While reading Down and Out in Paris and London, I reached the description of the plongeurs’ pub party in Chapter XVII. The scene immediately reminded me of Hrabal’s work: a gathering of picturesque figures in a dirty, underground bistro at the foot of the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux, sharing the joy of their collective intoxication: “Everyone was very happy, overwhelmingly certain that the world was a good place and we a notable set of people.”

Orwell depicts a parade of fringe characters hiding from the world’s humiliations, each bearing some social or physical handicap. These outcasts are not only excluded from society—they also radiate a peculiar, almost surreal authenticity. One example is Furex, a Limousin stonemason (Orwell’s mother’s family name was Limouzin), a communist by day and a chauvinist by night. Drunk, he would launch into speeches on French nationalism, singing the Marseillaise—not only contributing to the queer atmosphere of the place, but adding to the amusement of his companions:

„He partially undressed and showed the wound he had received at Verdun. There were shouts of applause. We thought nothing in the world could be funnier than this speech of Furex’s. He was a well-known spectacle in the quarter; people used to come in from other bistros to watch him when his fit started.

The word was passed round to bait Furex. With a wink to the others someone called for silence, and asked him to sing the ‘Marseillaise’. He sang it well, in a fine bass voice, with patriotic gurgling noises deep down in his chest when he came to ‘Aux arrmes, citoyens! Forrmez vos bataillons!‘ Veritable tears rolled down his cheeks; he was too drunk to see that everyone was laughing at him. Then, before he had finished, two strong workmen seized him by either arm and held him down, while Azaya shouted, ‘Vive l’Allemagne!‘ just out of his reach. Furex’s face went purple at such infamy. Everyone in the bistro began shouting together, ‘Vive l’Allemagne! À bas la France!‘ while Furex struggled to get at them.“

But here Orwell diverges sharply from Hrabal. Where the Czech author might stop, preserving the drunken camaraderie as a kind of tender epiphany, Orwell continues—and reveals the decay as the night wears on. The almost metaphysically joyful community is lit not by any eternal flame, but only by the flickers of their own wretchedness, which mimic the peace of pain’s absence near death. It is narcosis, not knowledge; intoxication, not illumination.

Historian Pavel Hošek, in his recent book The Gospel According to Bohumil Hrabal, has attempted to justify Hrabal’s celebration of alcohol culture. Yet Orwell shows what is missing from both Hrabal’s work and his admirers’ apologetics: the vacancy of the soul.

„By half past one the last drop of pleasure had evaporated, leaving nothing but headaches. We perceived that we were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk. We went on swallowing the wine, but it was only from habit, and the stuff seemed suddenly nauseating. One’s head had swollen up like a balloon, the floor rocked, one’s tongue and lips were stained purple. At last it was no use keeping it up any longer. Several men went out into the yard behind the bistro and were sick. We crawled up to bed, tumbled down half dressed, and stayed there ten hours.“

There it is: after the royal joy comes the royal sobering, followed by the inevitable hangover. In Czech history and culture, which honors Hrabal alongside Jaroslav Hašek as a national bard, the same pattern repeats. A surge of enthusiasm is followed by a harsh headache and long passivity—sometimes lasting decades. This is because there is no clear vision of the future; the utopian moment is only a narcotic state. No mysticism—just a self-consuming ecstasy.

The Czech twentieth century is full of such mornings-after: the euphoria of 1918 followed by the paralysis of the 1930s; the spring of 1968 followed by the grey years of normalization; the Velvet Revolution followed by the disillusionment of the 1990s. Orwell’s warning was that joy without vision ends in stupor. Hrabal did not give us that warning, and so perhaps it was easy to read Orwell without hearing it. We have taken the pleasure, but not the warning; the camaraderie, but not the politics; the wine, but not the bitter aftertaste. In doing so, we have flattened Orwell into a figure he never was. Maybe that is why Czech culture appropriated Orwell in a very misleading manner. Wholly depoliticized, he became only a symbol of anticommunism.