THE GENTLE BARBARIAN

The esteemed Czech writer offers up an affectionate portrait of a little-known Czech visual artist.

Originally published in 1974 as a samizdat book in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, Hrabal’s impressionistic, brief look at his eccentric, boisterous artist friend Vladimír Boudník (1924-1968) is now available in English thanks to Wilson’s fine translation. In this brief look at Boudník’s life, he employs some of the artist’s “methods”—e.g., “leave the text exposed, like an excavated street,” and fill it with “fast-flowing, tossed-off sentences and words.” He recalls when he and Boudník, who “suffered…acutely from hypochondria and hysteria, lived in rooms next to each other in a building in Libeň that they called the Embankment of Eternity; they yelled and argued back and forth about the mysteries of creativity. A “master of tactile imagination,” Boudník created a lithographic art form he called Explosionalism, a process by which he would take random stains and spatters and blotches and turn them into recognizable images.” The “overheated furnace of his brain,” Hrabal writes, “found creativity in disorder.” Working at a steel mill, Boudník was “transfixed” by the grinding machines, “enthralled by what he was seeing and what his imagination was making of it.” The author is clearly impressed by “how beautifully structured Vladimir’s graphic art is, how grounded it is,” even when Boudník anointed himself and his etched metal plates “with his own semen as he worked.” The narrative, more about their relationship than a critical discussion of Boudník’s art, is replete with humorous and lavish personal anecdotes about surviving during a politically repressive time. Sometimes joined by their poet friend Egon Bondy, they would walk, talk, argue, drink excessive amounts of beer, and engage in outlandish adventures, which Hrabal fondly recounts with extravagant glee and warmth. Wilson includes Hrabal’s “A Letter to Attendees at an Exhibition” and an illuminating afterword about the book’s publishing history.

Short on artistic insights but large on life.