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[ excerpt ]
book view
also by the author:
Woman in the Plural
The Absolute Gravedigger
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
Edition 69
Antilyrik
events:
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a prague flâneur
by Vítězslav Nezval
translated from the Czech by Jed Slast
photographs by the author
Written between June 1937 and July 1938, A Prague Flâneur has a unique publication history. In the original version that made a brief appearance in bookshops,
Nezval discusses the Moscow Trials, his friendship and break with André Breton, the rift within the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia, Hitler's rise to power and
Nazi Germany, Lautréamont, capitalism, Trotsky, hearing Bukharin speak, and Surrealism in relation to the general political environment. The version that has
survived and is generally taken as the "first edition" has much of this largely expunged, the gaps filled at times with assorted poems and a variety of lyrical
meanderings through Prague neighborhoods that really do read like filler. Most, if not all, mentions of Surrealists or Surrealism, Freud and Breton, memories
of his visit to the Soviet Union are excised, often replaced with generic formulations about "poetry."
What might be the reason for doing this? Given that the book appeared in September 1938, once the Munich Agreement was signed at the end of that month,
which ceded the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich, it seems either the author or the publisher or both became apprehensive about anything Nazi officials
might take exception to, and the book was immediately pulled from booksellers and "revised" while keeping the same layout and page count (thus the need to
fill in where whole passages were expunged). Yet a few of these "ur-editions" survived and popped up decades later in used bookshops. The present translation
is based on this version. So rather than Nezval traipsing through the Troja district where the zoo is located and waxing nostalgic about the lions and bears
keeping watch over Prague, he explains, sometimes in cumbersome detail, how his views on events in Moscow diverge from Breton's and his fellow Czech Surrealists.
Yet most of the content remains the same : a particular restaurant suddenly transports Nezval back to his student years, he walks the streets and reminisces
about past loves, musing on the changing face of Prague and of all the cafés and pubs, many of which no longer exist, where he would meet with (erstwhile)
friends and discuss the issues facing artists. First and foremost, however, it is a real-time account of a city bracing for war, a lament that all that makes
her so enchanting to the author might be reduced to rubble.
Included are Nezval's original photographs and illustrations as they appeared in the first edition, an appendix that maps out the revisions
made and translations of the longer passages that were inserted as replacement, and notes to explain perhaps lesser-known places, people, and events.
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ISBN 9788088628002
212 pp., 135 x 195 mm
softcover with flaps
10 b/2 illus.
literature : surrealism
RRP: £13 • US$19
publication:
September 2024
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