Religionist Pavel Hošek discovered recordings of the speeches of the writer Bohumil Hrabal, who in the 80s of the last century regularly visited the evangelical congregation in Libica nad Cidlinou about Advent. “I was quite surprised how he fit in with the parishioners. The way he talked to them, it was as if they had known each other forever. He always got into a boil within two minutes, talked like Uncle Pepin and was unstoppable,” says the theologian.
According to him, Hrabal was talking about the Bible, Advent, faith or the meaning of Christmas. “Kindly and humanely and with humor, but also seriously. You can hear on those recordings that whenever the meeting was coming to an end, no one wanted to go home. Everyone was so moved. Even Hrabal says several times that he is moved,” explains the fifty-year-old preacher of the Church fraternal and professor of the Evangelical Theological Faculty of the Charles Hošek University, who wrote a book about the find. It will be published under the title Gospel according to Bohumil Hrabal in March 2024, on the 110th anniversary of the writer’s birth.
The fact that since 1980 Hrabal regularly traveled to Libice nad Cidlinou, a small town 20 kilometers from his home town of Kersko, to meet evangelicals, may still be remembered by several seniors of this church congregation.
Pavel Hošek has already written books about CS Lewis or JRR Tolkien. | Photo: Radek Vebr
The novelist was friends with the local parish priest Zdenek Soušek, whose visits are evidenced by entries in the parish chronicle. However, the fact that out of the 11 traditional meetings of the writer with the evangelical choir, recordings of Hrabal’s speeches inspired by the holidays were always preserved on the last Sunday of Advent, was hardly a believable finding for Pavel Hošek.
He considers the discovery of seven old tape recorders with previously unknown speeches by one of the most translated Czech authors of the 20th century to be groundbreaking. “The key I was looking for fell into my lap,” Hošek describes in the upcoming book, according to which even the greatest connoisseurs of Hrabal’s work were not sure why the author so often mentions Jesus Christ in his prose and what exactly it means.
Forty-year-old sound tracks from a Libyan parish are, according to the religionist, a detailed spiritual commentary on Hrabal’s work. Under socialism, it was able to uplift and enchant, but it also aroused negative reactions. “Enough with Hrabala! That’s the motto of decent people. You lewd bastard, you belong to the criminal world,” the writer recorded reader feedback in one of his books.
Bohumil Hrabal with a paper cap, 1980s. | Photo: CTK
He received rejection not only from vulgar puritans, but also from the Prague underground, which burned Hrabal’s books in Kampa in the mid-1970s after the writer made concessions to the regime so that he could publish again in the normalizing Czechoslovakia.
However, according to Hošek, it cannot be said that there was nothing sacred about the author in popular terms, if someone already understood his thinking and writing in this way. Speeches from the vicarage demonstrate how he understood himself. They show that he was very well versed in biblical texts and theologically informed reasoning.
In his speeches, he tells Hasidic stories, even humorously comments on the somewhat out of tune singing of Christmas carols when he paraphrases a New Testament text about Jesus’ visit to the home of the practical Martha and the contemplative Mary. “I have the impression that if he was already here under the windows and heard the out-of-tune piano, he would not come in here… and he would say: Marta, Marta, you take care of many things, but you forget one thing, for one hundred and fifty crowns you can have it tuned piano,” he jokes.
Hrabal seems to have thought out his speech beforehand, but he probably delivered it on the spot. Relaxation prevails, revealing that among the evangelicals at the parish “Mr. Writer” felt welcome, safe and seemingly among his own. He mentions that although he is “a registered Catholic, my feeling is more towards the evangelical Word”.
In a speech from December 19, 1983, he takes as a starting point the Gospel text about the need to be born again to describe his own life’s journey. “For a person who deals with literature… sometimes he has to cause himself to be born. I lived in a brewery, we had three beautiful rooms, a piano,” recalls Židenice Hrabal, a native of the Brno suburb. He spent his childhood in Nymburk, where his stepfather managed a brewery.
“After that year of forty-eight,” the writer continues, “young gentleman, I wore a tie, always a hat, I was such a busy young man, you know. But suddenly it occurred to me that I could not live like this, that I would be what is called a consumer . I knew I had to cut myself off from the brewery, from the relative luxury, I moved to Kladno,” he tells how he volunteered to work at the Kladno smelters as part of an event called 77,000 for production, where he stayed for several years.
“I was born there to notice how others live, people in Kladno, how they live on the outskirts of Prague. How life is extremely difficult. I told myself that I don’t want more than others have, and so, even So I graduated as a doctor of law, so I went to Kladno, I was an ordinary worker,” Hrabal continues on the recording. He completed his law studies in 1946, i.e. before the Anabasis in Kladno.
