The Gentle Barbarian is Bohumil Hrabal's moving homage to Vladimír
Boudník, a brilliant but troubled Czech graphic artist who died
tragically at the age of forty-four a few months after the Soviet
occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The Gentle Barbarian takes us to the heart of Boudník's creative
drive: his gift for infusing the objects and events of everyday life
with transcendent magic, and his passion for sharing his ideas and his
art with anyone willing to listen. Hrabal's anecdotal portrait includes
another controversial figure in that early postwar Czech avant-garde:
the poet Egon Bondy, the pen name and alter ego of a self-styled
"left-wing Marxist" philosopher called Zbynek Fiser.
Hrabal's amazing memoir celebrates the creative spirits who strove to
reject, ignore, or burrow beneath an artificial "revolutionary" fervor.
Fueled by vast quantities of beer, emboldened by friendship, driven by a
sense of their own destiny, they filled the intellectual and spiritual
vacuum around them with manic humor, inspiration, and purpose, and in
doing so, pointed the way to a kind of salvation.