Literary Excerpt: Bohumil Hrabal

Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) is famous for sentences that never seem to stop — cascading, comma-chained rivers of clauses that imitate the way memory and speech actually flow, one thing dragging in the next. Reading such a sentence teaches an advanced learner something no textbook does: how Czech can sustain enormous grammatical sentences without losing the thread, because case endings keep every role unambiguous no matter how far a word drifts from its verb, and because the literary transgressive (přechodník) lets two actions ride in one clause.

The illustrative text

Seděl jsem na nádraží a díval se na koleje, které se leskly v dešti, a myslel na to, co bylo, a vlaky přijížděly a zase odjížděly, a lidé spěchali s kufry, nevšímajíce si nikoho, až se setmělo a já jsem tam pořád seděl, protože jsem neměl kam jít.

A natural translation:

"I sat at the station and looked at the rails, which glistened in the rain, and thought about what had been, and trains kept arriving and leaving again, and people hurried by with their suitcases, taking no notice of anyone, until it grew dark and I was still sitting there, because I had nowhere to go."

One breath, one sentence, a dozen clauses. Let's see what holds it together.

The architecture: parataxis on a string of "a"

Hrabal's signature is parataxis — clauses set side by side and linked by the simplest coordinators, above all a "and," repeated until it becomes a rhythm rather than mere grammar. Count the joins in our sentence:

The repeated a is doing rhetorical work, not just syntactic work: each new a opens another small window of experience, and the accumulation mimics the drift of an idle mind. This is the opposite of tight, hierarchical prose — it's additive, democratic, one clause no more important than the next. The coordinators and their nuances are on coordinating conjunctions; the choice of a vs i is a separate subtlety covered there and on the related pages.

Aspect keeps the long sentence moving

A sentence this long would collapse into mud if every verb were the same aspect. Hrabal-style prose alternates. Notice the pattern in our text:

• Imperfective backgrounds: seděl "was sitting," díval se "was looking," leskly se "glistened," přijížděly / odjížděly "kept arriving/leaving," spěchali "were hurrying." These are the durative, ongoing, repeated actions — the wash of continuous experience.
• Perfective punctuation: setmělo se "it grew dark." This single perfective is the one bounded, completed change in the whole flow — the moment the scene tips from afternoon into night. It works precisely because everything around it is imperfective; it lands like a full stop inside the run-on.

So imperfectives paint the standing scene and perfectives mark the turning points. In a very long sentence this alternation is what gives the reader footholds — you feel the perfective setmělo se as a genuine event against the imperfective background. The way aspect narrates the past is on aspect in the past tense.

The transgressive: nevšímajíce si nikoho

The literary jewel of the sentence is nevšímajíce si nikoho "taking no notice of anyone." This is a present transgressive (přechodník přítomný), a non-finite verb form that compresses a simultaneous action into the main clause — "the people hurried by while taking no notice of anyone." English does this with an -ing participle ("hurrying by, noticing no one"); Czech has a dedicated, and now distinctly literary/archaic-flavoured, form.

A transgressive agrees with the subject in gender and number (not person). Here the subject is lidé "people" — masculine animate plural — so the ending is the plural -íce:

Two things for the advanced learner. First, register: the transgressive has almost vanished from spoken and everyday written Czech — it survives in literature, elevated prose, and set phrases, which is exactly why it lends Hrabal-style writing its bookish, slightly antique music. Use it in conversation and you'll sound like a nineteenth-century novel. Second, its economy: it replaces a whole coordinate clause (a nevšímali si nikoho "and they took no notice of anyone") with a single word phrase, keeping the long sentence flowing without another finite verb. The form is introduced on the present transgressive and explored fully on transgressives in depth.

Why case marking makes the length possible

Here is the deep insight the sentence delivers. It can sprawl this far without confusion because Czech marks grammatical roles morphologically, on the words themselves, so a noun's job is clear no matter where it sits or how many clauses have gone by:

• koleje is accusative plural (object of díval se na), kufry is accusative plural (object of s → actually instrumental s kufry "with suitcases"), nikoho is genitive (governed by všímat si, which takes the genitive), dešti is locative (after v "in").
• Because each of these carries its case on its ending, the reader never loses track of who is doing what to whom — even across ten clauses. Word order is freed up for rhythm and emphasis rather than being spent on signalling grammar.

An English sentence this long would strain, because English leans on word order and adjacency to keep roles straight; drift too far and the reader loses the thread. Czech's case system is precisely the machinery that lets a Hrabal sentence run and run. Note s kufry "with suitcases": s + instrumental for accompaniment, exactly the pattern on s + instrumental. And až se setmělo uses až "until" as a temporal subordinator, one of the time conjunctions on temporal když / až / jakmile.

Reading strategy for a Hrabal sentence

When you meet a genuine sentence of this length, don't try to hold it all at once. Find the finite verbs first (seděl, díval se, leskly se, myslel, přijížděly, odjížděly, spěchali, setmělo se, seděl, neměl) — each is the spine of a clause. Then note the coordinators and subordinators (a, až, protože, the relative který, the free relative co) that string them. Treat the transgressive as a compressed extra clause hanging off its subject. And trust the case endings: whatever the distance, nikoho is still the thing not-noticed, koleje still the thing looked-at. The length is an effect, not a trap.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Hrabal-style syntax is paratactic: clauses strung on repeated a "and," additive rather than hierarchical, mimicking the drift of thought.
• Aspect keeps a long sentence readable: imperfectives paint the continuous background, a perfective (setmělo se) marks the one turning point.
• The transgressive (nevšímajíce si) compresses a simultaneous action into one word; it agrees in gender/number with the subject and is now firmly (literary) — read it, don't speak it.
• Czech can sustain very long sentences because case endings mark every role, so words stay unambiguous however far they drift from their verb — freeing word order for rhythm.
• The passage above is an original pastiche, written to illustrate these features; it is not a quotation from Hrabal.