The Tender Barbarian is a series of texts Hrabal compiled on the one hand to pay homage to his deceased friend, Vladimr Boudnk, and on the other as a somewhat fictionalized account of their life during the 1950s in PragueLibe, with Egon Bondy acting as Boudnks foil and dialectical antithesis. Having been influenced by Surrealism in the 1940s, by the end of the decade all three were trying to move beyond it: Bondy and Hrabal with Total Realism and Boudnk with Explosionalism, an associative method of graphically interpreting random blotches. Boudnk here plays the naif, a proletarian artist who’s a tender barbarian, someone for whom a state of grace comes naturally, spontaneously, while for Bondy, who is poring over philosophical tomes to learn how to achieve such a state, this becomes a never-ending source of frustration and admiration, to which he reacts with streams of invective. Hrabal once mentioned that when he sat down in 1973 to write something about Boudnk for an exhibition and samizdat publication to commemorate the fifth anniversary of his death, he just kept writing and writing, and the book does read almost like an automatic text as one episode spills into another, the interplay between the two protagonists forming a dialectic that Hrabal indicates he has borrowed from Boudnks mode of being and creating.

Format: Oversized paperback
Published: Czech Republic, 2019
Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press
Pages: 180
Language: English
ISBN 13: 9788086264523
ISBN 10: 8086264521