The Unsung Hero of the Velvet Revolution: Václav Havel’s Greengrocer

The lecture will be accompanied by a one-day showcase of Václav Havel’s and Peter Steiner’s publications. Light refreshments will be provided.

To make the most of the lecture, we encourage you to read the digest beforehand.

Speaker

Peter Steiner is an Emeritus Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Born in Prague, he received his Ph.D. at Yale in 1976. Before coming to Penn, he taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Harvard. After retiring, he served as a Visiting Yunshan Professor at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou. His research interests include literary theory and modern Russian and Czech literature.

Author

The last Czechoslovakian and first Czech President Václav Havel was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, under Communist rule. Due to his bourgeois background, Havel was not allowed to study formally by the Communist government. Despite this, Havel became Czechoslovakia’s leading playwright and wrote more than 20 plays and many works of nonfiction in his literary career. For many years, he was a political prisoner under state repression until the end of the Communist government in 1989. He spent 13 years as president of Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic.
(https://rfkhumanrights.org/vaclav-havel)