Literature and life Autostylization as a strategy in the autobiographical and essayistic texts of Bohumil Hrabal

Hrabal often emphasizes that his work is firmly anchored in reality. He says that it is based either on what had happened to him, or what he had heard from other people and had identified with to such an extent that he merged in with it. This emphasis on the indivisible link between literature and real life is strongest in his later autobiographical and essayistic texts in which he writes directly about himself and not through narrators or literary characters as he did previously. In these texts he also thinks more systematically about what it means to be a writer, how he himself developed as a writer and what his objectives were in writing and in life in general. Characteristically, these texts cannot be reduced to what Hrabal says to us in them, as he frequently stylizes himself in various forms and makes use of a number of other typically literary techniques. What Hrabal writes about and how and why he keeps coming back to the problem of the relationship between literature and life is a sign of his efforts to come to terms with what is weighing him down. For him literature becomes a kind of adaptive strategy to deal with his chronic inability to be in the present moment.