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Bohumil Hrabal

(28th March 1914 - 3rd February 1997)

Václav Kadlec, Prague

(Václav Kadlec is the Czech guardian of Bohumil Hrabal's work and the editor and publisher of Hrabal's autoritative and definitive nineteen-volume Collected Works)

Bohumil Hrabal is one of the most important Czech writers of the 20th century. His work has had a profound influence on the development of Czech prose both in style and subject matter. Similarly Hrabal has had a significant influence on films and the theatre. His prose works are his main contribution to Czech literature. Mostly short, colloquial in style, they introduce common Czech and the ordinary man as the unheroic hero. Irony, humour, a trenchant style and acutely observed details create a milieu the reader can relate to, where the author freely alternates pub talk and philosophical aphorisms, folk wisdom and the precepts of historians. As a rule the resultant texts have no substantial plot but they fascinate the reader by separate dramatic incidents connected by a continuous flow of speech. Bohumil Hrabal had also, unintentionally, for the most part, a considerable influence on politics. At the time of the post 1968 "normalisation", in the 1970s and the 1980s, when Czechoslovakia suffered a neostalinist backlash and much first class Czech literature was driven underground or abroad, Hrabal's work served, wihout the author's intention to do so, as an integrating force between the officially permitted and the unofficial Czech literature.

Bohumil Hrabal was born on 28th March 1914 in Brno - Židenice. His mother was Marie Kiliánová (born 1894). The father's name was not on the birth certificate. At first the little boy was brought up mostly by his grandmother Kateřina. Later when Marie (Maryška) married František Hrabal (born 1889); the family moved to Polná where František (Francin) was bookkeeper in a brewery. After they were married in 1916, František Hrabal accepted little Bohumil as his own son and cared just as much for him as for his brother Slávek, who was born not long afterwards in 1917. In the summer of 1919 František Hrabal took the job of manager in a brewery in Nymburk where Bohumil Hrabal went to primary and secondary school. Having to go to school was a sore trial for him. Young Bohumil did not like school work and was not good at it. He preferred roaming about, observing what people did and listening to them talking. The colourful life of the small brewery enchanted him, especially when one day František's brother Josef came to the Nymburk brewery for a short visit and stayed for the rest of his life. His lively uncle Pepin completely won over the ten-year old Bohumil and the little boy became more attached to him than to his parents. The endless stories pouring out of Pepin provided the first great source of material for the future writer. Pepin was also the first of the great characters that Bohumil Hrabal contributed to literature.

Just after his school leaving examinations that he passed with difficulty, literature became Hrabal's absorbing passion. Karel Marysko, the musician and poet, who was a year younger than Hrabal, and the artist and poet Antonín Frýdl, were chiefly responsible for introducing Bohumil Hrabal to modern literature. They borrowed books, had discussions, went to football matches and cheap restaurants together and together they read their first poetic efforts. They small town had everything the young poets needed. The local bookshop always had the latest in literature. They discovered surrealism, dadaism, poetism. Bohumil Hrabal continued his intensive exploration of modern art in Prague. After a year of private lessons in Latin, on August 7th 1935 he enrolled as a full-time student in the Faculty of Law at Charles University. His first efforts at poetry date from that time. Like thousands of others he attempted to give expression to his thoughts, emotions and moods. He published some of his poems in the local Nymburk papers, in Občanské listy and in Nymburské listy. These little poems are certainly not exceptional. They are just like the work of other young men in all ages. Only the future would make them of any special interest...

Student days are generally the happiest time of one's life and all the more so if they are as richly filled as Hrabal's. His student record book dated 30th August 1939 contains a list of all the lectures he attended in eight terms between 1935 and 1939. He had passed the state examination in ancient law but he had not yet sat the rest of the examinations. The funeral of Jan Opletal, a Czech student who was killed student demonstrations in Prague in the autumn of 1939 aginst the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the subsequent closing of the Czech universities meant that Hrabal did not finish his studies till six years later. From December 1st 1939 till 31st August 1940 JUC Bohumil Hrabal worked in the office of Josef Možuta, notary, in Nymburk. From 4th August 1940 till 31st January 1941 he attended Eckert's private business school in Prague and received a first class certificate with distinction. From 10th September 1940 till 15th August 1941, at the same time as he was engaged in these studies, he was employed in the office of the Railway Consumers' and Manufacturers' Cooperative in Nymburk. Then he worked in the railway station Kostomlaty near Nymburk. Hrabal's own life provided him with material for his stories. He had worked as a maltster, on the trains, as a linesman and after taking a course in Hradec Kralove as a guard, which gave him another great subject to write about. Of course all this needed time to mature. Hrabal the truant from school was still under the spell of poetry, composing his lyrical verses on a typewriter in the brewery office. But he was storing up incidents and stories in his remarkable memory.

