Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997)

Bohumil Hrabal is a creator of a highly idiosyncratic, energetic and entertaining style of writing, synthesising a number of major 20th century cultural and artistic influences: psychoanalysis, surrealism, American slapstick comedy, pub talk, the language of William Faulkner and Jaroslav Hašek, James Joyce's stream of consciousness, Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism, Jiří Kolář´s collage techniques, based on the art of the every day. In his literary texts, which range from highly experimental to relatively conventional, Hrabai shows ordinary, plebeian human beings in the context of their everyday existence and looks for the sparks of magic in their lives. Hrabal's work has significantly influenced 20th century Czech fiction, both in style and in subject matter.

Although Hrabai became a doctor of law in 1946, he never practised the legal profession, partially due to his personal temperament and partially as a result of unfavourable political circumstances. He supported himself as a clerk, a railwayman, a steelworker and a handler of waste paper at a waste-paper collection point. He started writing poetry and experimental prose in the 1940s. However, for political reasons, his first book of short stories Perlička na dne (A Pearl in the Deep) could not be published until 1963, from when the Czechoslovak communist regime became relatively liberal for a few years. Hrabal's literary debut, Ztracená ulička (A Lost Street), due to be published in 1948, did not come out until 1991.

While Hrabal eventually created his own idiosyncratic style of the novel, his creative output ranges over several genres. In his earliest period, he wrote poetry, primarily influenced by Czech inter-war poetism and surrealism. The 1950s were for him a period of "total realism". During this time, he produced poems in free verse and prose texts, ranging from experimental to more conventional work. Gradually his attention shifted from poetry to prose. None of this early work could be published at the time.

Between 1963 and 1970, several volumes of Hrabal's shorter prose texts and novellas came out, making him a celebrity overnight. Jiri Menzel's film version of Hrabal's short novel Ostře sledované vlaky 1965,Closely Observed Trains), received an Oscar for the Best Foreign Film in 1967. In the first half of the 1970s, Hrabal again suffered a total publication ban in in his native country; between 1976 and 1989 only bowdlerised versions of his texts could be published. Yet, in the 1970s and the 1980s, Hrabal produced his most profound and mature works.

Hrabal's creative method was Protean. His main inspiration was colloquial speech of ordinary people, which he stylised during the process of writing. Until approximately 1970, Hrabal continually re-worked his themes, sometimes producing parallel versions of the same work in different genres or in different styles. In his later creative period, h primarily used the technique of "automatic writing", pioneered by the Surrealists, typing his texts spontaneously, relying on the inspiration from his subconsciousness and avoiding the conscious mind. Hrabal's texts matured in his mind, until he hurled them spontaneously on paper at a speed of some 2500 words per hour. Thus one novel was written at a break-neck speed over a few days on an old typewriter by Hrabal sitting on roof of a shed in blinding sunlight. The sun prevented him from seeing what he was actually typing. Hrabal wrote in order to gather together energy and to produce moments of ecstasy, madness and magic, through which he attempted to transcend the ordinary world. "Hrabal's texts consist of repeated attempts to run and take off - often he manages to fly," wrote Salman Rushdie.

Hrabal’s short stories, published in the 1960s, were the re-working of his raw, experimental texts written in the 1950s, partially conventionalised and formalised. Nevertheless, even the tidied-up versions were received very warmly as a major new phenomenon in Czech literature. A group of young Czech film directors made some of Hrabal's stories into a feature film, which launched the "new wave" of Czech cinema in the 1960s.

Most of Hrabal's texts are set in Czech working class environments. Their oral origin is clearly detectable. The short stories published in the 1960s consist primarily of anecdotes, usually without a strong narrative line. The focus is on people talking and on the energetic zaniness of Hrabal's "palaverers", the raconteurs of tall tales.

Hrabal's third published book, Taneční hodinypro starsi a pokrocile (1964, Darning Lessons for Older and Advanced Pupils), also a reworking of an earlier text, was an important landmark which took the author's interest in the principle of people talking to an extreme end. The work is a single, long sentence spoken by an old man for the amusement of a young girl. Just as the other texts by Hrabal, this work is also characterised by fast editing, the techniques of collage, surprising juxtaposition of motifs and imaginative associations. Ostře sledovane vlaky (1965) is a relatively traditional reworking of two earlier texts, recast in the classical form of a short novel. It is the story of a young apprentice station master, Milos Hrma, who works at a small railway station in German-occupied Bohemia towards the end of the Second World War. The events of Great History are racing by, but the employees at the railway station do not participate in the war - as members of an enslaved nation, they have been relegated to the state of children and they preoccupy themselves with juvenile matters. Hrma is trying to overcome his problems with premature ejaculation. When he eventually proves himself as a man, he also carries out a serious act of sabotage against the Germans. However, this act of growing up costs him his life.

After the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968, the Russian reinstated a harsh neostalinist regime in Czechoslovakia. Hrabal, whose work was now banned, reacted by returning in his work, nostalgically, to the pre-Second World War of his youth. In Postřižiny (1970, Haircutting), he drew a picture of life in the small town of Nymburk, where he had grown up, as seen through the eyes of his young mother, the wife of the manager of a local brewery. Here he developed a rich, impressionistic style, with a number of multiple adjectives, recurrent motifs, superfluous conjunctions and mesmerising repetition of expressions he liked. Another nostalgic, bravura performance, a dirge for long gone times of old-fashioned, democratic Czechoslovakia, is the novel Městečko, kde se zastavil čas (1973, The Little Town where Time Stood Still). The work is an homage to Hrabal's boisterous, energetic Uncle Pepin, who once came for a visit for a fortnight and stayed for the rest of his life. The intense, moving scene of Uncle Pepin dying is a convincing metaphor of the departure of the democratic era.

The novel Obsluhoval jsem anglickeho krále (1971, 1 served the King of England) is again a comment on the predicament of a small man, a child-like Everyman (his surname is Dítě - Child) who tries unsuccessfully to be accepted by society: the political regimes in Central Europe in the twentieth century change to quickly for the hero to keep pace with them.

Possibly the most powerful work by Hrabal is the short novel Příliš hlučná samota (1976, Too Noisy Solitude). Three variations of this work exist: one written in verse, one in colloquial Czech and one in literary Czech. The hero, a workman named Hanta, employed at a waste paper collecting point, has spent thirty five years of his life operating a hydraulic press, making huge cubes of waste paper. Large amounts of precious, often banned books come his way, he rescues them from the waste paper, reads them and thus is "educated against his own will". The novel is Hanta's monologue, written in a sonata form. Hanta conforms to the task of destruction of old books, i.e. the destruction of European culture with a centuries long tradition. As is the case with many Hrabal's plebeian heroes, Hanta actively participates in the destruction, yet he is horrified by it. Eventually, though, he is incapable to come to terms with the modern (communist world), symbolised by a new, state of the art paper processing plant. He commits suicide by letting himself be pulped in the hydraulic press in the centre of the last of his giant paper cubes.

In the 1980s, Hrabal wrote a three-volume tour de force, a recapitulation of his life, as seen through the eyes of his recently deceased wife Svatby v domě, Vita nuova and Proluky (Weddings in the House, Vita nuova, Vacant Sites). In 1989, shortly before the fall of communism, he returned to the present. Starting with the dramatic text Kouzelná fletna (1989, The Magic Flute), relating the events of the first week of large anti-communist demonstrations in January 1989, he recorded the Democratic revolution and his experiences from the first few years of life in Czechoslovakia after the fall of communist rule with his own idiosyncratic energy. These texts came out in five volumes, published between 1990 and 1993.