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The study examines the transformation of the Syndicate of Czech Writers into the Union of Czechoslovak Writers at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, when the writers’ association turned into an ideological organisation fully dependent on official politics. The destruction of private publishing houses and the grouping into large, state-owned ones, is examined and analysed. The paradoxical role of writers and artists after 1948, i.e. to serve and to lead at the same time, is also discussed. more...

Charvát, Martin: Magical crossing: Karel Teige and Vítězslav Nezval

The study is devoted to the topic of the assassination of the prominent politician and the Minister of Finance of the newly established Czechoslovak Republic, Alois Rašín (1867--1923). The author traces the refl ection of this event in contemporary journalism, literary works and drama, describes the way in which authors portrayed it depending on their political orientation and their relationship to the ideas of the First Republic. In addition to the depiction of the assassination itself, the authors discussed the question of whether a violent solution is a justifi able method of political struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

La influencia de Whitman en la literatura posterior, a ambos lados del Atlántico, creció en las últimas décadas del siglo XIX y principios del XX. El período de entreguerras fue especialmente fructífero, con un gran número de traducciones, estudios críticos de su obra, biografías y huellas concretas en los poetas contemporáneos. Su principal aporte estuvo relacionado con la libertad, tanto a nivel temático como formal. Ejemplos de ello son las obras de Martí, Karásek, Huidobro o Nezval. more...

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Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1932) by Vítězslav Nezval represents a unique attempt of merging the tradition of the Gothic novel with modern Czech avant-garde literature. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is examined in detail with regards to both contexts (and not only to them). The study reveals and interprets specific poetic devices, both formal and thematic, used by the author in order to distort the poetics of the Gothic novel to an extent that it can be metamorphized into a fully surrealist literary artwork. more...

What is noticeable in the 1920s, when Czech modern poetry and Vítězslav Nezval in particular express their avant-garde quests through the felicitous poetic program, is the aesthetic distancing from the romantic melancholy and respectively from the interpretation of landscape as an object of contemplation and a mediator between the human soul and the universe. The preference of poetism for civilization diversity and metropolitan dynamics and its superficial disregard for nature are the reasons why this aspect of Vítězslav Nezval's poetry has remained outside the field of literary research so far. The main objective of this paper is to discover and outline the manifestations of artistic treatment of nature in Nezval's poetry even when he denies its place in modern poetry in general. The paper focuses on those transformational processes of anti-mimetic nature through which the image of the landscape is no longer perceived as a reflection of the real entities of nature but as a fictional entity based on the principle of collage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Aim: The interwar period in Czechoslovakia was a time of societal anxiety. The aim of this paper is to find the central themes of societal fear, as reflected in the surrealist works of Vítězslav Nezval, a czech poet. The analysis will be based primarily on the lyric poetry from the collections: Žena v množném čísle [Woman in Plural] (1936) and Absolutní hrobař [Absolute Gravedigger] (1937). Methods: The analysis is based on the Josef Vojdovík's anthropo-phenomenological method of exploring the surrealist perceptions of the body, which is based on vertical and horizontal anthropological dimensions and phenomenological conceptions of fears. Results: Surrealist poetry and other literary works contain images of the body that are changed by fear: deformations, metamorphoses, fragmentarisations, hybridisations, expressing the body as a collage, a mosaic, an amalgam, a phantom, a grotesque, an inlay, and as lifelessness. It undergoes multiple metamorphoses, not only within its own form, but also with regard to the categories of life and lifelessness. Conclusions: The analysis leads to the conclusion, that V. Nezval's works show a clear tendency to portray the body as an object which undergoes a metamorphosis. The body is balanced on the edge between living and dead, organic and inorganic, it is determined by time and space. It is often shown along the narrowing-widening relation, in stupor, petrification, reduced to a flat surface or miniaturised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Thesis: The aim of the research is to find the connection between Freud's theory of psychoanalysis and Vitezslav Nezval's novel Valerie a týden divů [Valerie and Her Week of Wonders]. Story about the teenage girl in the search of her own identity was written in the 30's of 20th, century in Czechoslovakia and is a part of the identity novels genre, but also contains some surrealistic elements. Concepts: After the description of the czech avant-garde atmosphere, historical context and connections between surrealism and psychoanalysis, the author starts with the analysis of the work Valerie a tyden divu. Basing on the chosen parts of the plot and specific characters she refers to the concepts of subconsciousness, archetypes, Oedipus complex and family romance. The author of the article used as base the Bruno Bettelheim's book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales to show, with selected examples, the Valerie's entrance into adulthood and search for self-sexuality. Results: Analysis of the characters and selected parts of the novel shows the connections with Freud's psychoanalysis, especially theory of subconsciousness, archetypes, Oedipus complex and family romance. Author also focuses on the surrealistic aspects or Jung's theory of initiation and categorisation of the scenes to sacrum and profanum components. The characters and selected elements of the novel shows the connections with psychoanalysis, and leads to the conclusion, that the text refers especially to human subconsciousness, mainly in the erotic scenes and in the archetypal features of the characters. The main character, Valerie is teared apart between reality and dream and between adulthood and childhood. Even though the journey she took in the find of her own identity, she finds out, that she does not know herself at all, which is a clear refferation to the theory of subconsciousness. Originality/value: The analysis lead to conclusion that relations with the human subconscious are clearly mark in the text. V. Nezval's relations with psychoanalysis are widely known, but there is a lack of studies (especially in czech literature studies on polish field) of specific literary texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