Bohumil Hrabal goes to the post office with a letter, first half of the 1990s. | Photo: Michal Růžička / MF DNES + LN / Profimedia.cz
The upcoming book Evangelium pole Bohumil Hrabal is not an attempt to Christianize a Czech classic. Hošek does not try to bind it to some doctrine and yoke it to his vision of the world. However, as a researcher and interpreter, he can rely on the way in which Hrabal uses religious concepts and thinking.
From the newly found speeches, the author quite convincingly concludes that the spiritual themes in Hrabal’s texts are not just a peculiarity, or perhaps even a parody, but belong to his ideas about the cosmos and people. “Calls from the Parsonage” refers to a deeper meaning that is somewhat obscured, if not completely lost, in the popular image of a drunkard drinking at the Golden Tiger.
According to Hrabal, the gospel can be a development of the well-known motif “pearls at the bottom” from the first short story of the same name published in 1963. The original meaning of the turn, as the novelist used it, is actually Christmas. Hošek shows that it is not just an effective combination of opposites, common with Hrabal as in the case of “gentle barbarian” or “noisy solitude”.
The writer, familiar with the thought of the medieval Dominican Meister Eckhart, attributes to the human soul a divine spark, a pearl at the bottom. In this case, the day does not mean the intellectual depths of “physically and mentally fed citizens”, as Hrabal called them, but people who, according to him, “were taken by fate in its claws”. In short, the hope of Bethlehem is born in the soul of a person on the edge, a person scraping the bottom of life.
The imagination of Hrabalov’s world upwards, i.e. towards the heavens, is not without problems, which Pavel Hošek is aware of. For example, when he deals with the objection that by deifying the “ordinary man” Hrabal at the same time grants a general pardon for human smallness.
Sometimes the religionist succumbs to his master’s taunts, for example when he adopts and develops his idea that “a pub is a place where there is as little effort as possible to change the world” and which is “as much as possible against war”. The magic of Hrabalov’s universe probably won’t disappear by reminding that beer culture is not completely alien to violence and that when we describe sitting in a pub as “mutual therapy with talk” and “staring in amazement at the miracles of everyday life”, we are probably idealizing the consumption of alcohol.
Perceiving a pub as a church, a bar as an altar and beer as a Eucharist is a matter of imagination in the exalted world of Hrabalov; but at the same time, the question arises whether such a “Czech heaven” lacks understanding and a place for a real altar with the Eucharist.
Bohumil Hrabal in Kersk, where he bought a cottage in the 1960s and took care of many cats there. | Photo: CTK
Hošek’s study of Hrabal is also generous with a number of references to existing professional sources. He suggests that in the world of literary scholarship the religionist behaves like a polite newcomer who feels obliged to plant his findings in a landscape that many, many others have cultivated before him.
Hošek previously wrote books about writers CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Jaroslav Foglar, as well as published stories of Hasidic Jews. “Hrabal has always been an unsettling mystery to me. He stirred something in me. I wanted to find out what it is that makes me tremble quietly while reading his books,” he describes how the current work was born.
For a long time he didn’t know which end of Hrabal to grab, until the discovery of recordings from a Libyan parish provided a clue. “Suddenly, the scattered fragments were assembled into a mosaic. When I listened to the tapes, I had the impression that now I had to write the book,” he adds. His text about Hrabal is fueled by the reader’s undisguised passion and devotion. However, even in this case, the theologian and religionist does not just religiously read the popular author’s lips. He thinks about what is written and what he says and puts it into the context of his profession.
“Hrabal’s work is enormously layered. With each reading, new levels of meaning open up. I almost have the impression that one never reaches the bottom,” he thinks. According to him, the Advent speeches shed new light on the poorly mapped spiritual ground of the writer’s work. “I have the impression that even old well-known texts by Hrabal have acquired a whole extra dimension,” he sums up.
Thanks to this “breadth of heart” too, the book avoids the situation where two incompatible worlds collide; in the first, the pub story is sacred, in the second, rational analysis.
Bohumil Hrabal once described such a situation. “There is nothing more terrible than when a Czech puts on the felt robe of the Czech brothers, becomes hardened and insists on his truth, which is sterile, incapable of irony and humor. When a person comes to our table wearing the felt robe of the Czech brothers, we are in *eli,” he stated. In the Gospel according to Bohumil Hrabal, Pavel Hošek connected these two worlds to the benefit of both – and especially the readers.
