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In English speaking countries, several literary monographs and dictionaries about cult fiction were published in the last decades. In our postmodern times, this seems to be quite an inspiring topic because it deals with constant tension between “high brow” literary values usually recommended by state education systems on the one hand, and spontaneous need to overcome these somewhat petrified systems of thinking about artistic values on the other hand. This effort is usually supported by independent intellectua...

Jachym Topol (born 1962) is a Czech poet, novelist and rock musician whose literary works have been translated to more than ten languages up to now. He comes from a well-known Czech literary family (e. g. Karel Schulz, Josef Topol), started his career as a Czech “angry young man” and a representative of Czech underground culture in the 1980s. After 1989 he began to write novels which are rooted in the underground way of expression but at the same time are discussed as samples of typically postmodern prose. Esp...

Milan Kundera is widely known especially for his novels written in Czech, only much later he began to write his fiction in French. Rather paradoxically, it was only when he had become a French citizen that Kundera started to write systematically about the Central European novel as a specific phenomenon with highly original features, e. g. polythematic structure, lack of great epic stories, a tendency to essayism, and an ironical approach to the author’s homeland. His novels are very often based on playful or gro...

Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) is along with Jaroslav HaВљek and Milan Kundera one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century; his works are translated into 27 foreign languages. In the period from 1989 to 1992, Hrabal wrote a series of fictional letters addressed to Dubenka (April Gifford), a visiting American student who became the muse of his later years. These half-imaginary letters were never sent to her, though their relationship was very close and even intimate. Therefore, it is necessary to ask a questi...

During my numerous research and teaching stays at the universities in Great Britain, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria I was asked to speak about Czech independent literature which existed under the communist regime (1948-1989). As an author of a monograph about Czech literary underground (1999) and many studies on this topic, I expected that it would be easy for me. Nevertheless, I soon came to the conclusion that translation of basic terms connected with independent culture is not only a matter of linguistic ability ...

Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) is along with Jaroslav HaВљek and Milan Kundera one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, his works are translated to 27 foreign languages. The present paper pays attention especially to his texts written in the early 1950s when Hrabal started to use his specific narrative style that combines modernist impulses with down-to-earth tall tales inspired by the milieu of Czech pubs. In that time Hrabal was in a close and friendly contact with much younger Egon Bondy, a poet and p...