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            Bohumil Hrabal, one of the most popular 20^th Century Czech writers, acted in many ways as an artistic spokesman for the citizens of the Visegrad Nations.  Like Jiří Menzel, whose film versions of Hrabal’s novels and short stories are among the director’s most popular and well-loved works, Hrabal’s novels and stories are fully integrated into Central-Eastern European consciousness, to a degree aiding in the creation of a common regional culture.  Throughout the years of communism, Hrabal had varying degrees of difficulty with the publishing establishment that acted as the controlling body of the state.  Like many of his artistic contemporaries, Hrabal was a samizdat writer as well as being a widely published author.  While playing a tricky game with the “censors,” Hrabal brought to life complex characters with ambivalent relationships to the society in which they lived.  As Josef Škvorecký writes, Hrabal did not present the standard division of positive worker, negative capitalist, and uncertain hero who must decide where his loyalties lie. [1]   Hrabal’s fiction embodies, exposes, and relies upon a particularly Central-Eastern European humor.  The joyful, and sometimes bawdy, environment of childish play and titillating sexual situations barely covers a more somber underground of dark social and political realities.  

            With Cutting it Short, which was originally published in 1976, Hrabal avoided or eluded the “censors” by seemingly presenting a loving eulogy to his mother.  At the same time there is a strong sense of the struggle between a desire for the modern and a nostalgic love of the past.  Hrabal cuts close to a sentimentality that is not nearly as present in his other works, but I would argue that his quiet inclusion of a social commentary translates into a critique of both traditionalism and impending modernity.

 

I like those few minutes before seven o’clock at night, when, as a young wife, with rags and a crumpled copy of the newspaper National Politics, I clean the glass cylinders of the lamps, with a match I rub off the blackened ends of the burnt wicks, I put the brass caps back, and at seven o’clock precisely that wonderful moment comes when the brewery machinery ceases to function, and the dynamo pumping the electric current around all the places where the light bulbs shine, the dynamo starts to turn more slowly, and as the electricity weakens, so does the light from the bulbs….I dread the day the mains will be brought to the brewery and all the brewery lamps, all the airy lamps at the stables, the lamps with round mirrors, all those portly lamps with round wicks one day will cease to be lit, no one will prize their light, for all this ceremonial will be replaced by the light-switch resembling the water tap which replaced the wonderful pumps. (3-4) 

While the young wife Mary loves relicts of the past, and—to a certain extent—symbolizes tradition itself, the character also hopelessly loves her husband Francin, seemingly working against the logic of a simple analogy which could be applied to the story.  He is staid and conservative, the quiet hard-working businessman, in direct contrast to her playful traditionalism.  At the same time that she anchors us in the past, she loves the modern conveniences he brings her as gifts from his monthly trips to Prague.  Hrabal establishes a complex relationship between the husband and wife and similarly presents us with a complex struggle between views of the past and future. 

            Like Hašek‘s The Good Soldier Švezk, a large portion of Cutting it Short is composed of nearly independent vignettes.  Various comic situations establish Mary as an innocent trickster and her brother in law Uncle Pepin as her self-important, foolish sidekick.  The important exceptions are the final four chapters of the novella, which build to a turn away from the past and into the future. In the end, Mary’s obsession with Josephine Baker prompts her to cut short her own hair.  Upon seeing Mary’s new style, Francin publicly whips his wife with the tube from her bicycle pump and says,

 

“Right, lass…we start a new life.”

And he bent down and picked up his number three lettering pen from the ground, then screwed the rubber hose back in the pump and stuck the pump in the clip on my bicycle frame.

I took the pump and showed it to the cyclists and said:

“I bought this cycle pump at Runkas’s on Boleslav Road.” (134)

 

And thus ends the novella.  Mary’s response is not indignation, but to again note that Francin is sexy and attractive.  She leaps back to life either in embarrassment, or with her typical resilience.  She immediately focuses the onlooker and reader’s attentions on this consumer product she has obtained thanks to modernity.  And a new life is certainly to begin.  

           The struggle between the traditional and modern is never far from sight in Hrabal’s novella.  While the drive to modernization is inevitable, Mary and Francin epitomize the contradictions involved in the love of the past and desire of the future.  It is difficult to distinguish if Hrabal’s seeming ambivalence towards the modern is due to this particular new world’s implicit relationship with the seat of communist authority, or if his criticism would extend to any or all societies undergoing a process of modernization.  In any case, Hrabal’s novella is a clear indication of a tradition of nostalgia as a cultural driving force.