After the war Bohumil Hrabal at the age of thirty-one took the chance to finish his degree at the university. On 22nd March 1946 he graduated doctor of laws. One chapter of his life was closing but he still had to do his deferred military service. His entire military service did not last long, from 1st April till 31st August 1946. On September 16th 1946 Dr.Bohumil Hrabal took up the post of director of the Tradesmen's Health Insurance and Pension Fund. In the legends and myths that the author invented about himself Bohumil Hrabal maintained that as an insurance agent he was trying to overcome his innate shyness. There may be a grain of truth in this but it is worth looking at the actual situation. Here was a university graduate, in the prime of life, unmarried, without encumbrances, who could not make up his mind what to do: should he look for a steady job, find a family and live quietly in a small town - something his friends, Marysko in particular, were emphatically against, or should he devote his whole life and sacrifice everything for art - which his friends, Marysko in particular, strongly challenged him to do. For the moment the dilemma remained unresolved. More and more bizarre stories were being stored up in his memory, more and more poems were being written....But it soon becomes obvious that, no doubt because of his job, Hrabal's poetic work was already moving away from whimsical lyrics and poetism to reality. This would later influence his prose but as yet the poet was unaware of this. From his poems he made up an anthology Ztracenáulička (The Lost Street) and tried to have it published at his own expense at the Nymburk printers Hrádek. Less than a year later the young lawyer took a job beginning on 9th September 1947 as a commercial traveller for the wholesalers H.K.Klofanda selling brushes and supplies for chemist shops.... and he continued to type out dozens of lyrical poems reflecting on his life and times. Volume 1 of his Collected Works contains Bohumil Hrabal's literary output between the years 1937 and 1948.

The February coup of 1948, through which the Communist Party came to power and through which Czechoslovakia became a part of the Soviet Bloc for the next half a century, shattered the basis on which the rising standard of living of the postwar era was built. Some unscrupulous people managed to improve their lot but most quietly collapsed. The Hrádek printers was finished and with it Hrabal's hope of publishing his first work; in fact it was not published till 1991. The firm H. K. Klofanda was closd down. The former commercial traveller became the receiver, joined the nationalized firm Obchodní domy and in June 1949 volunteered for the labour brigade SONP Kladno (The National United Steelworks, Kladno). It was the end of an era and the end of a poet. By going to Kladno Bohumil Hrabal took a decisive step. He broke with Nymburk and lived in a single men's hostel in Kladno. Later he lived in Prague in the working class quarter of Libeň at 24, Na Hrázi (On the Dyke - he called it "On the Dyke of Eternity"). Kladno and Libeň became vast sources of inspiration for him. In Kladno he met Vladimír Boudník, who moved to Libeň in December 1950. At one time Karel Marysko also lived there. Egon Bondy and the brothers Vávra were frequent visitors. They read each other's work and went for beers. Hrabal wrote and wrote. He recorded endless reams of Uncle Pepin's sayings and wrote about Kladno. In the autumn of 1950 he had two splendid, long poems ready - Bambino di Praga (The Baby Jesus of Prague) and Krásná Poldi (The Beautiful Poldi). In the spring of 1952 the famous Jarmilka came into being...

