed '' Lidové noviny'' newspaper. After the end of communist rule in 1989, he became the country's first non-Communist foreign minister in four decades, a post he held until 1992. Shortly after his appointment in December 1989, Dienstbier and Minister of National Defence Miroslav Vacek called for the withdrawal of 75,000 Soviet troops who had been stationed in the country since the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 2008, he was elected to the Czech Senate for the Kladno region. He died on 8 January 2011 in Prague's Vinohrady Hospital. Awards and honors In 2000, the Vienna-based International ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rock 'n' Roll (play)
''Rock 'n' Roll'' is a play by British playwright Tom Stoppard that premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2006. Plot summary The play is concerned with the significance of rock and roll in the emergence of the socialist movement in Eastern-Bloc Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Taking place in Cambridge, England and in Prague, the play contrasts the attitudes of a young Czech PhD student and rock music fan, who becomes appalled by the repressive regime in his home country, with those of his British Marxist professor, who unrepentantly continues to believe in the Soviet ideal. The play takes place over several decades, from the late 1960s until 1990, ending with a concert given by the Rolling Stones that year in Prague. Recurrent references are made to a glimpse by one of the main characters of the young Syd Barrett performing ''Golden Hair''. Barrett's physical and mental decline also plays a role in the drama ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Einhorn
Edward Einhorn (born September 6, 1970) is an American playwright, theater director, and novelist. Early life, education and career A native of Westfield, New Jersey, Einhorn graduated from Westfield High School, where he was an editor of the student newspaper '' Hi's Eye''. He attended Johns Hopkins University, and he has a MA in Opera Writing from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1992, he cofounded the Untitled Theater Company No. 61 in New York with his older brother, David. He curated the Ionesco Festival in 2001 (Eugène Ionesco's complete works) and the Havel Festival in 2006 (Václav Havel's complete works). He currently also serves as the Artistic Director of the Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival, honoring Václav Havel. As a playwright As a playwright, Einhorn became known for his absurd comic style. One of his best-known plays is ''The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein'', a farce set at a fantasy marriage between Stein and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
