For decades in the Czech cultural consciousness, we keep hearing the legend of how the surrealist and prodigious magician Vítězslav Nezval (1900–1958) had a bad falling out with his friends in the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia (and even with André Breton, the “father of surrealism”), leaving the ranks of the free-thinking avant-garde and declaring himself a Stalinist in the spring of 1938. While the reasons and the dramatic course of the rift between Nezval and the rest of the Czechoslovak surrealists are partially known (see Nezval, Řeč ke studentstvu o roztržce se surrealistickou skupinou/Speech to Students About the Rift with the Surrealist Group and Karel Teige, Surrealismus proti proudu/Surrealism Against the Current), they can in no way however be ironically reduced to a dispute between “hard Stalinism” (Nezval) and “free Trotskyism” (Teige, Breton). Even from the “reality and dream as dialectic opposites” position of surrealistic orthodoxy which Nezval opposed, Nezval’s break with the group has still not completely been made clear.
Eighty-eight years after the poet’s turnabout, the story about a “rift between freedom and Stalinism” has been complicated by the new discovery of unknown, kept secret verses from Nezval’s Pražský chodec (1938; English edition A Prague Pedestrian, 2024). These were “written by Nezval from June 1937 to the end of June 1938, i.e. in the time of growing threats to the Czech nation and simultaneously to revolutionary events and activities in his own life. The first (kept secret) version of A Prague Pedestrian was apparently printed in September 1938, but was either not distributed, or fell victim to post-Munich Agreement censorship. Nezval, evidently in a verbal agreement with the publisher, replaced words, sentences, paragraphs, and entire pages which were suddenly unpublishable in record time with a new, fully-fledged text. The second printing (presented as the first edition) was finished in time for the Christmas 1938 book market, entering history as the first.” – Milan Blahynka
The exhibition in Rub Gallery goes hand-in-hand with the book publication of the unknown version of A Prague Pedestrian which was prepared for Rub Editions by Milan Blahynka, the editor of Nezval’s works. In it, Blahynka restores the first version of the book and reconstructs the circumstances of its genesis and disappearance. The exhibition will not only present “both editions” of A Prague Pedestrian, but also avantgarde books by André Breton, Nezval, and Karel Teige from Nezval’s own library in the collection of the Memorial of National Literature in Prague and from Blahynka’s archives, as well as Nezval’s lesser known photography of Prague ash heaps and dirty city street corners, plus post-surrealist paintings by Nezval from the 1940s. What is more, it will exhibit for the first time ever in public the wartime “astrological” portrait of Vítězslav Nezval by Jaroslav Dobrovolný of the wider circle of the surrealist Skupina Ra group.
We will “exhibit”, as the central document, the twelfth chapter from the “lost book” with working title “Revision of several principal thoughts, for which surrealism has one or another explanation”. In it, Nezval was able to “shake off the assumption that the activity of the surrealists was an expression of their pure psychological automatism”. In “resolving the reality-dream question”, he calls out his dear and great friend for inattention: “If, as André Breton avers, surrealistic poetry in the full sense of the word is undirected, how can he say at the same time that surrealistic or undirected and undirectable poetry can become a means for revolutionary activity…?”
But Nezval goes even further: “we cannot (…) unilaterally emphasise the role of psychic automatism, (…) if we do not moreover consider how decisive a role the taste of surrealists plays in its creation; for whom its particular kind of expression, the surrealistic poem and the surrealistic text, these supposed waking dreams, are quite close, both in their origin as well as their structure, to dreams.” Nezval here is passionate for his surrealism, for the “great dialectic synthesis between good in the service of life and the tamed evil of the dream, between the boons gained from the poet’s conscious attitude and those gained from the incalculable possibilities of oneirism [daydreaming].” He is also opposed to “surrealistic stereotypes”, and his argumentation is capped by Karel Teige’s ostentatious “excommunication” of Nezval from surrealism due to his rhymed verses, his poem on the death of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (first president of Czechoslovakia), and other offenses. With this, he joined the ranks of the Belgian Surrealists associated with the magazine *Correspondance* (Paul Nougé, Marcel Lecomte, René Magritte), who, several years before him, had been the first to challenge Breton’s dogma from a similar standpoint.
Nevertheless, Nezval did commit a tragic mistake when, blinded by fear of the impending German cannons, “from every wound that could be inflicted on this city”, he believed in Stalin’s smile and in 1938 wrote that “the hour has already passed for poets to sing about joy over rivers of blood. Perhaps its most terrible pool, which is flowing right before our eyes, will definitively convince the poets of revolution, the poets of hope for a more righteous tomorrow, that it will be necessary to bury the world of sophisms and over their bleeding shadows hail the rosy cloud of goodness which shines in the small building of the great Kremlin.” True to his principle of understanding YES and NO as one word, at the same time he did not hesitate in Absolutní hrobař (1937; English edition The Absolute Gravedigger, 2016) to refer to Stalin as an Asiatic, bloody figure.
Today we could only ask a “butterfly cocooned in a crystal ball” how Czech surrealism would have developed, had the Munich conference been delayed by but a few weeks and the book published in its “original version”. Whether Nezval’s “corrections, which he (…) tried hurriedly to draft, corrections with clear principles of surrealism” would have transformed the development of wartime and post-war surrealism. And perhaps the most interesting question: how would André Breton himself have reacted to this manifesto “of a great new realism, paved by surrealism” had he received the French translation in green ink by the poet’s own hand?
—David Voda
ACCOMPANYING PROGRAM
A meeting with editor Milan Blahynka / author reading from the book “A Prague Pedestrian” / discussion on surrealism and its origins
May 15, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM, Olomouc Museum Night
Photogallery by Petr Palarčík