On the 10th of July 1952 Bohumil Hrabal was seriously injured at work at Kladno. For a long time after he left hospital he was not able to work. He spent a month recuperating in a sanatorium in Vráž near Písek. At last on March 7th 1953 he was passed fit for light work. Suddenly however everything was different, except for the irreversible fate linking his life and literature. Because he was unfit for heavy work he left Kladno and on the 8th of October 1954 he began working in Sběrné suroviny, a firm which collected waste paper and other material for recycling. Here was another typical Hrabal paradox. Working with tons of waste paper was hard grind. After this hard grind it was straight to the typewriter - and before, during and after all this - to the pub! In the waste paper recycling centre in Spálená Street in Prague 1 (now closed) Hrabal met his second great character the former weightlifter, pole vaulter and rugby player Jindřich Peukert, known as Hanťa. Hrabal wrote a story about him that later appeared with the title of Baron Prášil (Baron Muenchhausen). He made more and more use of this character until twenty years later we find in Příliš hlučná samota (Too Loud a Solitude) the monumental figure of Hanťa, one of the great characters in contemporary literature. Hrabal's typewritten texts were gradually being circulated and were discovered by poet, graphic artist and critic Jiří Kolář and other literary figures. In fact it was Jiří Kolář and Josef Hiršal who published the 1956 typewritten almanach Život je všude (Life is Everywhere). Five of Hrabal's stories were included and two of these appeared that same year among the 250 printed as Příloha Zpráv spolku českých bibliofilů (The Supplement to the Bulletin issued by the League of Czech Bibliophiles). The texts from that period are contained in volumes 2 and 3 of Hrabal's Collected Works.

Through his friends Hrabal was awarded a six months' grant from the Czech Literary Fund to finish his collection of short stories. This led to another paradox. Because he had the grant he was dismissed from the waste paper recycling centre. The agreement cancelling his contract was signed by both parties on February 16th 1959 and on February 18th he began to work as a scene-shifter in the S.K. Neumann theatre in Libeň. He completed the collection of stories Skřivánek na niti (Lark on a String), the book was typeset, the proof-reading was completed, but in the end, its publication was banned. So Hrabal worked in the theatre and lived with his wife Eliška, whom he married in 1956, round the corner from the theatre and close to at least five of his favourite pubs. At that time he did not write much. Things were not getting better, politically, and he had little hope of being published. Once again Jiří Kolář intervened and, urged on by him, from January 1st 1962 Hrabal became a freelance writer. His short stories appeared in magazines and at last at the end of January 1963 his first book Perlička na dně (The Pearl in the Deep) was published and his second book, Pábitelé Ę(Palaverers) followed the next year.

The first two collections of short stories were developed from the rejected book Skřivánek na niti , which had been made up from revised texts written during the fifties. Numerous revisions and adaptations at the demand of the publishers' editors removed much of the original rawness of the "totally realistic" texts. They changed colloquial speech into standard Czech giving the stories a more formal style. In spite of that the stories created a sensation at the time and won immediate acclaim. A group of young directors, Juraj Herz, Věra Chytilová, Jaromil Jireš, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Ivan Passer and Evald Schorm, made them into the films that ushered in the "new wave" in Czech cinema.

Hrabal was thoroughly familiar with the background of the stories - a small town, the outskirts of Prague, the Kladno ironworks and the waste paper recycling centre. The characters were also based on living models and Hrabal reproduced their language to a T. They were altogether ordinary people with altogether ordinary concerns. The stories have a fairly restricted background. They are made up of a series of unrelated anecdotes without a strong story-line. If there is any suggestion of a plot, as for example in Bambino di Praga (The Little Child Jesus of Prague,1947) it is retroactive arising out of references going back to previous self-contained stories strung out like beads on a necklace. Hrabal's texts do not have substantial punch-lines. First and foremost they are concerned with the speech of ordinary people - incidentally the symbolic title of the 1956 special edition of two of the stories was Hovory lidí (People Talking). Hrabal's titles and subtitles always indicate the essence of the work. His heroes are free souls like the lark out of sight above the ploughed field, but their flight is restricted by fate, by the string of laws and social conventions. They are simple, ordinary people but at the bottom of the soul of every one of them shines an unsuspected pearl, making him or her exceptional and unique. Their rich earthy language is the whole point of the stories. These people are simply "pábitelé" (palaverers, tellers of tall stories, originals), a word that Bohumil Hrabal introduced into the Czech language and keeps using in connection with his characters.

