Abstract
These selected essays reflect, in various ways, certain literary thresholds or excesses, whether we are concentrating on the situation-anchored speech as one of the key contexts in Hrabal's writing, or on a dream reality which may offer a hermeneutic model for understanding the genesis of literary work. These origins refer to a lack of self-sufficiency of literature, where the accent is put on the contents of the message, and not only on its form.
The dialectic of form and contents is also present in other of the present essays in so far as a specific form creates a certain contents: this is the topic of a study dealing with the early works of Věra Linhartová, where the narrative strategies generate an impression of depth and mystery. But we can also choose an opposite way (from motive to form) and look at how certain themes - like the motive of home in Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal - require a certain form; this can be shown by looking at the contrast between a concentrated world of Kundera's fiction and Bohumil Hrabal's expansive writing.
Apart from that, the excesses of literature may refer to a certain anthropological dimension. This is a case of the study concentrating on Havlíček, where literature is dealt with as a theatrical mechanism, which is supposed to bring about an illusory justice.
We may thus remark that literature seems to seek to surpass its own boundaries - this is the case of Harlekýnovy miliony, where Hrabal transforms the map of the real Labe lowlands. But it is obvious that this surpassing can be developed only through literary means - we can follow this in Kundera's work where - in his later novels - the accent is transferred from metaphoric to metonymical motivation.