Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp by Hrabal Bohumil Short David Szigeti László

Author:Hrabal, Bohumil,Short, David,Szigeti, László [Hrabal, Bohumil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
Published: 2014-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Couldn’t it be that the citizen of the new, that’s to say socialist, era of this republic doesn’t fully identify with the forms that constitute this society?

That brings us back to the problem of whether the society I live with, each individual, is capable, even with no boss standing over him, of being a real husbandman. That’s something President Zápotocký101 propounded in the Fifties: ‘Everyone a master in his workplace.’ The principle is a noble one. We’ve been describing the things around us, but it also applies to me since I’m just the same, my style’s the same, half-baked we might say. We live in an age of half-baked things, when you even buy half-prepared food and just finish it off at home. My own impression is that the things I write – thanks to my untidiness and lack of endurance – the things I write are half-baked. It’s really my readers who have to construct them, or cook them at home, in their heads. At the age of seventy I consider myself a child of the age and a child of the environment I live in. Those days in the brewery, that was poetry, everything was beautiful, the countryside, everything; we even employed two bricklayers to maintain the fabric, so everything really was shipshape. But I moved to Libeň, now I live on this grotty urban fringe, and it’s here I’ve written all my decent works, even though I do the actual writing in Kersko. There’ve been great changes at the brewery. And I’ve also changed.

101 Antonín Zápotocký (1884–1957), second Communist president of Czechoslovakia (1953–57).

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