How Bohumil Hrabal the author was born: The process of reviewing and editing Hrabal's manuscripts at Československý spisovatel during the first half of the 1960s
Abstract
This essay analyzes the review and editorial processes at the Československý spisovatel publishing house, concerning Bohumil Hrabal's initial three works (Lark on a String, Pearl of the Deep and Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age), the first of which, after being reviewed and edited in January 1959, was eventually not published. The processes in question are characterized not only by a variety of editorial and reviewer recommendations (from which we can reconstruct the origin of certain motifs and their subsequent forced transition to other novels), but also by a certain interpretive dispute (both within the editorial office and between the editors and the office) over the final form of Hrabal's prose, encompassing the more general problem of what can and cannot be considered a literary work (this is especially the case with Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age).
Thus, there has been a certain interpretive scheme forming around Hrabal's style, which after more than fifty years has proven to be not only coherent, but also relatively constant.