In his third book Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé (Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age,1964) Hrabal carried the principle of continuous talk to the extreme. This was a revised version of the story Utrpení starého Werthera (Old Werther's Sufferings,1949). The story consists of a single sentence, uttered by an old man (Uncle Pepin) for the consolation and guidance of Miss Kamila. This monologue, spoken by a man who admired the European Renaissance, the Czech 19th century democratic journalist Havlicek, young Mozart and Mr. Batista's Manual of Sex Education is introduced by a quotation from the philosopher Ladislav Klíma, "Victory consists of nothing else but being beaten into a pulp". In this sense the speaker is victorious over and over again, in any situation. This novella, made up of a single sentence, contains all the characteristics fundamental to all the author's work. Comparison with the original extant texts shows in detail Hrabal's use of cutting, collating, surprising shifts of meaning and novel associations in his textual development. Here Hrabal makes full use of the whole range of subjects - pub talk, man's basic instincts, sex, the contrast between outward (noble) and inner (selfish) motives - that brought him fame but at the same time made him the target of a great deal of almost hysterical abuse. History, philosophy and politics are interpreted from the point of view of those at the bottom of the social scale. There are quotations from the most varied sources, including conversations overheard and set down into provocative contexts. Once again there is no basic plot, no punch-line.

In his fourth book the novel Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely Observed Trains, 1965) Bohumil Hrabal tried out a different, more traditional form. The origin of this novel is the same as of all his prose work produced in the sixties. The author started from the his existentialist story Kain (Cain,1949) , took the famous stamp scene from the short story Fádni stanice (The Deadly Dull Station) and then he revised and reshaped everything into compact classical form. The young hero Miloš Hrma is a trainee guard in a small railway station. The Second World War is nearly over and history is reaching a crucial point. The young hero has a personal problem with ejaculatio praecox. He tries to commit suicide and then returns to the station office where the experienced guard Hubička, who is due to be officially reprimanded for his scandalous behaviour on duty towards the telegraphist Zdenička Svatá - he had stamped her buttocks with the official railway rubber stamps - gives him advice. A committee of inquiry, headed by senior railways official Zedníček, takes away the stationmaster's hope of a promotion to a railway inspector. This is how things stand when at night a messenger from the resistance movement, Viktoria Freie, arrives bringing explosives to blow up a closely watched military transport train. At the same time she solves Miloš' problem for him. Next day Miloš takes the charge up to the signal-post and from there throws it down on to the ammunition train. In the course of the diversion he himself dies. As if it were a warning from Hrabal to his Czech audiences: as long as you remain in a child-like state, you may survive: the moment you reach maturity and adulthood, you die. This traditional tragic story with typical characters and names that comes to a climax seems to retain all the attributes of Hrabal's style, including humour, cleverly juxtaposed scenes, and latent sex, sex, sex. The great days of the end of the war are seen through the eyes of small, insignificant people. In fact only certain surrealistic details indicate the wartime background. War fever is contrasted with the outlook of the unheroic heroes; the destinies of insignificant people are the little wheels on which history moves forward. Contemporary critics mostly welcomed Hrabal's movement towards a more traditional form. Some critics however, chiefly Jan Lopatka, immediately saw the pitfalls. In any case the author must have been aware of them himself and none of his later work has such a conventional form. Ostře sledované vlaky is very like a film script and it was very soon made into a film that had its premiere in 1966. It was extraordinarily successful, winning many awards - the grand prix of the city of Mannheim in 1966, an Oscar in 1967 and the Klement Gottwald State Prize in 1968.

Bohumil Hrabal's greatest achievement in the period when his work was first published was the collection of short stories taken from various sources and called Inzerát na dům, ve kterém už nechci bydlet (Advertisement for a House I Don't Want to Live in Anymore,1965);. Every one of the seven texts in this book was a rigorous adaptation of an older version. Long epics and shorter lyric poems were both re-worked into prose form and the whole was held together by an autobiographical figure with the symbolic name Kafka. Hrabal here shifted his position to one of political confrontation while retaining all the fundamental stylistic elements of previous books. The oppressive climate of the fifties had eased somewhat by the exposing of the cult of Stalin, but in spite of that, to write the truth about such contentious questions as the placing of the enormous statue of Stalin overlooking Prague and its almost immediate demolition, or the work of the "class enemies" in the "voluntary" labour brigade in heavy industries, required personal courage both on the part of the author and the publishers. Inzerát na dům, ve kterém už nechci bydlet was one of the decisive steps towards the political liberalisation of the Prague Spring of 1968.

