When Václav Havel begins his eight-week residency at Columbia University on Wednesday, October 25, a central focus will be his 13 years as president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. This is appropriate: Mr. Havel’s rise from dissident playwright to world leader marks a unique chapter in Cold War history.

But it is crucial that the daring, spry, richly amusing plays not be slighted in the process. And Columbia has ensured they won’t: For the first time ever, a work by a living writer — Mr. Havel’s first full-length play, “The Garden Party” — will be a part of the school’s mythic Literature Humanities survey course. The rest of New York will get their crack at it and 17 other works when the Ohio Theater in SoHo and the Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, present the entire Havel canon, beginning Thursday, October 26.

New translations and even a world premiere are all promised in the Václav Havel Festival, but a highlight will undoubtedly be his three one-acts about Ferdinand Vanek and their honorary sequel, “Largo Desolato.” These four plays chart with devastating clarity both the meager rewards and the accumulating dangers of stoicism in the face of totalitarianism.

Who is Vanek? Pavel Kohout, one of three contemporaries to write subsequent plays featuring Vanek, called the character Mr. Havel’s “fictional twin brother.” And despite the latter’s repeated insistences to the contrary, both are Czech dissidents who worked in a brewery before going to jail for political provocations.

He’s a quiet fellow, extremely polite, seemingly a bit on the ineffectual side. “Vanek is really not so much a concrete person as something of a ‘dramatic principle,'” Mr. Havel explained in an untitled 1985 essay. “He does not usually do or say much, but his mere existence, his presence on stage, and his being what he is make his environment expose itself one way or another.

“The Vanek plays, therefore, are essentially not plays about Vanek, but plays about the world as it reveals itself when confronted with Vanek.”

The ludicrous, exquisitely funny subjects of “Audience,””Unveiling,” and “Protest” take on a disquieting new shade in “Largo Desolato,” however, when the environment of Mr. Havel’s own besieged psyche emerges. Taken as a whole, they represent a benchmark in 20th-century theater.

***

Those who picture rigorous discourse when they think of “political theater” will find Mr. Havel’s work a bit discombobulating. In “Disturbing the Peace,” an insightful book-length series of interviews, he stresses that his style of theater “is not here to explain how things are. It does not have that kind of arrogance; it leaves the instructing to Brecht.”

Mr. Havel — who began his career as a playwright during his compulsory Army stint, of all places — was drawn less to the dialectical proscriptions of Bertolt Brecht or the portentous cadences of J.B. Priestley and more to the scorched-earth absurdities of Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. “I have the feeling that, if absurd theatre had not existed before me, I would have had to invent it,” says Mr. Havel, who has called the movement “the most significant theatrical phenomenon of the twentieth century, because it demonstrates modern humanity in a ‘state of crisis.'”

This debased state, against which Mr. Havel crusaded as a playwright, as a dissident, and as a politician, spurred him to create a mechanized, schematic fictional world in which individuation is nearly impossible. Back in 1965, the protagonist of his early comedy “The Memorandum” bemoaned the pernicious effects of a nonsensical form of bureaucrat-speak called Ptydepe:

“Manipulated, automatized, made into a fetish, Man loses the experience of his own totality; horrified, he stares as a stranger at himself, unable not to be what he is not, nor to be what he is.”

When even language morphs into an existential threat, one solution is to become silent. After Soviet tanks crushed the promise of 1968’s Prague Spring, Mr. Havel’s works were banned from the stage for several years, and he spent most of 1974 working at a rural brewery. This experience yielded a one-act play the following year called “Audience,” in which a boorish foreman conducts a beer-soaked meeting with a meek employee named Ferdinand Vanek.

The unnamed brewmaster subjects Vanek to a series of threats, pathetic attempts at ingratiation, lewd propositions, and self-pitying declarations, punctuated with frequent bathroom breaks. Ultimately, he wants Vanek to do two things: to bring a renowned actress acquaintance to the brewery for “a bit of fun,” and, bizarrely, to prepare weekly reports for the authorities on his own “subversive” activities.

Vanek agrees to neither of these things. In fact, throughout Mr. Havel’s three plays, Vanek does virtually nothing besides request — unsuccessfully, of course — that a fellow writer add his signature to a political “Protest.”

Perhaps in response to the external silence imposed upon Mr. Havel during the 1970s, his “fictional twin brother” is similarly mute. Instead, he forces those around him to constantly recalibrate or, more often, to launch into verbose defiance as the moral fault lines of their arguments widen.

“His spoken part inevitably consists of unfinished sentences, fragmentary apologies, murmured remarks, repetitions,” Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz in her anthology of all four playwrights’ Vanek plays, writes. “Silence becomes the chief defense against the falseness of language.” It is surely no coincidence that Harold Pinter, the writer who used silences to such menacing effect during roughly the same period, played Vanek in a 1977 BBC radio production of “Audience” and “Unveiling.”

***

From the perspective of a Western playgoer who regards freedom of speech and expression as inalienable rights, Vanek’s mumbling, stammering diffidence can at times seem contrarian, almost priggish. Declining to supply weekly self-incriminating statements is one thing, but refusing to indulge a proud parent’s anecdote about his infant son, as in “Unveiling”?

Mr. Havel, whose involvement with the human-rights document Charter 77 resulted in his being jailed for more than four years for “subverting the republic,” addressed this quality of Vanek’s in his own roundabout way upon being freed in 1983.

While recovering from the illnesses that spurred his release, he spent a month in the hospital — “released from the burden of prison, but not yet encumbered by the burden of freedom,” as he describes it in “Disturbing the Peace.” That second burden bears poignant fruit in 1985’s “Largo Desolato,” perhaps his best-known work, thanks to a crisp translation by fellow Czech Tom Stoppard.

Mr. Havel’s revised surrogate, Professor Leopold Nettles, here reflects what biting one’s tongue for 10 years will do to a person: Vanek, who showed tremendous courage in his understated way, has devolved into a paranoid, pill-popping, impotent husk of a man, incapable of leaving his apartment, let alone of putting pen to paper.

After focusing for so long on state repression, Mr. Havel turns his gaze within and focuses on the deleterious effects of his own self-denial. “I’m lacking a fixed point out of which I can grow and develop,” Nettles complains to a young woman. “I’m … no longer the self-aware subject of my own life but becoming merely its passive object.” The chilling irony is that not even these words are Nettles’s own: He is merely parroting a speech made lines earlier by a concerned friend. He’s not even present enough to realize his own absence.

***

But the tremulous Nettles is no more a typical protagonist than the unassuming Vanek or any other of Václav Havel’s creations. Director Jan Grossman, Mr. Havel’s fellow evictee from Prague’sTheatre of the Balustrade in 1968, once wrote that Mr. Havel’s protagonists cannot be found on the stage. The audience, Grossman believed, is the hero.

“This doesn’t just mean that a viewer who is moved by what he has seen may start looking for a real solution,” Mr. Havel says in “Disturbing the Peace” of this observation. “It also means that he becomes this ‘positive hero’ while he’s still in the audience, as one who participates and cocreates the catharsis, sharing with others the liberating delight in evil exposed.”

Just as he offers the world a shaming mirror to its actions of complacency and capitulation, Vanek’s timid decency gives his audiences an opportunity to fill in his blanks. For the next several weeks, may the streets of Williamsburg and SoHo teem with newly christened heroes as they emerging from the ridiculous and piercing works of Václav Havel.

For more information, visit http://havel.columbia.edu/index.html.