The Little Town Where Time Stood Still

by Bohumil Hrabal

Genres: Cultural Heritage; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The Little Town Where Time Stood Still contains two linked narratives by the incomparable Bohumil Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera has described as “Czechoslovakia’s greatest writer.” “Cutting It Short” is set before World War II in a small country town, and it relates the scandalizing escapades of Maryška, the flamboyant wife of Francin, who manages the local brewery. Maryška drinks. She rides a bicycle, letting her long hair fly. She butchers pigs, frolics in blood, and leads on the local butcher. She’s a Madame Bovary without apologies driven to keep up with the new fast-paced mechanized modern world that is obliterating whatever sleepy pieties are left over from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. “The Little Town Where Time Stood Still” is told by Maryška and Francin’s son and concerns the exploits of his Uncle Pepin, who holds his own against the occupying Nazis but succumbs to silence as the new post–World War II Communist order cements its colorless control over daily life. Together, Hrabal’s rousing and outrageous yarns stand as a hilarious and heartbreaking tribute to the always imperiled sweetness of lust, love, and life. 

Release date: June 30, 2015

Publisher: NYRB Classics

Print pages: 320

Sample

One of the first authors – certainly the oldest and the most popular – of the political thaw that reached Czechoslovakia at
the end of the 1950s and lasted until the Soviet ambush in 1968, was Bohumil Hrabal (b.1914). Yet to appreciate fully what
a revelation his first books were to the Czech reader, the Westerner would have to have some knowledge of the socialist-realist
portrayal of the working class, of its deadly foe, the bourgeoisie, and its wavering ally, the intellectual. In the terminology
of the “method”, which only the Devil understood (as Sholokhov once remarked), these social categories translated into the
Positive, Negative, and Wavering Hero. Classical socialist-realism knew no other human type. The formula was permeated by
a social determinism more deterministic than anything written by American naturalists in the nineteenth century. The positive
character in these fairy tales was always a worker, the negative always either a capitalist or his middle-class lackey; the wavering hero was always either an old, feeble-minded worker, unable to comprehend the beneficial nature of revolutionary change, or a bourgeois intellectual who, to paraphrase Marx, found it difficult to cross in ideology the limits he was unfit
to cross in life.

Into this thoroughly fictitious world of wishful thinking came – as a ray of light – Hrabal’s stories, peopled by unmistakable
proletarians who were not necessarily always likeable, by unmistakable middle-class characters, not necessarily unlikeable,
and by “atypical” intellectuals who discussed E.A. Poe or Jackson Pollock in a tavern over a mug of beer. Gone was the determinism,
gone was the lifelessness of the cardboard world of the once mandatory “method”. Hrabal’s colourful folks were triumphantly
alive, they displayed the politically incorrect classlessness of raconteurism, they lived in a universe lighted by fireworks
of imagination. The “low” material of rough life recorded in beerhalls merged with the “high” concepts of great art; this
union was blessed by surrealism and the silent two-reelers of early American cinema; everything was sifted through a creative
intellect blessed by the profound democracy of extraordinary talent. The poetic products of this talent were anathema to everything
the socialist-realist establishment stood for, although nowhere did the author trouble himself with the ponderous issues of
ideology, and very rarely was there a direct criticism of the particular sores of socialist life. But the entire oeuvre, by
its miraculous existence, was a critique of the canonized vision, enforced, in the bad old Stalinist days, sometimes to the
point of incarceration.

In the early fifties, the man who did all this was realist enough not to attempt submitting his fictions for publication.
He read them aloud to a group of friends who constituted one of the very few active literary undergrounds of the Stalinist era. I was a member of this circle, so was
the great jazz composer, the late Jan Rychlík; so was Zdeněk Urbánek, later one of the most courageous dissidents of the seventies and eighties; so was Věra Linhartová, the gentle experimentalist of fiction, who later left the country for Paris; and last but not least, the then
unpublished poet Jan Zábrana. The spiritus agens of the sessions was Jiří Kolář, a great and influential force in modern Czech literature, who did in verse something similar to what Hrabal did in prose.
It was Kolář who first helped Hrabal to see his name in print. He found a loophole in the censorship of the day: the fact that officially
sanctioned organizations were allowed to print newsletters for their membership. Since such materials were not sold to the
general public, the censor applied much lighter control. In 1956, Kolář convinced the Bibliophiles Club to print a supplement to one of their issues, entitled People Talking (Hovory lidí) and containing two of Hrabal’s stories. In this limited way Hrabal reached his first readers outside the underground circles.

