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Nezval's Amazing Magician: A Czech Shamanist Epic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Alfred French
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Extract

From the labyrinth of literary revaluations to which modern Czech literature has been subjected, the work of the gifted but unpredictable lyric poet Vítězslav Nezval (1900-1958) has emerged relatively unscathed. His literary career was a bewildering trail of shifting allegiances and paradoxical novelties —from Expressionist infantilism to elegant sophistication, from Dadaist anti-art to obsequious socialist realism: an anarchist in his youth, a surrealist in middle age, he ended as a laureate of the Czechoslovak Communist Establishment.

At the age of twenty Nezval came to Prague for university studies. Always a loner, he led a solitary life in the big city. His early poems are full of nostalgia for his Moravian home and lost childhood, sometimes recalled with more than a touch of childish nightmare. Prague in the early twenties was a place of tumbling pedestals and mushrooming social manifestoes: the newly silenced guns and the freshly inaugurated state seemed to be an earnest of a new start, and the end of a world discredited.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 1973 , pp. 358 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1973

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References

1. Several monographs have appeared on Nezval's work, for example, Fedor, Soldan, O Nezvalovi a poválečné generaci (Prague, 1933)Google Scholar, and Jelínek, Antoniín, Vitězslav Nezval (Prague, 1961)Google Scholar, Svoboda, Jiří provides an intimate portrait of the poet in his Přitel Vitzslav Nezval (Prague, 1966)Google Scholar. There is also a bibliography edited by Blahynka, Milan and Nečas, Jaroslav, Vitězslav Nezval (Prague, 1960)Google Scholar. Perhaps the best selection of Nezval’s poetry is Vitězslav Nezval : Podivuhodný kouzelnik, edited by the poet Milan Kundera (Prague, 1963). Of the many books concerned with the literature of the period, perhaps the best single study is Franti šek Xaver Šalda’s O nejmladši poesii české (Prague, 1928), now most readily available in Šalda’s Studie z české literatury (Prague, 1961), to which reference is subsequently made in this article.

2. Nezval’s first book of verse was Most (Prague, 1922). His earliest poems were written at the age of sixteen.

3. For the literary atmosphere of Prague in the early twenties see Šalda, F. X., Krásná literatura česká v prvnim desetileti republiky (Prague, 1930)Google Scholar; Chvatik, Květoslav, Bedřich Václavek a vývoj marxistick é estetiky (Prague, 1962)Google Scholar; Kalista, Zden ěk, “Počátky české literarni avantgardy,” Annali dell'Istituto Universitario Orientate (Naples, 1965)Google Scholar; Götz, František, Anarchie v nejmladši česke poesii (Brno, 1922)Google Scholar; Čapek, Jan B., Zářeni ducha a slova (Prague, 1948), pp. 449–59 Google Scholar; and Alfred, French, The Poets of Prague (Oxford, 1969).Google Scholar

4. Chvatik, Bedřich Václavek, pp. 42-71; Matěj Piša, Antonin, Proletářská poesie (Prague, 1936)Google Scholar; Neumann, Stanislav Kostka, O uměni (Prague, 1958)Google Scholar. In English there is a lighthearted article by Karel Čapek on Proletarian art in In Praise of Newspapers (London, 1951), pp. 123-32. The most successful poetry collections in the style are by Josef, Hora, Pracující den (Prague, 1920)Google Scholar, and Wolker, Ji ří, Tězká hodina (Prague, 1922).Google Scholar

5. For the work of Wolker see Nezval, Vítězslav, Wolker (Prague, 1925)Google Scholar, reprinted in Nezval’s collected works (Dilo XXIV, Prague, 1967, pp. 17-33); Kalista, Zdeněk, Kamarád Wolker (Prague, 1933)Google Scholar; Kratochvíl, Ladislav, Wolker a Nezval (Prague, 1936)Google Scholar; Blahynka, Milan and Čutka, Jiří, Nezval a Wolker (Prague, 1964)Google Scholar; Přemysl Blažiček in Česká literatura, 11 (1963) : 449-72; Alfred, French, “Wolker and Nezval,” in Miloslav Rechcigl, Jr., ed., Czechoslovakia Past and Present, 2 vols. (The Hague and Paris, 1968), 2 : 983-92.Google Scholar