This article analyses three sets of translations that form the core of Vítězslav Nezval's translation work: The Work of Arthur Rimbaud (1930), The Poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé (1931) and a selection from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire (completed 1931, published posthumously 1964). It observes that Nezval declares the translation to be an "analogy and imitation of the original poem", created ex novo from the original "content and verbal material", as this is in line with translation theory at that time, which demanded that a translation should above all be an original poem. In keeping with this principle, Nezval has Rimbaud speak in the modern poetic language which speaks for itself in his collections. His poetic licence is then excused, if not justified, by the conviction that Rimbaud's poetics are the product of a modernism that basically consists in the associative mechanism. However, Rimbaud's, Baudelaire's and Mallarmé's modernism does not work on the basis of the associative principle: quite the reverse, the works of all these poets are characterized by highly rational structuralization. Hence Nezval presented a quite specific "imitation" of the original texts, projecting his own poetics that were in thrall to a cubist-poetist faith in poetic imagery in perpetural motion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

In 1936, an anonymous collection of poems entitled 52 hořkých balad vĕčného studenta Roberta Davida ('52 bitter ballades of the perpetual student Robert David') was released in the Prague publishing house Borový. Soon it became clear that the author of this book of ballades (a very strict Romanic form of poems which was made famous by François Villon) must be Vítĕzslav Nezval. Nezval, however, who at that time was the main representative of Czech literary surrealism, denied his authorship for many years. After a short analysis of the work (themes and motifs, poetic form) and a brief overview of its contemporary reception the question will be discussed, why the author of an extremely free literary conception such as surrealism at the same time wrote a rather conventional text using an old and very strict poetic form. As will be shown, Nezval's oeuvre since the 1920s had always been characterized by the co-existence of avantgardistic and non-avangardistic texts. His surrealistic works and the ballades about Robert David are, on the one hand, connected by their playfulness. On the other hand, the mystifying play around the perpetual student was, maybe, determined to prepare Nezval's withdrawal from the surrealist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

In 1929 Vítězslav Nezval wrote the poem The Unknown from the Seine. This poem has three documented sources of inspiration: Nezval's experience of his childhood, an episode with a drowning person in the 1920's Prague, and the famouse motive of the "Unknown of the Seine," a girl, whose death mask has a mysterious smile. The study offers another source of Nezval's inspiration: Jean Arthur Rimbaud's Ophelia, which Nezval actually translated into Czech. In this poem Rimbaud explores the cult of Ophelia – a beautiful drowned girl. Nezval's poetic composition can be seen as a belated tribute from the Czech poetist to the European cult that deeply inspired symbolism and decadence. more...

Until the mid-I95Os and the advent of pop-art, kitsch objects mostly gave rise to a sense of revulsion both among eminent artists and the experienced public. Kitsch was considered to be a secondary phenomenon in relation to "good" art, a poor imitation of art or at best art reduced to the level of banality. In spite of the famous statement made by Clement Greenberg that cultural phenomena like kitsch and the avant-garde were separated by an insuperable abyss, we can easily find distinctive traces of a fascination with "degraded art" in several poems and theoretical texts by leading poetists. Studies show that Czech avant-garde poets were not just great lovers of film, circus, variety theatre and adventure books. In order to make their poetry into more accessible works which did not demand intellectual effort and which the readers would enjoy, they sometimes made use of expressive means normally ascribed to popular kitsch. Close ties between poetist works and the basic principles involved in the creation of kitsch are illustrated in this study of examples from the poetry of Jaroslav Seifert, Vitězslav Nezval, Adolf Hoffmeister and Konstantin Biebl. Selected verses, or rather the poetic images found in them, were divided into three separate categories within Abraham Moles's typology of kitch, i.e. religious kitsch, patriotic kitsch and exotic-erotic kitsch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...