Eight powerful contemporary Czech plays along with four illuminating commentaries by their authors are presented in this volume. The plays are unusual in that all share the same protagonist, the "dissident" writer, Ferdinand Vanek. In Czechoslovakia, these plays can only circulate in faded, dog-eared typescripts. These clandestine "unbooks" have become a vital force in currenc Czech literature. It is especially gratifying, therefore, to present the Vanek plays in a book which will endure. When Vaclav Havel first invented ...
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Eight powerful contemporary Czech plays along with four illuminating commentaries by their authors are presented in this volume. The plays are unusual in that all share the same protagonist, the "dissident" writer, Ferdinand Vanek. In Czechoslovakia, these plays can only circulate in faded, dog-eared typescripts. These clandestine "unbooks" have become a vital force in currenc Czech literature. It is especially gratifying, therefore, to present the Vanek plays in a book which will endure. When Vaclav Havel first invented his fictional playwright to entertain his friends in 1975, he had no idea that Vanek would be "taken over" by three of them--all real Czech writers. Between them, Havel, Pavel Kahout, Pavel Landovsky, and Jiri Dienstbier have made what Havel has called the "Vanek principle" into a public property. The plays explore the "realism of the strange," mixing fact and fiction, levity and seriousness. While Vanek says little in the plays, his silence is an eloquent retort to the falsehoods of bureaucratic language and jargon. Vanek has greater freedom than his creators. Havel and Dienstbier continue to live in the Eastern Bloc, while Kohout and Landovsky, both now residents of Vienna, cannot return. Their corporate character, however, has managed to travel all over the world. The Vanek plays have been staged in many European countries as well as the United States. With the exception of the three plays by Havel, these translations have been especially prepared for this volume. The Vanek Plays will be of interest to stduents of contemporary theatre, producers, directors, and anyone concerned with the deep divisions of our modern world and literature's response to it.
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