[In the following essay, Pospiszyl and Nessel comment on Hrabal's work and the strange circumstances of his death.]

That arcane word “defenestration”—the act of throwing someone out of a window—holds a special place in Czech history, which is famous for two of them: One marked the beginning of the Hussite revolution, the radical people's movement of the Middle Ages; the second, a dumping of Catholic emissaries from the palace windows into a pile of manure, caused the Thirty Years' War. Both were symbolic prologues to tumultuous new periods in Central Europe.

On February 3, 82-year-old Bohumil Hrabal, considered by many the greatest modern writer in the Czech language, went out a window to his death. While recovering from hip surgery, he apparently tried to feed some birds from his hospital window, lost his balance and fell from the fifth floor. Known for the great neatness with which he dressed, he was found in a peaceful pose, as if only resting on the sidewalk, without any apparent injury and with his pajamas perfectly straightened and buttoned up. Hrabal's bizarre and tragic end raised questions about the official version of the accident, especially since voluntary falls from the fifth floor appear in at least two of his books. Hrabal, who had stopped writing two years before, left behind some twenty volumes of collected writings and approximately the same number of half-wild cats at his country cottage near Prague. This fall marks an end rather than a beginning.

Internationally, Hrabal may be overshadowed by Milan Kundera or Vaclav Havel, but Czech readers commonly consider him their greatest writer of the past fifty years. To be fair, only in the last seven have Kundera and Havel been officially published in their home country. But Kundera's cynical Europeanism is seen by his former countrymen as too arrogant, and Havel, continuing a long tradition of Czech writers who take political responsibility into their own hands, exchanged art for politics. When most shelves of the bookstores of Communist Czechoslovakia were stocked with stories of the heroes of collectivization, Hrabal captured the heart of the average Czech reader with shockingly realistic, cruel, yet poetic books, including I Served the King of England (Vintage), Closely Watched Trains (Northwestern) and Too Loud a Solitude (Harcourt Brace).

During Hrabal's lifetime, the country where he lived changed its official name at least nine times, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Czechoslovakia, from a Nazi protectorate to Communist regimes of such diversity that someone sentenced to death under one could become president in the next. Borders were significantly changed seven times, and uninvited armies entered from almost all directions. The black humor and irony of the locals proved to be not luxuries but essential tools for survival. The arts, except during a very few years, were divided into the officially recognized sphere and the underground, with the borderline painfully cutting through the body of work of every artist, including Hrabal.

Hrabal took almost thirty years to publish his first book. He was not in a hurry. Naturally shy and silent as a young man, he forced himself to make a living as a traveling insurance agent in order to go out in the world and seek experience. The times were more than conducive to Hrabal's wish to get dirtied by life. Because of his bourgeois background, the only job he could get in the fifties was as a foundry worker, watching debris from the war be melted and reshaped into iron ingots, and watching his fellow workers, mostly the intellectual elite of the former regime, be re-educated by the raw and often cruel environment of the factory. Hrabal spent years as a railway worker, a paper recycler, a stagehand. He lived in Liben, a peripheral quarter of Prague, where the magic of the Golden City is kept not by its ancient architecture and medieval legends, but by deteriorating nineteenth-century projects and the folklore of factory workers. Next door to Hrabal lived Vladimir Boudnik, by day a tamer in a factory and by night the originator of the Czech version of Abstract Expressionism. They were often visited by Egon Bondy, a poet too radical for local Surrealists and a thinker too left for the Marxist government. They published in samizdat for their friends and neighbors. When Boudnik wanted to share his prints with others, he would bring them to the factory; he argued with his co-workers over abstract art. Life was so beautiful and so sharp that one had to get drunk to blunt its frenzy.

Hrabal's language has its roots in the tradition of the pub tale, an exaggerated story nobody around the table believes, but everyone enjoys. He often visited his senile Uncle Pepin, who was able to carry on endless monologues of half-fictional, half-true stories from his life. Hrabal recorded and then transcribed hours of these chaotic escapades. He reworked this raw material, endlessly rewriting until everyday language was distilled into poetry. Like the experiments of Prague's sixteenth century alchemists mining gray stones into gold, this metamorphosis of casual conversations into art will keep university departments of Czech literature busy for many years.

Like his Uncle Pepin's stories, Hrabal mixes real life experiences with fantasy. Stories of great soccer games, gossip and imaginary amorous encounters are combined with Kafka, Kant, Nietzsche, Lao-tzu, Mann, Warhol, Einstein and Schopenhauer. Hrabal's weird characters are full of love and trust: They talk about God while sawing Baroque statues of angels for firewood; they love books while binding them up as wastepaper.

If Hrabal himself did not have to worry about writer's block, there were others trying to block or divert the stream of his writings. The endless rewriting of his stories was not simply artistic method; when an almost 50-year-old Hrabal was finally introduced into official literature in the midsixties, state censorship and self-censorship forced him to edit everything over and over again. Even though he was censored and threatened by the government, he was criticized by friends from the underground for collaborating with the regime. Average readers, often unaware of these private dramas, stood in long lines in front of bookshops to get every word he published. No matter how many copies were printed, his books always sold out.

During the student revolution in 1989, a tall old man in a peculiar hat came to the entrance of the Philosophical Faculty building at Charles University. It was the second night of the sit-in strike, and food, as well as paper for fliers and pamphlets, was badly needed. The tall figure handed his heavy backpack to the student security guard, and without a word of explanation disappeared in the direction of the Old Jewish Cemetery. The backpack was full of cash.

After 1989, when there were no more barriers to Hrabal's writing, he exhaled a short book every few months. He remained unsure about his work: Upon the slightest criticism by his publisher he would tear up the only version of a text and never go back to it. He worked on a critical edition of his earlier works, but it is not clear which one of the many versions, some edited by Hrabal, some by censors, is more authentic than another.

The last visitors to the hospital describe Hrabal as almost unbearably kind, overflowing with love, too sensitive to carry on a conversation without tears of inexplicable happiness. Leaning into the open hospital window, he was outbalanced by his out-sized heart. In that brief moment when his body was suspended in the air, he had just a split second to make sure he looked neat enough to enter eternity, where, we all hope, one can do without publishing houses, censorship or even paper, and still make literature.