which seek to reconstruct The Trial from particular localities. I also work from localities. Those great symbols and ciphers of Kafka’s, which have ultimately proved far more realistic, more magically realist, were already there, but no one understood them. There’s one particular report from The Castle in a stiffbacked note-book of his, and he’s got a footnote on moving people to a concentration camp that dates from s ometime in 1910. I bought them in Germany, those Quartenhefte that were never published. There you suddenly have it in one story: someone comes and knocks on the door, father gets dressed and is led away from Celetná Street,105 never to be seen again... And the behaviour of the man who came in a leather coat – it’s exactly as if Kafka had seen how the SS or the Gestapo would arrive. In other words, Kafka is part of my Prague awareness, because as Eman Frynta106 pointed out, any crossroads where several linguistic consciousn esses meet always produces great literature. He gave Prague as an example – a Jewish-Slav-German intersection; Odessa was another, and Trieste, Zurich, crossroads where Dadaism came into being; for our own time he cites Paris, where half the artists are from Spain, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, America, etc. He included St Petersburg, where there were also intersecting consciousnesses. I’m forever appealing to Kafka, hence I bought all those books about him. When I was in Paris it was the A street leading off Prague’s Old Town Square, part of the area associated with Kafka’s life. 106 Emanuel Frynta (1923–75), translator from Russian, author of radio ‘essays’ and filmscripts; wrote on Kafka and Hašek and various photographers. 105
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exact centenary of his birth. At a gigantic exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, where the twentieth century was pronounced as belonging to Kafka, everything was presented just as if it were taking place in Prague. A display area the size of an ice-hockey stadium to represent the Old Town Square – in a nutshell, Prague, city of a hundred spires, there in Paris… I bought all the photos and in them you can also see the area where he was inspired to write The Castle – it’s in Frýdlant.107 There are two books, hundreds of photos pointing to particular places where he would go and where he got his inspiration,108 so I would go so far as to say that I’ve been inspired by place and reality less than Kafka was. In short, to me Kafka is a hieroglyph, just like Hašek. They are two hieroglyphs A small town in the far north of Bohemia, close to where the Czech, German and Polish borders meet, and overlooked by an impressive castle. 108 It is not apparent which books Hrabal is referring to here. One might well be Jiří Gruša’s Franz Kafka aus Prag (Frankfurt a/M., 1983), also in English (trans. Eric Mosbacher) as Franz Kafka of Prague (London, 1983), in which the photographs are accompanied in part by Gruša’s notes, in part by relevant quotations from Kafka. Gruša himself (b.1938) is a poet, translator and publisher, founder of literary journals banned in the 1960s, exiled in Germany since 1982; Hrabal would not have been able to come by the book easily, or feel free (or courageous enough) to cite an effectively banned author, which might explain why he fails to identify either book. For him to state in the next sentence that he was ‘inspired by place and reality less than Kafka was’ may seem slightly ingenuous, given that – besides his works in which Nymburk plays such a big part – his toto město je ve společné péči obyvatel (Prague, 1967), based on photographs of Prague by Miroslav Peterka, even has some points of similarity with Gruša’s later work, though Hrabal’s intentions are rather different (see David Short: ‘Fun and games with montage: the individual case of Hrabal’s toto město je ve společné péči obyvatel’ in Short (ed.): Bohumil Hrabal (1914–97). Papers from a Symposium (London, 2004, pp. 59–81). Gruša’s problems with the authorities came to a head with his Dotazník aneb Modlitba za jedno město a přítele (samizdat 1975, Toronto, 1976; in English as The Questionnaire [Chicago, 2000; trans. Peter Kussi]). 107
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which I try to decipher in the places where I walk, or through the legends about them. Hieroglyphs, as Mr Kroutvor109 described them. Hieroglyphs of the Prague consciousness? Yes, but it’s not that simple. Karel Čapek for one is much simpler, in every respect. He has his own view of things, a Neopositivist, an ace. But I am stirred by those other two, and I’ll never fathom what they are, even if I buy yet more books. Radko Pytlík and I talk about it; last time it dawned on us both almost simultaneously that sometime in the future there has to come a third æ stheticist and critic and artist rolled into one to try to decipher that hieroglyph; someone has to be born who will also be a psychoanalyst in order to be able to puzzle out something that is so gloriously monstrous and tender-hearted as that dead, and yet still so living writer, that Dadaist, yet Realist with it, that outstanding journalist and hoax-merchant who died at forty, just think, forty... Kafka? Hašek! Hašek! Jaroslav! But Kafka as well. Consider this, my friend: they were both forty and one wrote six hundred short stories and a novel which Eman Frynta has described as a pub yard overgrown into a verbal collage with the proportions of a novel… Josef Kroutvor (b. 1942), Czech art historian and critic of literature and the applied arts, who has occasionally written on Hrabal but who, in particular, appended an essay ‘Central Europe: Anecdote and History’ to the 1987 samizdat edition of Pirouettes, and gave the address on the occasion when Hrabal was awarded the George Theiner Prize at the festival of literature held during the Prague Book Fair (14 May 1992).
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