Hrabal, Bohumil and Evald Schorm.

[UNPUBLISHED SCRIPT FOR AN UNREALIZED FILM] Příliš hlučná samota [Too Loud a Solitude]. Original signed mimeographed film script.

Prague: Film Studio Barrandov, 1978. Quarto (28.2 × 20.2 cm). Original mimeographed wrappers with tan paper spine strip; mimeographed typescript to rectos only; [2], 107 pp. Signed and inscribed by Hrabal on the first page, in 1983 ("to Eva, sincerely, Hrabal, before the first spring day." Very good, save for a few nicks to wrappers (mostly the rear wrapper). With an original signed color photograph showing Hrabal drinking a beer at his favorite pub, the “Golden Tiger” in Prague. Item #55943

An unrecorded film script of the acclaimed lyrical novella by Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997), who is widely considered the most important Czech author of the twentieth century. While he was strictly speaking not a dissident, some of Hrabal's works were not published until the fall of Communism in 1989, including Too Loud a Solitude, which circulated in samizdat form after 1977. The book tells the story of a dim-witted, yet dazzlingly well-read waste-paper compacter, who selectively saves and collects the books he is meant to destroy day by day. Hrabal's writing served as the basis for two films by the Czech New Wave, including Jiří Menzel's Closely Watched Trains (1966), which went on to win an Oscar in 1968.

The present script, jointly authored by Hrabal and Evald Schorm, was never produced. Given the latently subversive content and the novella's ambiguous lyrical tone, it is easy to imagine why the censors in Normalization-era Czechoslovakia would have been wary. Moreover, the director Schorm was increasingly persona non grata in the Czechoslovak culture industry due to his "politically undesirable" films. The two men had collaborated as early as 1965, when Schorm wrote the script and directed an episode of Hrabal's "Pearls of the Deep" (Perličky na dně), considered an early milestone of the Czech New Wave. The credited dramaturg of the present film project is Václav Nývlt (1930–1999), who worked on Hrabal and Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains, in addition to other projects involving Hrabal as well as several adaptations of Hrabal's works for the stage.

We are not aware of any other copy of this missing piece of Hrabal's oeuvre. As of October 2026, the script is not traced via KVK, OCLC, and is not held by the Czech National Library or any other Czech institution to our knowledge.

Price: €3,000.00

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