Bohumil Hrabal
I am standing outside Palmovka metro station in Prague, in front of the mural which has been created in memory of Bohumil Hrabal, one of the greatest Czech writers of the last century. The mural covers the outside of the little house in which the author resided between 1950 and 1973, and where he wrote several of his early novels. Alongside a large portrait of the writer himself there is also a painting of his bookshelf, lined with works by Hrabal's favourite writers and artists: Freud, Kant, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Jiri Kolar...
Bohumil Hrabal was one of the rare breed of authors who are loved by readers and critics alike. Praise was even heaped upon him by fellow writers, such as Milan Kundera, who once called him the greatest living Czech writer. Hrabal was born in 1914 in the Moravian city of Brno, the illegitimate son of Maria Kilianova. His mother later married Frantisek Hrabal, and the three of them lived together as a family in Nymburk in Central Bohemia, where Frantisek worked as the manager of a brewery. Thus, beer culture played an integral role in Hrabal's life from boyhood, which could explain why he was such an enthusiastic drinker throughout his life.
I talked to Dr. James Naughton, a lecturer in Czech at Oxford University, who has translated several of Hrabal's books, and asked him what made Hrabal such a greatly loved figure in Czech society:
In 1935, Bohumil Hrabal moved to Prague to study law at Charles University. After graduating, he became the consummate Jack-of-all-trades, and held down a variety of jobs before the publication of his first work, Perlicky na dne, encouraged him to concentrate all his efforts on his writing. Hrabal worked as a railway worker, insurance salesman, travel agent, and theatre sound engineer, as well as numerous other professions. It was only in 1962 that he decided to put a stop to this perpetual flitting from profession to profession, and settled down as a full-time writer.
This interim period was still a fruitful one for the author, however, as he drew on his experiences in several of his books. The philosophical novel 'Prilis Hlucna Samota', or 'Too Loud A Solitude' is about a man who works compressing old paper into bundles. The author himself worked as a paper compressor between 1954 and 1959. Hrabal must have also drawn on his experiences working on the Czech railways while writing 'Closely Observed Trains', a work which was first published in 1965. 'Prilis Hlucna Samota' was written during the 1970's, during the Communist 'normalisation' period which followed the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact countries in 1968. Hrabal was unable to publish during this period, I asked Dr. Naughton about the effect that Hrabal's exile had on his writing:
Hrabal came to a very Czech end. He followed in the great Czech tradition of defenestrations, and died in 1997 by falling from a window in the hospital where he was staying. The official line was that he died accidentally while trying to feed the birds outside his window, but there has been much controversy surrounding his death. Many claim that the fall was planned, and suicide is certainly a viable possibility. His writing towards the end of his life discussed the idea of suicide, and Hrabal included several references to taking his own life in his 'Letters to Dubenka'. Of course, nobody will ever really know, but perhaps his death was intentional, a foolproof way of perpetuating the idea of the writer as a legend.
