Hrabal suggested another word for his works: pábení, Englished by the writer Josef Škvorecký as “palavering,” meaning “idle chatter” or “flattering babble,” here intended to characterize looping, loopy conversation

Innumerable poems, stories, and shoddy ad campaigns have fantasized that the river running through Prague, the Vltava—the Moldau in German—is a river of beer. On one bank is the city’s administrative center; on the other, the nation’s—the Castle, apostrophized by another son, Franz Kafka. Prague is a city of churches where no one goes to church, a city of synagogues without Jews. Literary Prague—aping the literary life of the empire’s imperial cities, Budapest and Vienna—once enjoyed more of a café culture, conducted not in Czech but in German. Kafka and his future executor, Max Brod, along with Oskar Baum and Franz Werfel, were ersatz Viennese who aspired to the capital’s caffeination, taking their beans with a dash of cream. Not for them the Slavic demimonde, the twilit taverns strewn with sawdust, their rusty tanks and taps—the Eastern accents of this Western metropolis were too gauche for the authors of The Metamorphosis and The Song of Bernadette.

Socialist Realist fiction was too obviously occupied with schematic surface: A man is discharged from the Red Army a hero and returns to reorganize his hometown around a hyperprogressive cement factory (the novel Cement by Fyodor Gladkov). It was all exterior, a series of events or plot points demonstrating fate, synonymous in these books with political calling. By contrast, the corpora of censored or banned writers were usually more interested by the inner life—the mind, the one space from which no citizen can be exiled. Show a veteran working productively in a plant and you have created propaganda, but tell the thoughts of this man, tell us what he feels when he boozes at night and beats his children and wife, and you have an artwork—a dangerous artwork.