Then the post-Stalin thaw began to be felt in Prague publishing houses, and the first collection of Hrabal’s stories, Lark on a String (Skřivánek na niti) was to be brought out by the Writers’ Union Publishing House. But before it could be released in 1959, my own novel The Cowards exploded in the ideological trenches and was used by the Stalinist faction of the Party as a warning example of what happens
if the grip of orthodox censorship is loosened. Hrabal’s collection was one of the many casualties of the ensuing purge.

But that was the last, cramp-like attempt by the Stalinists to regain full control over literature. The liberal forces quickly
recovered, Hrabal’s book eventually came out in 1963 with a new title, Pearl on the Bottom (Perlička na dně), and launched its author on a meteoric career that elevated him to peaks of popularity no other Czech writer had enjoyed
before him. It also brought him almost universal critical acclaim.

Soon, too, came the first international success when his short novel Closely Observed Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky), was filmed (directed by Jiří Menzel), and received an Oscar in 1967. The novel’s theme – the merging of sexual suffering with anti-Nazi sabotage – was
another challenge to accepted norms: this time to the officially ratified portrayal of Czech wartime resistance as something
sexless, saintly and thoroughly removed from the mundane affairs of common people. It was Hrabal’s first step towards more
expressly political themes, and gradually issues related to the repressive and often destructive party measures began to seep
through the palavering texture of surreal raconteurism. The trend culminated in another film, and in another novel. The film,
shot again by Jiří Menzel and based on Hrabal’s most “controversial” book to date, An Advertisement for the House I Don’t Want to Live In Anymore (Inzerát na dům, ve kterém už nechci bydlet, 1965), but, symptomatically, given the slightly altered title of the book banned in 1959 Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti), is the story of a group of female political prisoners, of “bourgeois elements” sent to work in a huge junkyard, and of the
mésalliance of a young worker with one of the jailbirds. It was banned before release and locked, with many similar films, in the vaults of the Barrandov Studios whence it finally, twenty-two years
later, emerged unscathed to receive recognition at the San Francisco film festival in 1990.

The novel was The Little Town Where Time Stood Still (Městečko, kde se zastavil čas). Written in 1973, it went through two emigré editions (in 1978 by Comenius, Innsbruck and in 1989 by the Sixty-Eight Publishers,
Toronto), but it was never, in its entirety, brought out in Prague until after the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

It is, perhaps, Hrabal’s most powerful text: essentially a dirge for the “old times” before the advent of cruel European dictatorships
– times that, whatever they were, possessed at least a human face.

Why was it never published at home until after the collapse of communism? I suspect that Western readers will hardly find
anything so politically unacceptable in the text as to give the authorities a reason to smother a book which brims with life
(and it is not the life of the leisure class). But the Stalinist mind does not possess the superstructure of the unconscious,
but of pathological suspicion. And, in the meantime, Soviet tanks arrived in Prague.

The best writers either left, or went underground where they founded several samizdat publishing ventures; or simply remained
silent; or even began writing inconspicuous crime stories. When Hrabal turned sixty in 1974, a group of his friends published,
in the samizdat form, a Festschrift, and Hrabal was generally seen as a dissident writer, alongside Václav Havel, Milan Kundera (who at that time still lived
in Czechoslovakia), Ivan Klíma, Ludvík Vaculík and others. But Hrabal, who under the guise of a “tough guy” is a very sensitive and vulnerable man, was selected and focused
on by the establishment hacks. These included both the secret policemen who, playing the traditional role of the “bad” cop,
regularly took the sick author in for interrogation, and the Marxist literary critics, who tried to convince him that it was
his duty to do something so that the thousands upon thousands of his devoted readers could again read his books. One such
critic, Mr Jiří Hájek, playing the traditional role of the “good” cop, eventually persuaded Hrabal to give him an interview which was printed
in the Party’s cultural weekly Tribuna. It’s a lukewarm text, conceived in generalities, talking, for instance, about socialism which Hrabal “never had anything
against”, without specifying what kind of socialism he had in mind. His devoted readers naturally understood him; what he
certainly did not have in mind was the post-invasion abomination which Party ideologues labelled “truly existing socialism”.
Seriously ill and under constant pressures of this kind, Hrabal finally published his interview in exchange for permission
to return to print.

