SOURCE: Pospiszyl, Tomas, and Jen Nessel. “Bohumil Hrabal, 1914-1997.” Nation 264, no. 25 (30 June 1997): 33-4.

In the following essay, Pospiszyl and Nessel comment on Hrabal's work and the strange circumstances of his death.

That arcane word “defenestration”—the act of throwing someone out of a window—holds a special place in Czech history, which is famous for two of them: One marked the beginning of the Hussite revolution, the radical people's movement of the Middle Ages; the second, a dumping of Catholic emissaries from the palace windows into a pile of manure, caused the Thirty Years' War. Both were symbolic prologues to tumultuous new periods in Central Europe.

On February 3, 82-year-old Bohumil Hrabal, considered by many the greatest modern writer in the Czech language, went out a window to his death. While recovering from hip surgery, he apparently tried to feed some birds from his hospital window, lost his balance...