Abstract
This article examines a chronicle of Bohumil Hrabal's life and work: Hlucna samota: sto let Bohumila Hrabala, 1914-2014, Too Loud a Solitude: A Hundred Years of Bohumil Hrabal, 1914-2014, the most valuable of all the publications to have come out on Hrabal's centenary. This chronology is outstanding for its critical presentation of the rich and varied archive material, in which the authors place Hrabal's key biographical and literary details, as well as some marginalia too, on his timeline.
This is the first truly critical examination of Hrabal's life, and the most systematically supported by a knowledge of the sources. The chronology also raises questions that go beyond its intended horizons, as the authors are not only solving the riddles of literature, but they are also presenting the twists and turns of his life.
However, as Hrabal assumes a creative and sometimes an almost imperceptibly ironic view of history and various events in the past, it would be worth considering an examination of his life from the standpoint of literature (and not just of literature from the standpoint of his life), which in spite of his considerable literary stylization is normally considered to be realistic and authentic in its way. This article focuses on further use of alternative sources that might help us to reveal certain narrative strategies that can be summarized under the term "illusion of reality". "Realism" can be seen in Hrabal's case to be an illusion constructed by particular strategies, which we can understand better by taking into account the alternative contexts.