Every title of Hrabal's published at that time was an event. His books went rapidly out of print and a new editions were brought out. In 1966 the popular publication seris Máj brought out the wide-ranging selection of Hrabal's texts Automat svět (The 'World' Cafeteria) in a huge edition of 102,000 copies. It had a very important epilogue by Emanuel Frynta and was illustrated by Jiří Kolář. A year later the book Bohumil Hrabal uvádí... (Bohumil Hrabal presents....) came out. This was a kind of anthology of his favourite authors and a collage of texts with photographs by Miroslav Peterka. Called Toto město je ve společné péči obyvatel (This Town is in the Care of its Inhabitants) it inaugurated the HU+SA (Humor a satira, Humour and Satire); series from the publishing house of the Czechoslovak writers. Of course there was another side to the enormous popularity and fame that Hrabal had gained so rapidly. There was no time for writing and nothing new appeared. In the end the author delved into his store of older writings and produced the book Morytáty a legendy (Legends and Broadside Ballads of Murder, 1968). In this collection the cuts and revisions are somewhat perfunctory and it lacks any unifying element. Besides collages from letters, conversations and literary extracts there are unrevised texts and also other stories that have undergone many changes (eg. Legenda o krásné Julince, The Legend of Beautiful Julinka). The whole book appears scrappy and does not manage to conceal the fact that it was composed from "left overs". Hrabal's work from the sixties is contained in the 4th anf 5th volumes of his Collected Works.

On August 21st 1968 Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Warsaw Pact armies. For a year threafter everyone still nursed various hopes before it became obvious that all these hopes were unfounded. Bohumil Hrabal had two books Poupata (Buds); and Domácí úkoly (Homework); at the publishers Mlada fronta. Both were printed, bound, parcelled up and....sent to the waste paper recycling centre, to the very place where he had made up bales of old paper ten years previously - to the very place where his wife Eliška was working, making out travel documents for the removal of banned books. Perfidious irony of fate! Bohumil Hrabal was suddenly persona non grata. He withdrew from public life and lived mostly in the village of Kersko, outside Prague. Once again paradoxically, that was the time when he wrote his best works.

From the late sixties Hrabal had been talking about writing his memoirs, in which he would return to the Nymburk of his childhood and youth, to the brewery and his Uncle Pepin. The first of these texts was Postřižiny (A Ceremonial Haircut,1970). The author looks at the small town as it once was through the eyes of is mother, the wife of the manager of the brewery. The language of the narrator is less terse, more metaphorical and fluid. The plot is not fundamental to the story. The pictures, characters and situations are what matters. His mother will be for ever Maryška, his father Franci, and Uncle Pepin will be the most impressive figure in all Hrabal's work. It is interesting that the not even the liberal, samizdat editors did not begin to understand the extravagant, unrestrained language of this novel and copied it out making a great many corrections, changing the style and the order of words. In fact Hrabal had invented a style full of repetitions often using synonyms and recurring themes. He used many coordinating conjunctions and kept repeating the same favourite words and idioms. His writing became more and more like impressionist painting or symphonic music from the turn of the century. It is necessary here to say a few words on Hrabal's writing technique. He often described it and commented on it himself. The basis of his technique was his prodigious memory where he stored up details, stories, anecdotes, subjects and even words he had heard. In some indescribable way all this material in his head reacted, combined, evaluated and arranged itself. The creative process continued wherever the author went, to the pub, on the bus or to the woods... until suddenly the moment would come when the text would burst out and would be hurled straight on to the typewriter at the rate of 2500 words an hour. Then the first draft was submitted to scissors and paste and the result could now be sent to the editors. Beginning with Postřižiny Hrabal gave up eternally revising and "improving" his texts. He became more and more inclined to leave his texts in their original form.

