HAVEL, Václav.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Audience - Vernissage - Pétition. Signed by the author on the title page, this is a reprint of the first collected edition of the trilogy in any language. Havel was the final president of Czechoslovakia before the country's dissolution in 1992, and he was subsequently elected as the first prime minister of the Czech Republic, serving from 1993 to 2003. Originally written between 1975 and 1978, these one-act plays were secretly distributed by dissidents in samizdat form due to their antiestablishment contents. They grew to be significantly popular despite these restrictive circumstances, and a number of Havel's contemporaries even borrowed Ferdinand Vaněk, the autobiographical central character, for their own plays, establishing him as a cultural touchstone in Czechoslovakia. The works were not officially published in Czech until 1990, following the Velvet Revolution of the previous year. This French collected edition was first published in 1980.

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