Václav Havel

Václav Havel was a Czech absurdist playwright, a Charter 77 dissident, a prisoner of the communist regime, and — five weeks after the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 — the President of Czechoslovakia. The arc from cell to castle in less than a year was matched by his refusal to relinquish the playwright's perspective: as president he wrote his own speeches, kept friends from the dissident circles, refused state ceremony where he could, and articulated a politics of living in truth drawn from his 1978 essay "The Power of the Powerless". The Alchemist signature in him is his refusal to identify with the role even as he held it; he was always slightly to the side of his own presidency, observing it with the same dramatic irony he had used to dismantle the regime. He oversaw the peaceful split of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993 — the Velvet Divorce — and served until 2003. He died in 2011. His life is the rarest case in the framework: a writer who became a head of state without becoming a politician.