This was also the case with the novel Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England,1971); which is reputed to have been written in three weeks in the summer in Kersko and left in its original state. Five chapters are introduced by the words,"Pay attention to what I'm going to tell you " and they all finish in the same way: "Have you had enough? I'm finishing here for today". By this simple expedient Hrabal indicates he is telling the reader a story - or more accurately - he is having a chat with him. That is what the otherwise apparently confusing sub-title Povídky (Stories) refers t. (The expression "Povídky" is derived from the word "povídat", "to talk". Hrabal has here returned to the original meaning of the word.) Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále is undoubtedly a novel, the sub-title merely stresses the fact that there is only one narrator telling the reader everything; first of all he is an apprentice waiter, later a waiter, after that he is owner of a hotel and ultimately he is a road-mender. The appearance and personal qualities of the young man are not described. In fact he has no name and this is as the author intended. In the first three chapters neither the narrator's first name or a surname is mentioned. It is only with the arrival of the Nazis and their racial inquiries that we learn that his grandfather was called Johann Ditie. Later from the context it becomes clear that his surname was Dítě, Child. The symbolism of this surname is just as obvious as the fact that in the last chapter his name is consistently (if possible still more deliberately) not mentioned. The novel is set in Bohemia about the time of the Second World War and social and political events form one of the main backgrounds to the story even though they are not central to the narrator's tale. This novel is clearly the most convincing portrayal of Czech-German relations in Czech literature. In the novel the narrator's own life progresses more or less continuously and chronologically from his apprenticeship in the Zlatá Praha (Golden Prague) Hotel, through his years as a waiter in the hotels Tichota and Paříž, as far as the fourth, "German" chapter, when the young waiter feels important for the first time, for people have stopped calling him "son" or "boy" and address him as Herr Ditie. The novel reaches its climax in the last, longest chapter. After the war the narrator served six months for some slight infringment of the law but afterwards he built a hotel in the outskirts of Prague. His dreams came true and he became a millionaire. Then when a tax was imposed on millionaires he began to worry that nobody demanded that tax of his and that he wasn't a real millionaire; however, the moment he manages to has his millionaire's status recognised, a communist coup takes place and he is interned with the other millionaires, but even then he is not fully recognised as one of them. Throughout his life, the hero of Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále attempts to become part of the establishment, but the historical situation changes so quickly that he finds it impossible to keep up with developments. In the end, when he has to choose between prison and working in the forest with the labour brigade, he leaves the community of people and settles in Czechoslovakia's border region where he finishes up as a roadman repairing in solitude the same road over and over again year after year. The novel Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále represents a further step forward in Hrabal's creative development. It has all the merits of his previous works and in addition it clearly has a plot and a well thought out system of symbols, metaphors and parables. From the reader's point of view it is the most rewarding Hrabal's works. It forms volume 7 of the Collected Works.

Městečko, kde se zastavil čas (The Little Town Where Time Stood Still,1973) continued the nostalgic strain of Postřižiny . Again it is about Nymburk, before and after the war, this time seen through the eyes of the author as a boy. Mother, Francin and Pepin are again the main characters of individual chapters. The novel has of course many other distinctive characters. The end of the war and the nationalization of the brewery is portrayed very evocatively. This was of course the very type of subject that at the time of the normalization could not be published. At this point something has to be said about the accuracy of the facts in Hrabal's texts. Broadly speaking the author keeps to the facts regarding the smallest details. Perhaps he considered these details provided the truest basis for his work. However if it was in the interest of the story, he would change anything and everything as long as it resulted in a better metaphor or hyperbole. And so at the end of Městečko, kde se zastavil čas when Francin, with the gesture of a Cyrano de Bergerac, throws the famous "sailors cap" belnging to the dying Uncle Pepin into the Elbe, and returns home and reacts to the news of Pepin's death with the words,"Yes, I know" he had in fact been dead himself for nearly a year...

At the same time as he was writing Městečko, kde se zastavil čas Hrabal was working on a collection of texts Něžný barbar (The Gentle Barbarian,1973). The book was dedicated to the artist Vladimír Boudník on the fifth anniversary of his premature death. Once again it is a book of memoirs, this time chiefly about Libeň of the fifties. Anyone with a pedantic interest in facts would again find some departures from the truth, however it was intended to portray Vladimír which it did with total success. Vladimír Boudník not only continues to be recognized as as innovator in graphic technique, but he is also one of the most important figures in Hrabal's work. Memoirs from the first half of the seventies form volume 6 of the Collected Works.

In the early years of the seventies Hrabal also wrote short stories that he collected into Slavnosti sněženek (A Celebration of Snowdrops,1975). The stories are dedicated firstly to the village of Kersko and the people living there. The collection however also contained very important texts from this time, for example Variace na téma jedné slečny (Variations on the Theme of one Young Lady), Družička (The Bridesmaid) and Rukověť pábitelského učně (Handbook for an Eccentric Apprentice). Unfortunately in the official edition of 1978 these were the very ones left out.The original version of Slavnosti sněženek was not published till it appeared in volume 8 of the Collected Works.

