Abstract
This short story, written and hidden in 1953, found in 1971, remains unpublishable in Czechoslovakia
Bohumil Hrabal is one of the best and most original contemporary Czech story-tellers. Unable to publish his work for many years, he was fifty when his books started coming out during the ‘thaw’ in the 1960s, and he was the author of Closely Observed Trains, made famous by Jiří Menzel's film of the same name. Together with the surrealist poet and musician Karel Marysko and the literary historian Professor Václav Černý, he is a character in his own story, this record of an ordinary day in the Czechoslovakia of the fifties when the Stalinist terror was at its height.
On another level, the main hero of this particular story is time: although written as long ago as 1953, it has so far not appeared even in samizdat; the author himself added a postscript 18 years later, in 1971.
The second postscript comes from Index on Censorship another 13 years on, 31 years after this hitherto unpublished story was written.