And return he did – but something happened. When he submitted The Little Town Where Time Stood Still there was considerable embarrassment in the Writers’ Union Publishing House, judging at least by the time lapse between submission
– some time in 1973 – and the publication of Lovely Wistfulness (Krasosmutnění, 1979) and Harlequin’s Millions (Harlekýnovy milióny, 1981) which contain fragments of the as yet unpublished Little Town Where Time Stood Still. Under new pressures, this time from editors (acting as preventive censors), Hrabal rewrote the text considerably, removing most of the powerful conclusion, changing the narrative voice to that of his mother,
and chopping the text into pieces which he then mixed with other material, and published in the two above mentioned books.

The removal of essential parts of the requiem for the temps perdu naturally changed the tone and also, to a great extent, the meaning of the text which was still further disfigured by other
“editorial” changes. A good example is one of the central episodes, the sacking of Francin after the arrival of the “new times”
(i.e. after the communist takeover). In the “unedited” text; now fully restored in this English language edition, Francin,
after being rather rudely thrown out of his job, begs to be allowed to keep at least two old office lamps with green shades
as souvenirs of his long years in the brewery. However, “when Dad left the office, this was what the workers’ director had
been waiting for, he took both lamps with their green shades and he threw them out of the window on to a heap of lumber and
scrap, and the green shades and cylinders smashed to pieces and Dad clutched his head and there was a crumpling sound inside,
as if his brain had been smashed. ‘The new era’s beginning here too,’ said the workers’ director, and he went into his office.”
In Harlequin’s Millions the same episode is rendered in the following way: when Francin asks for permission to keep the two lamps, the working-class
director (renamed “chairman of the brewery”), a kindly, almost apologetic, certainly not rude character, first also refuses,
but then turns to the other members of the committee with the words: “Well, what do you think, comrades? Shall we be magnanimous? Take the lamps as souvenirs of old times which were good to you.” The difference between the two versions certainly
needs no explanation. Hrabal, in order to have the book published at all, simply used the Writers’ Union mandatory method,
and from a surrealist became a realist with an adjective attached. In fact, in one of his several books banned and seized
by the censors after the Soviet invasion entitled The Buds (Poupata) he predicted, with bitter self-irony, his own fate: “a cab driver drove me this year from the Barrandov studios, and suddenly
he asked me, laughing, ‘You’re Mr. Hrabal?’ I said, ‘Well, I am.’ And he said, ‘Heh-heh, so they’ve outsmarted you, haven’t
they? You wanted to be a poète maudit, and they’ve turned you into a socialist-realist. That’s what I call an achievement.’” A cabbie displaying knowledge of nineteenth-century
French literature was nothing very extraordinary in those times in Prague. Many “bourgeois elements” found refuge from the
uranium mines behind the wheel. And, for that matter, it’s not so very extraordinary in New York today, albeit it’s not political
oppression that makes such fine contemporary Czech writers as Iva Pekárková drive a taxi in the Big Apple.

Besides The Buds, at least two other works by Hrabal fell victim to the post-invasion book-burning: Homework (Domácí úkoly, 1970), a collection of highly original essays, and Three Wistful Grotesques (Tři teskné grotesky) which contained his early pieces written in 1944-53. The first fruit of his compromise with the establishment, to come out
in 1976, was Cutting It Short (Postřižiny). There are, however, no traces of any artistic compromise in this crystalline text of subtly erotic beauty, a refined and moving love song for his pretty and witty mother. Hrabal simply did not include things that do not belong
in a love song, and approved the omission of two other texts contained in the samizdat edition of 1973. These two stories,
however, The Bridesmaid (Drůžička), and The Handbook for a Palaverer’s Apprentice (Rukověť pábite ského učně) are self-contained tales, and the charming novella Cutting It Short in no way suffers by being published separately. In the present edition it is printed together with The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, which is logical and most appropriate – the same lovingly depicted characters appear in both, and the dirge for old times
assumes a new, polyphonous and more universal quality.