The culmination of Bohumil Hrabal's work is the novel Příliš hlučná samota (Too Loud a Solitude). The author finished it in July 1976 but he had been working on it from 1974 at least. There are many preparatory sketches and three final versions - the first written in Apollinaire style verse, the second in common Czech and the third in the literary language. The lyric poem Adagio Lamentoso is also closely linked with Příliš hlučná samota in which the hero is Hanťa, a worker in the waste paper recycling centre who has been working at the ancient press for thirty-five years. From piles of old paper he saves rare books and keeps them in his little room. By reading them he becomes educated "in spite of himself". The entire novel is really an inner monologue by Hanťa, written in sonata form with lots of recurrent motifs. The reader meets Hanťa's first love Mančinka and the gipsy girl Ilonka, who disappeared in a concentration camp. He is a witness of the daily struggle with mountains of paper and endless tankards of beer. He hears Hanťa quoting philosophy and learns of his dreams of retirement when he means to take the outdated mechanical press with him. Work is a ritual for Hanťa, bales of paper are works of art in whose entrails are found treasures of the spirit. The modern recycling unit that Hanťa visits horrifies him. It is so impersonal and sterile that he cannot imagine working there, so when he is moved to a centre for collecting clean paper where he cannot admire beautiful books he becomes suicidal from despair... In Hrabal's later work a theme of power and subjugation appears. His textss can be seen as treatises on how to deal with power from the point of view of the oppressed. Like Hašek's good soldier Švejk, Hanťa does obediently what is required as his job, thus contributing to the destruction of scores of rare libraries. Nevertheless, he is horrified by what he is forced to take part in - his only consolation is that the process of destruction in which he participates is not very efficient. Only when he is introduced to the modern technology, the epitome of total, absolute obliteration, does he finally despair.

The Hanta of Příliš hlučná samota is of course not the Hanťa of . Hanta here is just a cypher but in his inner being he is the author himself and Příliš hlučná samota is the author's supreme statement of his beliefs. All three versions of this novel are in volume 9 of the Collected Works.

In January 1975 the official communist cultural weekly Tvorba (Creative Work) carried a half-page interview in which Bohumil Hrabal basically said he would vote for the National Front candidates (in communist Czechoslovakia, the "National Front" was an umbrella organisation of smaller political parties, whose task it was to support to ruling communists) and that he liked football. The interview was supposed to have been an act of submission, which should have made it possible for Hrabal to get back into officially permitted Czech literature. All things considered this interview was no help to him at all. Certainly he could have his books published again but not as he wrote them. Městečko, kde se zastavil čas was changed into Krasosmutnění ( Aesthetic Mourning,1979) and there are other extracts from it in Harlekýnovy miliony (Harlequin's Millions,1981). These two texts are in volume 10 of the Collected Works. A completely altered version of Příliš hlučná samota came out as a kind of collage of extracts from Něžný barbar under the title Kluby poesie (The Poetry Clubs,1981). In 1982 Domácí úkoly z pilnosti (Extra Homework by a Diligent Pupil); was published - with deletions and corrections. Život bez smokingu (Life without a Dinner-suit,1986) contained several new texts, which were altered again. The author welcomed this book chiefly because in it the novella Autíčko (A Little Car); was left in its complete form. In an interview after the fall of communism Hrabal admitted that he often rewrote his texts himself, in order to make them acceptable for the communist publishers. More and more anthologies mostly of old texts continued to be published. Readers soon realized the author was not writing anything new...

In his fifties Bohumil Hrabal went back to writing memoirs. He surveyed his life through the eyes of his wife and made ironic comments about it. The very long text was divided into three volumes. Svatby v domě (Weddings in the House) takes the form of a continuous story telling of his meeting with Eliška and their life up till their marriage. Vita nuova (A New Life); is made up of pictures of life at Na Hrázi věčnosti (At the Dyke of Eternity). These are, as the subtitle says, sketches portraying the most outstanding character in the novel, the sculptor Vladimír Boudník. The last book Proluky (Vacant Lots) is like a kaleidoscope of miniatures projected on to a roughly plastered wall. They cover the years from 1963 to 1969 and their political subtext meant that they were much copied in samizdat and published abroad earlier than the first two works. The whole trilogy was finished during 1984-85.

