‘Educated against his will’ – the motif of library in “Too Loud a Solitude” by Bohumil Hrabal

The article deals with an reinterpretation of the motif of the library and librarian in the novel Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. The library in this piece is not a repository of knowledge, but a collection of waste paper, just garbage pile for books. The protagonist, digging in this trash of culture, is trying to commit an act of artistic creation through the destruction of books. His reading strategies allow him to take on various figures − a Taoist scholar, Sisyphus, Faust, etc. A key reading for him, however, turns out to be Schopenhauer, from whom he learns that it is love and compassion which are the most important, and the state of absolute cognition is attained through an aesthetic attitude