After the publication of Cutting It Short, the book market in occupied Prague was flooded with various new and old texts by Hrabal, but these were not the result of
further compromises but of censorial selection. Hrabal has always been very prolific, and so, from the deluge of writings,
the “normalized” editors, with an unerring hand, excluded the best. Too Loud A Solitude (Příliš hlučná samota, 1976), his poetic condemnation of the banning of books, was never published (except by emigré houses), and neither was his
incomparable three-volume autobiography The Weddings in the House (Svadby v domě), Vita Nuova and Vacant Lots (Proluky). They cleverly use the narrative voice of the writer’s loving but puzzled wife who cannot comprehend what is it about her
beer-swilling, pork-guzzling man that makes people think he is a genius. And, at the very end of the “new era”, shortly before
the collapse of communism, Hrabal returned to the ranks of samizdat authors. Another masterpiece, I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 1975) was rejected as inappropriate, and eventually published in 1983 by a courageous group of people, members of the semi-legal
Jazz Section of the Czech Musicians’ Union who tried to use the same loophole Jiří Kolář had discovered a quarter of a century earlier. They brought the book out in their “members only” series jazzpetit, endorsed by Hrabal’s dedication “To the Jazz Section”, and it proved to be the last drop in the establishment’s cup of patience.
For years they had been trying to suppress the Jazz Section, and so, finally, in 1987, the Section’s leaders were put on trial
and sent to jail for “unauthorized publishing activities”. Shortly afterwards, communism went bust.

Hrabal, now approaching the eightieth year of his life, is still the favourite of Czech readers. He is certainly one of those
contemporary Czech writers without whom the knowledge of the literature of that distant land would be lamentably incomplete.

Josef Škvorecký

1993

I like those few minutes before seven o’clock at night, when, as a young wife, with rags and a crumpled copy of the newspaper
National Politics, I clean the glass cylinders of the lamps, with a match I rub off the blackened ends of the burnt wicks, I put the brass
caps back, and at seven o’clock precisely that wonderful moment comes when the brewery machinery ceases to function, and the
dynamo pumping the electric current around to all the places where the light bulbs shine, the dynamo starts to turn more slowly,
and as the electricity weakens, so does the light from the bulbs, slowly the white light grows pink and the pink light grey,
filtered through crape and organdie, till the tungsten filaments project red rachitic fingers at the ceiling, a red violin
key. Then I light the wick, put on the cylinder, draw out the little yellow tongue of flame, put on the milky shade decorated
with porcelain roses. I like those few minutes before seven o’clock in the evening, I like looking upward for those few minutes
when the light drains from the bulb like blood from the cut throat of a cock, I like looking at that fading signature of the electric current, and I dread the day the mains will be brought to the brewery
and all the brewery lamps, all the airy lamps in the stables, the lamps with round mirrors, all those portly lamps with round
wicks one day will cease to be lit, no one will prize their light, for all this ceremonial will be replaced by the light-switch
resembling the water tap which replaced the wonderful pumps. I like my burning lamps, in whose light I carry plates and cutlery
to the table, open newspapers or books, I like the lamp-lit illumined hands resting just so on the tablecloth, human severed
hands, in whose manuscript of wrinkles one may read the character of the one to whom these hands belong, I like the portable
paraffin lamps with which I go out of an evening to meet visitors, to shine them in their faces and show them the way, I like
the lamps in whose light I crochet curtains and dream deeply, lamps which if extinguished with an abrupt breath emit an acrid
smell whose reproach inundates the darkened room. Would that I might find the strength, when the electricity comes to the
brewery, to light the lamps at least once a week for one evening and listen to the melodic hissing of the yellow light, which
casts deep shadows and compels one into careful locomotion and dreaming.


