Egon Bondy, Bohumil Hrabal, Total realism, Czech literary underground

In the early 1950s, Bohumil Hrabal was in a close and friendly contact with much younger Egon Bondy, a poet and philosopher of Czech literary underground. The artistic programme of so called Total realism was originally the idea of Bondy realised in his poetry. Hrabal used the main ideas of this programme not only in his early short stories, but also in his mature novels and literary letters from the last decade of his life. The author of this paper brings evidence that the influence of Bondy to Hrabal was extremely important and should not be overlooked.