Vítězslav Nezval: Prague Pedestrian (the unknown, kept secret version)

In Czech cultural consciousness, a recurring myth persists about how the surrealist Vítězslav Nezval, having fallen out with his friends from the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia, left the ranks of the free-thinking avant-garde in the spring of 1938 and embraced Stalinism. Eighty-eight years after the poet’s salto, the story of the clash between freedom and Stalinism is complicated by the publication of a well-hidden, previously unknown version of Nezval’s Prague Pedestrian. This literary discovery by Milan Blahynka, a leading Czech editor of Nezval’s work and a doyen of Czech literary studies and Czech philology, is a sensation. The first (well-hidden) edition of Prague Pedestrian was apparently published in September 1938, only to be withdrawn from distribution entirely after the establishment of the Second Republic, as it would otherwise have fallen victim to post-Munich censorship. Nezval then, in record time, replaced words, sentences, paragraphs, and entire pages—unpublishable under the new circumstances—with new, yet fully-fledged text. The second edition (presented as the first) still made it to the Christmas book market of 1938 and thus went down in history as the only one. Nezval’s “lost” Prague Pedestrian is a grand, captivating declaration of love for Prague in many forms, from the glittering Vinohrady to the garbage dumps in the suburbs, for Lily Hodáčová, Jiří Wolker, and André Breton; it is also a political pamphlet, a great surrealist poem-en-prose, a polemic with the core of surrealism; a wandering book written through the associative method of deliberately aimless strolls. En même temps, it is a story of fervent socialism and tragic error, for, blinded by fear of the looming German guns—”of every blow that might be dealt to this city”—Nezval put his faith in Stalin’s smile. Years later, the loose trilogy Invisible Moscow, Gît-le-Coeur Street, and Prague Pedestrian finally makes sense. A discovery significant also from the perspective of understanding international Surrealism, which he might have influenced had the Munich conference been delayed by just a few weeks. A manifesto of “great new realism, prepared by Surrealism.”