SUSAN MIRON
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steelworker, Hrabal went unpublished until 1956, when Jiri Kolar issued a
semi-legal, not-for-sale Bibliophile Club edition of two of Hrabal's sto–
ries. Hrabal soon became a literary star, deemed a national hero, a revolu–
tionary of prose, a writer of the people.
Following the Soviet invasion of 1968 the secret police ruthlessly ha–
rassed Hrabal for having supported Alexander Dubcek. After a prolonged
period of hospitalization, his nerves totally frayed, Hrabal publicly de–
clared his support for a never-defined notion of "socialism," and signed
the "Anti-Charter," forced upon him by the Czechoslovak regime in re–
taliation for the publication of Charter 77, signed by most of his friends.
This permitted Hrabal to publish "officially," though his novels remained
"subversive," thus censored "preventatively" or radically disfigured by
"editorial" changes. His works, which include the popular
Closely
Watched Trains, Too Loud a Solitude,
and
I Served the King oj England,
would hence appear in Czechoslovakia in two guises - complete but
clandestine in
samizdat
and expurgated but sanctioned in another.
Hrabal has always been attracted to people who have suffered but en–
dured upheavals and to times of postwar confusion.
The Little Town,
a
dirge for pre-communist times written in 1973, is no exception. Twice
published abroad in emigre editions, it didn't appear in Prague restored to
its entirety until after the 1989 Velvet Revolution.
"I don't actually write," Hrabal has claimed in interviews. "I cut, and
then glue the cut-outs together into collages," montages composed of
scraps of reality , dreams , and flights of surrealist fantasy. The joint heroines
of the collage-like "Cutting
It
Short" (the first novella) are the irre–
pressible, sensuous Maryska and her glorious flowing hair, to which
Hrabal devotes pages of rapturous description. Maryska's fragrant hair, "a
hark back to the golden days of yore," enchants all who come into con–
tact with her and her mane, "as if I was part of a Catholic rite, as if my
hair was part of some feast of the church," she boasts. Her husband
Francin, manager of the local brewery, adores Maryska for her tresses,
which, in her words, "spread out and enveloped me like music" and
"glittered and shone like a papal banner."
But Francin loves his impulsive and flamboyant wife best when she
pretends to be an ailing dependent, "a nice decent woman sitting at
home," a role ill-suited to this sybarite who gorges on cherries and tries to
keep up with the latest fashion by shortening not only her skirts - scandal
enough! - but also her dog's tail, the legs of a table, and finally her own
illustrious hair. Francin's anger and grief over Maryska's rebellious haircut,
which
all
but shatters his insular world, gives some inkling of how ill-pre–
pared he and his Czech neighbors are for the seismic eruptions soon to
reshape their sleepy little town.