Francin lit in the office the two portly lamps with their round wicks, two lamps continuously bubbling on like two housekeepers,
lamps standing on the edges of a great table, lamps emitting warmth like a stove, lamps sipping paraffin with huge appetite.
The green shades of these portly lamps cut off almost with a ruler’s edge the areas of light and shadow, so that when I looked
in the office window Francin was always split in two, into one Francin soaked in vitriol and another Francin swallowed up in
gloom. These tubby brass contraptions, in which the wick was adjusted up or down by a horizontal screw, these brass skeps
had a huge draught, so much oxygen did these lamps of Francin’s need that they vacuumed up the air around them, so that when
Francin placed his cigarette in the vicinity of the lamps the brass hive mouth sucked in ribbons of blue smoke, and the cigarette
smoke, as it reached the magic circle of those portly lamps, was mercilessly sucked in and up the draught of the glass cylinder,
consumed by the flame, which shone greenishly about the cap like the light given off by a rotted stump of wood, a light like
a will-o’-the-wisp, like St Elmo’s fire, like the Holy Spirit, which came down in the form of a purple flame hovering over
the fat yellow light of the round wick. And Francin entered by the light of these lamps in the outspread brewery books the
output of beer, receipts and outgoings, he compiled the weekly and monthly reports, and at the end of every year established
the balance for the whole calendar year, and the pages of these books glistened like starched shirt-fronts. When Francin turned
the page, these two portly lamps fussed over every motion, threatening to blow out, they squawked, those lamps, as if they
were two great birds disturbed out of their sleep, those two lamps positively twitched crossly with their long necks, casting
on the ceiling those constantly palpitating shadow-plays of antediluvian beasts, on the ceiling in those half shadows I always
saw flapping elephant ears, palpitating rib-cages of skeletons, two great moths impaled on the stake of light ascending from the glass cylinder right up to the ceiling, where over each lamp there shone a round dazzling
mirror, a sharply illumined silver coin, which constantly, scarcely perceptibly, but nevertheless shifted about, and expressed
the mood of each lamp. Francin, when he turned the page, wrote again the headings with the names and surnames of the public-house
landlords. He took a number three lettering pen, and as in the old missals and solemn charters, Francin gave each initial
letter in the headings ornaments full of decorative curlicues and billowing lines of force, for, when I sat in the office
and gazed out of the gloom at his hands, which anointed those office lamps with bleaching-powder, I always had the impression
that Francin made those ornamental initials along the lines of my hair, that it gave him the inspiration, he always gave a
look at my hair, out of which the light sparkled, I saw in the mirror that wherever I was in the evening, there in my coiffure
and the quality of my hair there was always one lamp more. With the lettering pen Francin wrote the basic initial letters,
then he took fine pens and as the mood took him dipped them alternately in green and blue and red inks and round the initials
began to trace my billowing hair, and like the rose bush growing over and about the arbour, so with the thick netting and
branching of the lines of force in my hair Francin ornamented the initial letters of the names and surnames of the public
house landlords.


And when he returned tired from the office, he stood in the doorway in the shadow, the white shirt cuffs showed how he was
exhausted by the whole day, these shirt cuffs almost touched his knees, the whole day had placed so many worries and tribulations on Francin’s back that he
was always ten centimetres shorter, maybe even more. And I knew that the greatest worry was me, that ever since the time he
had first seen me, ever since then he had been carrying me in an invisible, and yet all too palpable rucksack on his back,
which was growing ever heavier by the day. And then every evening we stood under the burning rise-and-fall lamp, the green
shade was so big that there was room for both of us under it, it was a chandelier like an umbrella, under which we stood in
the downpour of hissing light from the paraffin lamp, I hugged Francin with one hand and with the other I stroked the back
of his head, his eyes were closed and he breathed deeply, when he had settled down he hugged me at the waist, and so it looked
as if we were about to begin some kind of ballroom dance, but in fact it was something more, it was a cleansing bath, in which
Francin whispered in my ear everything that had happened to him that day, and I stroked him, and every movement of my hand
smoothed away the wrinkles, then he stroked my loose flowing hair, each time I drew the porcelain chandelier down lower, around
the circumference of the chandelier there were thickly hung coloured glass tubes connected by beads, those trinkets tinkled
round our ears like spangles and ornaments round the loins of a Turkish dancing girl, sometimes I had the impression that
the great adjustable lamp was a glass hat jammed right down over both our ears, a hat hung about with a downpour of trimmed
icicles … And I expelled the last wrinkle from Francin’s face somewhere into his hair or behind his ears, and he opened his eyes, straightened himself up, his cuffs were again at the level of his hips, he looked
at me distrustfully, and when I smiled and nodded, he plucked up courage and looked right at me and I at him, and I saw what
a great power I had over him, how my eyes entrapped him like the eyes of a striped python when they stare at a frightened
finch.


This evening a horse neighed from the darkened yard, then there came another whinny, and then there resounded a thundering
of hooves, rattling of chains and jingle of buckles, Francin jerked up and listened, I took a lamp and went out into the passage
and opened the door, outside the drayman was calling out in the dark, “Hey, Ede, Kare, hey whoa!”, but no, the two Belgian
geldings were pelting away from the stable with a lamp on their breastplate, just as they had returned weary, unharnessed
from the dray, in their collars and with the traces hung on the embroidery of those collars and in all their harness after
a whole day delivering the beer, just when everyone thought, these gelded stallions can be thinking of nothing else but hay
and a pail of draff and a can of oats, so, all of a sudden, four times a year these two geldings recollected their coltish
days, their genius of youth, full of as yet undeveloped but nevertheless present glands, and they rose up, they made a little
revolt, they gave themselves signals in the gloom of dusks, returning to the stables, and they shied and bolted, but it wasn’t
shying, they never forgo. . .