The incident received sensational coverage in the Czech media, but Mr. Havel told Czech Television:
“It was a completely unusual, completely spontaneous and completely spirited response, and it did a little to save the honor of those who had been forced to sit and listen to all the lies.”
Vaclav Havel was born in Prague on Oct. 5, 1936. His father was a successful real estate developer, but when the communists came to power in 1948, the family’s prosperity abruptly came to an end.
In “Disturbing the Peace,” a memoir published in 1990, Mr. Havel said the new regime “confiscated all our family’s property and we became objects of the class struggle.”
As a teenager, Mr. Havel began the intellectual and artistic journey that would make him famous. In 1950, he got a job as a stagehand at the ABC Theater in Prague, an experience that convinced him that a theater “must be a living spiritual and intellectual focus, a place for social self-awareness.”
After studying economics at the Czech University of Technology, he served in the army and in 1960 joined the Theater on the Balustrade. The theater continually tested the limits of Czechoslovakia’s cultural freedom, helping bring about the cultural thaw that culminated in the Prague Spring. In 1963, it produced Mr. Havel’s first full-length play, “The Garden Party,” an absurdist satire of the bureaucracy and the distortion of language.
In his 1965 play, “The Memorandum,” an official tries to comply with a decree ordering the use of a new “scientific” language called Ptydepe — with the result that no one understands anything. In 1968, he wrote “The Increased Difficulty of Concentration,” a bedroom farce that made the point that the human heart cannot be understood by computers.
After being staged in New York, “The Garden Party” and “The Memorandum” won Obie Awards in 1968 and 1970. Mr. Havel’s other major works included 1984’s “Largo Desolato,” about someone accused of “intellectual disturbance of the peace”; “Temptation,” a version of the Faust tale; and three one-act plays about the struggle between conscience and conformity in the face of oppression: “Interview,” “A Private View” and “Protest.”
In January 1968, Dubcek succeeded the hard-line Antonin Novotny as chief of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.
With the Soviet invasion in August 1968, the liberal Dubcek was succeeded by Husak, a Communist Party apparatchik. Mr. Havel took part in Free Czechoslovak Radio broadcasts and signed a petition protesting Husak’s policy of “normalization,” as his program of repression was called.
In retaliation, the regime suppressed his writing and banned him from working in the theater. Although he was arrested several times and was under nearly constant surveillance, he continued to write. His work was published — and sometimes performed — clandestinely.
In April 1975, Mr. Havel wrote an open letter to Husak warning that the oppressed people of Czechoslovakia would demand redress for “the permanent humiliation of their human dignity.” Mr. Havel was arrested and detained again.
In the late 1970s, the Czech government cracked down with a wave of arrests and warnings that “freedom of expression” had to be “consistent with the interests of the working people.”
In 1978, he helped found an offshoot of Charter 77 called the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted, which resulted in a 41 / 2-year sentence in 1979.
During his imprisonment, Mr. Havel wrote many letters to his wife, which were collected as “Letters to Olga.” Published in English in 1988, they were praised by the Times of London as the work of a “profound philosopher.”
J.Y. Smith, the former obituaries editor of The Washington Post, died in 2006. Staff writer Matt Schudel contributed to this report.
