Vítězslav Nezval

The article looks at a number of significant features of the film theory and criticism of the poet and representative of Czech interwar avant-garde Vítězslav Nezval. Nezval tends to be somewhat marginalized as an author of texts on cinema in comparison with Karel Teige but, considering these features and frameworks, he represents a quite unique, albeit somewhat elusive, phenomenon in the history of Czech film theory. First of all, an unexpected and significant turn of thought in his interpretation of the phenomenon of cinema occurred within just one year. The turn was (a) rhetorical. In contrast to his earlier abstracting and theorizing approach, he later adopted an approach considerably critical, instructive and more focused on specific filmmaking practice. The turn was also related to (b) values. He proposed a concept of photogénie in 1925 which was focused on the abstract and visual qualities of cinema and employed the subject matter and story as devices in order to make the work more approachable to a wider, less aesthetically sensitive, audience. Nezval reversed the ratio, however, in 1926 and made the subject matter and quality of story construction the main driving force. Second, The article has attempted to support the claim that Nezval’s film theory has affinities, during both these phases, with certain aspects of the theoretical thinking of both Russian literary formalists and Czech literary structuralists. This may have been caused by the shared influence of constructivism through Karel Teige, through encounters with Roman Jakobson, or simply because of a tendency towards practical thinking about (film) art. This practical thinking was also related to an interest in discovering the logic of the inner mechanisms of work and its production.

Mit einem Nachwort zu Surrealismus und Poetismus, zur weiteren literaturhistorischen Einordnung (E.A. Poe, M.G. Lewis, Schauerroman, Longos), zu autobiographischen Aspekten (Vergleich mit Nezvals Prosa Sexuální nocturno / Sexuelles Nocturno) sowie zur Textkritik. Enthält eine Bibliographie bisheriger Übersetzungen und des Werks von Vítězslav Nezval.

This project analyzes the relationship between Czech avant-garde intellectuals and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCS) from the early 1920s through the 1950s.  The goal is to demonstrate how the avant-garde, associated with international artistic movements such as Constructivism and Surrealism, played a central role articulating the values and goals of communism.  Beginning with the interwar era of the Czechoslovak democratic republic and continuing through the establishment of Stalinist rule after 1948, my research demonstrates how the avant-garde fostered a sustained bond with communist functionaries through political cooperation and intellectual cross-fertilization.  From a broader perspective this allows us to understand communism in Czechoslovakia as an organic phenomenon with roots in the interwar First Republic, as opposed to an alien ideology imposed from outside.  The boundaries between Party functionaries and their intellectual “fellow travelers” were fluid and porous.  The Czech avant-garde—including a range of influential writers, actors and artists—helped build communism much as a later generation of intellectuals tore it down in 1989.

Through its analysis of intellectuals and their contributions to the development of communism, my work focuses on the various ideas and organizations that shaped avant-garde understanding of socialist aesthetics and role of art in politics.  Such a focus, heretofore lacking in political studies of the CPCS, allow us to understand the popularity of the communist movement, and how intellectuals helped legitimize the communist regime after 1948.  Although Czechoslovakia offered a vibrant climate for leftist politics, thanks to strong traditions of democratic rule, advanced industrial development, and influential workers’ movements, the popularity of the CPCS and its seizure of power did not rely on such factors alone.  Intellectuals performed a crucial task by promulgating the ideological discourses of the communist worldview.  By focusing on these intellectual contributions my work offers a major reinterpretation of avant-garde, positing an analytical framework that elucidates its many contributions to communist aesthetics and after 1948 to socialist realism.  In other words the distinction between “good” avant-garde art and “bad” socialist realist art is both anachronistic and misleading, occluding how both movements interacted and overlapped.

