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From surgery to syphilology and caesareans to psychotherapy, interwar culture is rich in references to medicine and medical practice. Yet, despite the theme's prevalence, related scholarship tends to focus on its presence in individual writers' or artists' work. Taking the Russian and Czech literary and cinematic contexts as case studies, this thesis sets out to address the wider phenomenon. Works of literature and film by major figures of the Russian and Czech interwar cultural scenes, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, Evgenii Zamiatin, Gustav Machatý and Vladislav Vančura, are analysed alongside works by lesser-known figures, such as Vladimír Raffel, Vikentii Veresaev, Nikolai Aseev and Noi Galkin. Chapter One sets interwar medically themed literature and cinema in the combined contexts of the nineteenth century's medical revolution; degeneration theory and the crisis of modernity; eugenics; the First World War; and the aesthetics and thematics of the interwar Avant-garde. The medical theme's prevalence, it contends, resulted from the coincidence of a widespread desire for physical and spiritual regeneration with the rise of a medical profession that, for the first time in history, ostensibly had the power to assist. Chapters Two to Five each explore literary and cinematic portrayals of a different area of interwar medical practice. Chapter Two examines narratives about the bacteriological and epidemiological treatment of syphilis; long a cultural symbol of decadent modernity. Chapter Three explores narratives dealing with neurological and psychotherapeutic treatments for nervous illness, which was believed to be caused by industrial and technological modernity. Chapter Four analyses narratives of surgery, which engage metaphorically with the post-war project of remaking the world by radical and often violent means. Finally, Chapter Five examines narratives of medicalised childbirth, which reflect the period's drive towards a literal and metaphorical societal renaissance.

Czech author Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923) is internationally renowned for his novel The Fates of the Good Soldier Švejk in the World War. During his lifetime, despite publishing prolifically, Hašek was primarily known as a notorious prankster. Anecdotes grew into a legend which depicts Hašek as a larger-than-life bon vivant. This image, however, has historically been in tension with the high esteem he ultimately earned with his great novel. My reading of Hašek proposes an anti-authority theory of authorship as the unifying force between the two seemingly incompatible aspects of his oeuvre. I understand the Hašek legend as a constructed literary text, improvised like the rest of his work. I argue that his original pranks and their preservation as anecdotes express a disdain for institutions of political and cultural authority. At the same time, Hašek encoded self-referential material into his later literary works, drawing attention to the already potent legend and championing authorship as an ungovernable refuge. The introduction presents a theory of authorial legend, followed by a brief biography. Chapter One, “The Bugulma Tales: Improvisation and Autobiographical Experiment,” discusses Hašek’s service in the Red Army and the satirical, pseudo-autobiographical stories he published upon returning to Prague. Chapters Two and Three are both devoted to the Švejk novel. Chapter Two, “Authorship as a Challenge to Authority: Storytelling in Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka,” analyzes the codes of self-censorship in Hašek’s depiction of wartime Prague and finds that oral storytelling exists as a bastion of self-expression for the low-class characters the novel champions. Chapter Three, “History as Fodder” discusses Hašek’s irreverent and skeptical treatment of historical discourse and, by extension, all supposedly non-fiction genres. Chapter Four, “My Friend Hašek: Memoirs Beyond Fact and Fiction,” explores how Hašek’s legacy came to be defined through a series of memoirs written after his death by friends and collaborators. In the conclusion, I propose reexamining Hašek’s role in global literary culture, paying particular attention to Russia. Hašek’s time in the Red Army legitimized him for a soviet readership, with the effect that his writings were never censored under the communist regime. Among Russian readers, Hašek remains the most popular Czech author, yet his appeal is paradoxically in conflict with his success. I find that Hašek created and managed his own authorial legend while remaining intentionally outside of, indeed antagonistic to, normative political and literary institutions. Taking seriously both Hašek’s writing and his celebrity invites a new understanding of the dynamic relationship between authorship and authority, a model that allows for both the essentially chaotic nature of Hašek’s work, and his virtuosity. Hašek was unique among the major writers of interwar Europe in that his genius appears not in spite of but in concert with his anti-intellectualism.

This dissertation seeks to broaden our understanding of what has come to be widely called the “historical avant-garde” (Bürger) of the interwar period to incorporate lesser known—but equally important—sites of literary and artistic production in Europe from outside the western canon. In the Middle of It All: Prague, Brno, and the Avant-Garde Networks of Interwar Europe shows how a group of leftist Czech artists, writers, architects, and actors, led by Karel Teige, engaged dialogically with peers at home and around Europe in the 1920s. The networks that Devětsil built, and how it built them, can be observed today in the remaining letters, travel accounts, and publications of its members. These are the media around which this dissertation is organized, in its consideration of both the private and public avant-garde. By presenting the published manifestos and theoretical texts of the avant-garde in situ—considering the design of the periodicals in which they appeared, any images that might appear besides text, and what authors were included together in an issue—this dissertation adds both to previous close readings of the texts under consideration (Zusi), as well as seminal work that has stated convincingly the need to introduce the study of ephemeral, printed matter and its design into a history of the avant-gardes of the early Twentieth Century (Drucker). The theoretical frame within which networks are located and analyzed draws from the Social Sciences (Luhmann) as well as Post Colonial Studies (Buck-Morss, Mohanty, Pratt), Periodical Studies (Ardis, Brooker and Thacker, Philpotts, Scholes and Wulfman) and epistolary theory (Altman, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, MacArthur). Utilizing such an interdisciplinary model, this dissertation reveals that the outcomes of the interwar exchange described have had a wide reaching impact, not only on art production and intellectual output in then Czechoslovakia, but also with regard to that region’s influence around the European continent. Through a series of case studies that take the Czech avant-garde of the 1920s as its focus, this dissertation points out and challenges gaps in our popular, western-centric understanding of the European interwar avant-garde, and resists long held notions of center and periphery.

I situate Škvorecký’s novel as both a primary document in the historical record of transitional justice and as a literary creation in the author’s larger oeuvre. In creating this work of autobiographical fiction, Škvorecký deals with the ambiguities of a tumultuous historico-political moment and creates an appropriately complex work of art. I combine social science research with close-reading of the text in the tradition of new historicism. In the introduction I explain the historico-political background, specifically transitional justice and lustration in Czech Republic in the early 1990s, that engendered Two Murders. In my first chapter, I examine the book reviews, Czech and English, that appeared following the two language-respective publications of Two Murders. In the remaining three chapters I present my analysis of the novel based on close-reading and applied historical information. Chapters two and three discuss different but interconnected manifestations of distance. Chapter two examines memory as the temporal distance of the mind, while chapter three explores exile as spatial distance. Škvorecký invests memory and exile with enormous significance, and uses both concepts to depict his characters’ isolation. In the final chapter, I discuss rumor and reputation in the novel’s two distinct story-lines, demonstrating how they come together to create a cohesive artistic work. Approaching the novel as both a historical document and a work of art, I hope to critically examine this complicated historical moment and appraise Škvorecký’s contribution to the post-communist Czech dialogue.

2031-01-02