Perhaps the most important theme of all three parts of Hrabal's autobiography is the relation between the Czechs and the Germans, German fanaticism and barbarity during the Second World War and the cruel Czech retribution after the war. In Hrabal's view, it was the Germans who brought Russian despotism into Central Europe: by attacking the Soviet Union they unintentionally extemded the Soviet sphere of influence to the river Elbe. Hrabal rejects the idea of revolution: revolution liberates the basic of human instincts and ends in a whirlwind of violence. Hrabal abhors Man's barbarism; throughout his writings there are recurring motifs of brutality perpetrated against people as well as animals. By incorporating these motifs into his texts, Hrabal passionately protests against Man's inhumanity.

Hrabal's autobiography forms volume 11 of the Collected Works. Parts left over from the original papers and other work from the eighties are in volume 12.

The situation at the end of the eighties was somewhat unusual. People kept waiting for something to happen and nothing did. It was like living in a museum directed by the government. Day by day life became more monotonous. Bohumil Hrabal did not wrote much at this time until the repressive police actions against student demonstrators, in January 1989, marking the twentieth anniversary of the death of student Jan Palach, who had immolated himself in January 1969 in protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion, led him to write the short story Kouzelná flétna (The Magic Flute). After that there followed a more or less continuous series of short texts, journalistic in nature. These texts were gradually xeroxed and published by Pražská imaginace, and subsequently issued as individual books. Listopadový uragán (The November Hurricane,1990), Ponorné říčky (Subterranean Streams,1991), Aurora na mělčině (The Aurora is grounded,1992), Večerníčky pro Cassia (Bedtime Stories for Cassius,1993). These Dopisy Dubence (Letters to the girl named "April" ie. Czech scholar April Gifford), as it has become customary to call them, go beyond the bounds of personal confession. The author, completely uninhibited, has left everything in its original unrevised form, so the confession, inconsistent as it is, nevertheless produces a picture capable of various interpretations. If we read with detachment Hrabal's description of November 1989, the time when the communist regime collapsed in Czechoslovakia, and the months that followed , we suddenly become aware of the atmosphere of these days in all its naivety and enthusiasm. Although readers and critics alike have given these texts a lukewarm reception, they are important in the context of contemporary Czech prose. They are perhaps the only ones reflecting the authentic atmosphere of the time. Texts from 1989 to 1995 are in volumes 13 and 14 of the Collected Works.

All his life Bohumil Hrabal published his work occasionally in newspapers and magazines. He gave interviews,opened exhibitions and wrote introductions to the work of other authors. All this work is contained in volumes 15 to 18 of the Collected Works. The last volume, 19, has a selected index to the Collected Works with a bibliography and biographical information.

Bohumil Hrabal's creative work can be divided into the following periods:

1. up to 1949 Mainly reflective lyrical poetry influenced by poetism and surrealism.

2. 1949 - 1962 Total realism. Poems in free verse and short stories. Practically no official recognition.

3. 1963 - 1970 First opportunity to publish. Immediate success. The last books from this period severely censored during the normalization.

4. 1970 - 1976 Banned. Author removed from public life. Best texts produced.

5. 1976 - 1989 Second chance to publish. Some edited versions published. Some samizdat versions.

6. 1989 - 1990 Popular journalism. Minor texts published in form of notebooks, subsequently printed, finally as anthologies in book form.

Critical reaction to Hrabal's work has always depended on contemporary circumstances and this applies even at the present day. The first definitive, most detailed monograph on Hrabal (see Susanna Roth,1993); is an analysis of his best work from the seventies. Milan Jankovič's monograph (1976); offers the first comprehensive look at Bohumil Hrabal's work. From the point of view of primary sources, the complete writings of Bohumil Hrabal have been published in the 19-volume Collected Edition (Pražská imaginace, 1991-1997).

SECONDARY SOURCES:

Letters:

There is no separate edition of Bohumil Hrabal's correspondence. Some letters have been preserved and have been published in volume 18 of the Collected Works. The letters Hrabal's lifelong friend Karel Marysko wrote to him are important for any research into Hrabal's life. These appear in volume 11 of The Work of Karel Marysko , published in Prague by Pražská imaginace in 1996.

Interviews:

All Hrabal's substantial interviews are reprinted in volume 17 of the Collected Works. The Bibliography in volume 19 of the Collected Works has a separate section containing a complete list of his interviews.

Bibliography:

Volume 19 of the Collected Works contains the most complete bibliography including references from all the biographical and dictionary publications up to 1996.