"The lesson of the machine. Cases of the poetry of the Czech avant-garde"
This book constitutes a proposal for a new reading of the most important trends in Czech avant-garde poetry from the years 1913-1926 via the prism of the struggle of individual poets against the achievements of civilisation. By virtue of the topics discussed, the book fits in with studies from the borderland between historical poetics and the sociology of literature, which is currently called research on modernity. But at the same time, it also introduces whole new contexts external to the artistic, primarily historical (the political aspect of the reception of Futurism) and the philosophical (among others the views of La Mettrie, Heidegger and Simmel). The focus of the analysis carried out in the book is the poetic legacy of the pre-war avant-garde (the poetry of S.K. Neumann and J. of Wojkowicz), the oeuvres of Czech proponents of proletarian art (incl. J. Wolker, J. Hora, J. Hořejší, A.M. Píša), and the early works of the poetists from the Devětsil avant-garde group (poems of J. Seifert, V. Nezval, K. Biebl, A. Hoffmeister). The immediate effect of the analysis is not only the presentation of relevant topics and themes in Czech avant-garde poetry, but also the documentation of formal transformations of avant-garde poetry induced by rapid development in techniques in the first decades of the 20th century. As a comparative background, the book uses poems by the Polish Futurist school and excerpts from the works of the Kraków Avant-garde.

Rozkosze czeskiej awangardy. O fuzjach literatury, sztuki i fi lozofi i na przykładach z twórczości Jindřicha Štyrskiego, Toyen, Vítězslava Nezvala i Františka Drtikola Wybuch pierwszej wojny światowej i lata jej trwania stanowią cezurę między belle époque i charakterystyczną dla niej podwójną moralnością mieszczańską a okresem tzw. wielkiej awangardy, która wniosła do kultury i sztuki nowy rodzaj estetyki, oparty w dużej mierze na cielesności, erotyce i wszystkim tym, co wcze-śniej znajdowało się w sferze tabu. Jak zauważa Reinhold Dörrzapf, "w pierwszym momencie kulminacyjnym industrializacji i technicyzacji życia wszystko uległo zmianie, także w dziedzinie stosunków między przedstawicielami obojga płci" 1. Później jednak okazało się, że "cały wiek XX to na przemian testowanie i odrzu-canie tego wszystkiego, co już kiedyś istniało" 2. Ówczesne debaty teoretyczne wskazują na istotne zmiany w postrzeganiu i opi-sywaniu ciała, cielesności i erotyki. W centrum zainteresowania znalazł się człowiek i jego sfera biologiczna, przede wszystkim zaś sfera seksualna. Wpływ na to miał m.in. rozwój nauki i wiedzy o człowieku, także o jego sferze psychicznej i psycho-logicznej, którą badano nowo odkrytym narzędziem, jakim była psychoanaliza. W parze z nią szła freudowska teoria libido, do której odwoływali się np. surrealiści. W nadchodzącej fali francuskiego surrealizmu czeska awangarda szukała nowych możli-wości połączenia twórczości, życia i społeczeństwa. Nurt ten radykalnie erotyzował cielesność człowieka; jego wolność, jako istoty zrywającej ze wszelkimi społecznymi konwencjami, była współzależna od wolności seksualnej 3. 1 R. Dörrzapf, Eros, małżeństwo, lucyper w pludrach. Dzieje obyczajowości seksualnej, przeł. M. Dutkiewicz, Gdynia 1997, s. 291. 2 Ibidem, s. 295. 3 L. Heczková, Tělo, tělesnost, antropologické konstanty, [w:] Heslář české avantgardy, red.

Das Kurzepos "Mai" von Karel Hynek Mácha (1810–1836) ist nicht nur eines der berührendsten Werke der Romantik, es diente auch wegen seines avantgardistischen Bilderreichtums den tschechischen Surrealisten als Vorbild und stellt bis heute ein Fundament der tschechischen Dichtung dar.
Das Nachwort der tschechisch-deutschen Ausgabe widmet sich u.a. den Hintergründen der Entstehung, der Rezeption, der Metrik und der Technik der Übersetzung. Bisherige Übersetzungen ins Deutsche werden besprochen, Vergleichsgedichte des Symbolismus und Poetismus/Surrealismus werden angeführt. Der Anhang enthält eine ausführliche Bibliographie aller bisherigen Übersetzungen des Werks, zusammengestellt von Ondřej Cikán und Stanislav Rubáš.