6. Details of Nezval’s early life in Prague and his contacts with the literary radicals appear in his memoirs, Z mého života (Prague, 1959), pp. 88-121. See also Kalista, Zden ěk, Tváře ve stinu (Prague, 1969), pp. 195–216.Google Scholar

7. The paper was subsequently published in the volume Revoluční sborník Devětsil [Revolutionary Volume Devětsil] (Prague, 1922). Devětsil was the name of the group. The paper, which was later attributed to the theoretician Teige, was reprinted in the collection Karel Teige : Vybor s dila I (Prague, 1966), pp. 33-63. For a discussion of the movement see the essay “Nové uměni,” by Vratislav Effenberger, in the same volume (pp. 575-619).

8. For a picture of Prague’s popular culture at the time see Pírková-Jakobson, Svatava, “Prague and the Purple Sage,” Harvard Slavic Studies, 3 (1957) : 247–87.Google Scholar

9. “The cinema is the true encyclopedia of modern art, a universal spectacle and universal lesson. In the cinema we enjoy ourselves and are happy. It is the Bethlehem from which issues the salvation of modern art” (Karel Teige, “Uměni dnes a zítra,” in Revolučni sbornik Devětsil).

10. The best single book on the Poetist movement is the collection Poetisnius, ed. Květoslav Chvatík and Zdeněk Pe šat (Prague, 1967), with an extensive bibliography.

11. Nezval, Z m ého života, pp. 88-90. Nezval recalled his discussions with Teige on their walks through Prague in the essay “Kapka inkoustu,” which is reprinted in Nezval's collected works (Dilo XXIV, pp. 173-84). Nezval used the same passage in his review of Teige’s book Film (1925.

12. See Milan Blahynka, “Proměny Podivuhodněho kouzelnika,” Nový život, 1959, no. 1, pp. 60-66.

13. See the comment by Šalda : “ … an intensely colorful revolution formed from a wealth of vital instincts that spill over every form, that can have no end outside itself : a revolution like a wild chase after a quarry that is an impossible, unrealizable mirage. If anywhere in Czech poetry revolution is depicted as a saturnalia of the spirit, as chaos from which rises a star, it is here” ( O nejmladší poesíí české, p. 172).

14. For common thematic features of European epics see C. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London, 1952; reprint, New York, 1966). For a study of the traps which seek to ensnare the returning hero see Agathe, Thornton, People and Themes in Homer’s Odyssey (London, 1970), pp. 16–37 Google Scholar, and Jack, Lindsay, The Clashing Rocks : A Study of Early Greek Religion and Culture and the Origins of Drama (London, 1965)Google Scholar.

15. Nezval, Z mého žívota, pp. 96-97. See also his introduction to the second edition of Most (Prague, 1937), whose poems illustrate his ideas of recalled fantasy; Nezval’s Chtěla okrást Lorda Blamingtona (Prague, 1930; reprinted in Dilo XXIV) is a fascinating revelation of the poet’s subconscious world. For a discussion of his creative method see French, A, “The Czech Lyric Poet V. Nezval,” Melbourne Slavonic Studies, 2 (1968) : 21–38.Google Scholar

16. See, for example, his poem “Poetika” in Menší růžzová zahrada (Prague, 1926); Šalda, O nejmladší poesíí české, p. 176.

17. See M., Hector and Chadwick, Nora Kershaw, The Growth of Literature, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1932-40), 3 : 702–3.Google Scholar

18. Mircea, Eliade, Shamanism : Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Trask, Willard R. (London and New York, 1964), p. 259.Google Scholar