Waiting for the Revolution. On Bohumil Hrabal’s texts of January 1989

Abstract

In 1989, Bohumil Hrabal, one of the most prominent Czech writers of the post-war era, reached the age of 75. He had a spectacular writing career behind him. Less than three decades had passed since his full-length debut (Perlička na dně, 1963), during which more than twenty books had been written. It seemed that nothing more than reissues of well-known titles would appear on the book market – the writer himself was inclined to think of his own work as a closed chapter. Meanwhile, the events of the “Spring of Nations,” when communist regimes in Central Europe fell one after another, marked the beginning of the last significant era in his writing. This article attempts to examine and describe the circumstances that influenced the creation of the opening texts of this era – The Enchanted Flute (Kouzelná flétna) and The Sunken Cathedral (Potopená katedrála).