Bohumil Hrabal

Czech · 1914 to 1997

Born on March 28, 1914, in Židenice, then a suburb of Brno in Austria-Hungary, to an unmarried mother, Bohumil Hrabal was raised as the son of František Hrabal, the brewery manager his mother married three years later, after the family settled in the market town of Nymburk on the Elbe. He enrolled at Charles University in Prague to study law in the mid-1930s, but the Nazi closure of Czech universities interrupted him for years, and he did not take his degree until 1946. In the meantime and after, he worked as a notary's clerk, a railway dispatcher, an insurance agent, a travelling salesman, a labourer at the Kladno steelworks, and, from 1954 to 1959, a baler of wastepaper at a Prague recycling depot, compacting condemned books alongside ordinary scrap. He wrote steadily through these years but published almost nothing; his first book, the story collection Pearls of the Deep, did not appear until 1963, when he was already forty-nine. Closely Watched Trains followed in 1965, a novella about a hapless young railway dispatcher during the German occupation. Jiří Menzel's 1966 film of it won Czechoslovakia its first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968, Hrabal was banned from publishing along with most of his generation. He wrote I Served the King of England in eighteen days at his country cottage in Kersko in 1971, but it could only circulate in samizdat until 1983. A limited, self-critical accommodation with the censors from 1975 let some of his work back into official print, heavily cut, while his fuller manuscripts kept moving hand to hand outside it. His long, run-on style, built from pub talk and overheard stories, he called pábení, or palavering. He married Eliška Plevová in 1956; she died in 1987. Hrabal died on February 3, 1997, aged eighty-two, after falling from a fifth-floor hospital window in Prague.