The Gentle Barbarian is Bohumil Hrabal's homage to Vladim?r Boudn?k, one of the greatest Czech visual artists of the 1950s and 1960s, whose life came to a tragic end shortly after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Boudnik and Hrabal had a close and often contentious friendship. For a brief period, in the early 1950s, they both worked in the steel works in Kladno and lived in the same building in Prague.
Written in the early seventies, Hrabal's anecdotal...