Varianta v poetice Bohumila Hrabala. Krásná poldi, Ostře sledované vlaky, Příliš hlučná samota

Abstract (EN) The doctoral thesis Varianta v poetice Bohumila Hrabala [The process of variation in Bohumil Hrabal’s poetics] studies the creative process of writing variants, which the author employed in the whole of his literary production. The main theoretical focus of the thesis is the concept of semantic „openness“ introduced by Italian semiotician Umberto Eco (1932– 2016) as the possibility of interpreting a literary work on the basis of the aestetic information (i.e. the formal construction) of the text. A further elaboration of Eco’s concept is to be found in a case study conducted by Michael Špirit (born 1965) on one text written by Hrabal in the 50s and presented by Špirit as an example of a concluded text yet open in meaning, and its variant published in the 60s, which according to Špirit has the features of an open text, but is semantically closed. Through the textual analysis of three groups of variant texts written by Hrabal, the thesis argues the development of the process of variation from texts written in the 50s towards the semantic closedness of their variants published in the 60s (epos Krásná Poldi– the short story Krásná Poldi; short stories Kain and Fádní stanice–novella Ostře sledované vlaky–short story Legenda o Kainovi), while demonstrating the opposite direction of the same process in texts written and re-opened in the 70s (the three „variations“ of Hlučná samota). Keywords: Bohumil Hrabal, Krásná Poldi, Ostře sledované vlaky, Příliš hlučná samota, textual variants.