Reading Vclav Havel

As a playwright, a dissident, and a politician, Vclav Havel was one of the most important intellectual figures of the late twentieth century. Working in an extraordinary range of genres poetry, plays, public letters, philosophical essays, and political speeches he left behind a range of texts so diverse that scholars have had difficulty grappling with his oeuvre as a whole. In Reading Vclav Havel, David S. Danaher approaches Havels remarkable body of work holistically, focusing on the language, images, and ideas which appear and reappear in the many genres in which Havel wrote. Carefully reading the original Czech texts alongside their English versions, he exposes what in Havels thought has been lost in translation. A passionate argument for Havels continuing relevance, Reading Vclav Havel is the first book to capture the fundamental unity of his vast literary legacy.