Il lavoro analizza la traduzione di una breve poesia del boemo Vítězslav Nezval ad opera del boemista Alessandro Catalano. Della traduzione vengono messe in evidenza non solo le molte scelte lessicali errate ma soprattutto le ripetute incomprensioni nella costruzione delle immagini, procedimento chiave nella poesia nezvaliana, in quei primi anni '20 all'ombra del Poetismo.

Prezentowany zbiór szkiców dotyczy wtajemniczeń, inicjacji i poniekąd związanej z nimi mistyki. Autorka nie ogranicza tematu do tradycyjnego rozumienia tychże pojęć, a więc do inicjacji powiązanych z dojrzewaniem, wtajemniczeń w reguły stowarzyszeń tajemnych i mistyki, którą często wiąże się z chrześcijaństwem. Za główny cel stawia sobie wskazanie całego wachlarza kontekstów i odniesień, jakie niosą ze sobą te kategorie psychologiczno-kulturowe.

Il lavoro ricostruisce la presenza di due figure "contigue" nell'immaginario dell'avanguardia ceca degli anni '20-'30, incarnazione dell'idea stessa di "poesia", come teorizzata da Karel Teige nel manifesto del Poetismo del 1924: l'esploratore polare Roald Amundsen e Charlie Chaplin. Di quest'ultimo in particolare viene ricostruito il percorso che, dalla prima scoperta in ambito franco-tedesco (Cendrars e Léger, Ivan Goll, Aragon…) e attraverso la cassa di risonanza di Erenburg (Eppur si muove!, 1922), lo porterà a diventare figura privilegiata anche nell'avanguardia sovietica (Majakovskij, Rodčenko e Stepanova…). L'analisi termatica indaga soprattutto il ritorno dei due personaggi nei versi e nei cinescenari di figure importanti dell'avanguardismo ceco quali il teorico K. Teige, i poeti V. Nezval, K. Biebl, F. Halas e J. Seifert e il prosatore V. Vančura, come anche negli spazi della grafica del libro, all'epoca determinanti nella costruzione di tale immaginario.

Číst Nezvalovy básně pro mne znamená být vždy a znovu překvapován a fascinován. Právě jejich mimořádným smyslem pro tajemství a konkrétnost, která jako by věděla o hmotném životě věcí víc než texty ostatních básníků. [....] Nezval dokázal postihnout ambivalenci erotické touhy, onu vzrušenou náladu, kdy poznání druhé bytosti působí horečku, ale zároveň má i rychlý poločas rozpadu.  Hmotná předmětnost světa, erotická ambivalence a zosobněné tajemství-tato triáda je vlastní i poemě Diabolo, která dosud stála spíše mimo pozornost vykladačů.

Although “Bezúčelná procházka” is only 8 Minutes long, it is rather complex. In this article I examine it from three different perspectives. Firstly I analyze it as a film about a city, thereby locating “Bezúčelná procházka” in the context of other city films before 1930, namely the “city symphonies”. Secondly, I discuss the complex construction of point of view in this film, connected to direction and movement. Finally, I examine the motif of the doppelgänger.
This article is structured as follows: the first three sections locate the film in the context of the historical avant-garde and in sections 4-12 I present a close viewing of the film as it proceeds, analyzing the aforementioned questions of film genre, camera, and editing techniques and offering an interpretation of the film with reference to literary and film history. All of these questions are directly related to the emergence of representations of Prague in film that were informed by city portraits of the avant-garde. We will see that, as a visual study of Prague in the year 1930, “Bezúčelná procházka” not only creates something unprecedented in Czech cinema, but is also able to reflect and transcend international avant-garde poetics. I argue that the film is able to achieve this by doing justice to the profound cultural topography of “Old Prague”  by ignoring it on the visible surface, but letting its dark legends ferment the “aimless walk” through the barren landscape of the city’s (post-) industrial outskirts."
https://www.bohemia-online.de/index.php/bohemia/article/view/3749/5641