SURREALITIES

hypothesis for discussion C that members of the avant-garde circles sought to overcome the forces of traditionalism and nationalism by cultivating both an internationalist social milieu and a new discourse using an elemental visual vocabulary they hoped could transcend national boundaries, an endeavor perhaps analogous to the aspirations of the Prague linguistic circle to derive a universal language ^[1]

I C juxtapositions

Accompanied by his wife Jacqueline, the poet Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, and the Czech painter Josef Šíma, André Breton arrived in Prague on March 27, 1935.  More than seven hundred people turned out two nights later to hear him lecture at the Mánes Gallery on AThe Surrealist Situation of the Object.@  Breton began by taking stock of his surroundings C

By the very fact that [Prague] carefully incubates all the delights of the past for the imagination, he went on, it seems to me that it would be less difficult for me to make myself understood in this corner of the world than any other. ^[2]

Breton gave a second lecture, to the Left Front, on April 1, entitled AThe Political Position of Today=s Art.@  He gloomily reported from Paris, where the communist L=Humanité Amade a specialty out of translating Mayakovsky=s poems into doggerel@ even as Athe royalist journal L=Action française is pleased to report that Picasso is the greatest living painter@ and Awith the patronage of Mussolini primitives, classic painters and surrealists were soon going to occupy the Grand Palais simultaneously in a huge exhibition of Italian art.@  

Such improbable conjunctures, as Breton clearly regarded them, presented avant-garde writers and artists with an uneasy dilemma C 

The lecture was warmly reviewed in the communist press by Záviš Kalandra, who applauded the surrealists for Anot having tried to degrade their poetic activity by bringing it down to the level of doggerel, whose value to the good of the revolution would surely be quite illusory.@ ^[4]

On his return to Paris Breton immediately wrote Vít�zslav Nezval, the Czech surrealist poet who had organized his visit.  It was more than just a formal letter of thanks.  AOften, in the mornings, before we met up for lunch,@ Breton recalled, AI would look out of the window of the room at the rain as beautiful as the sun over Prague and I would enjoy this very rare certainty that I would take away from this city and from you all one of the most beautiful memories of my life.@ ^[5]

Some years earlier, Prague=s same Alegendary charms@ had equally captivated Breton's compatriot Guillaume Apollinaire, the inventor of the term Asur-réalisme.@  Again it was the delights of the past that so seduced.  In AZone,@ the opening poem of his collection Alcools (1913) C a foundation stone in the canon of international literary modernism C Apollinaire juxtaposes two places, two times, alternating poles for a continent. 

One is a vigorous, bustling Paris, where all is movement and modernity C

The other is a soft-focus, languorous Prague, conjured up from a memory of a brief visit to the city in March 1902.  Here, time=s very trajectory alters C

II C modernities

Tourists, especially those of a poetic inclination, may be misled.  The quaint clock to which Apollinaire referred adorns the Jewish Town Hall in what was once the Prague ghetto. The district is known as Josefov after Emperor Joseph II, who in 1782 Aemancipated@ the Jews, meaning to turn them into good Austrians.  The old clock was fortunate to survive into the twentieth century.   The Jewish Town Hall was one of a handful of  buildings that escaped the modernizing clutches of  the asanace launched by Prague City Council in 1894, a Aslum-clearance@ scheme rivaling Baron Haussmann=s ambitions for Paris.  Hundreds of other structures, often of no lesser antiquity but deemed to be less Ahistoric,@ were reduced to rubble.

The roots of the Czech neologism asanace, just like the English words sanitation and sanity and the French cordon sanitaire, lie in the Latin sanitas. 

By the time World War I broke out much of Josefov and parts of neighboring Staré m�sto C Prague=s Old Town C had been demolished.   In their place arose a bourgeois quarter of high-priced art nouveau apartments.  Paris [PaÍíñská] Avenue, as it was tellingly renamed in 1926, punched its elegant way clean through what had been a labyrinth of narrow medieval streets from the Old Town Square to the new Svatopluk „ech Bridge across the Vltava.  Franz Kafka, whose parents moved to PaÍíñská in 1907, jokingly baptized it ASuicide Lane.@ ^[7]

After the war, in November 1920, seven years after AZone@ was published in Paris, the Jewish Town Hall had to be put under the protection of the United States Embassy to safeguard it from rioting Czechs.  They targeted German and Jewish people and properties without discrimination C visible reminders of what were now seen, in the aftermath of a national independence few had foreseen, as three hundred years of foreign oppression. 

Sitting, in all probability, in his parents= apartment in the Oppelt House on the corner of PaÍíñská Avenue and the Old Town Square, Franz Kafka wrote his Czech lover Milena Jesenská, who was living at the time with her Jewish husband Ernst Pollak in Vienna C 

The Mánes Gallery at which Breton gave his first lecture opened in 1930.  It sits on Slav Island C as the little sliver of land in the Vltava opposite the National Theater had been rechristened in 1925, in memory of the Slav Congress held there in 1848, the year General Windischgratz brought an earlier generation of Czech rioters to heel by shelling Staré m�sto from the ramparts of Hrad…any.   Prior to its renaming the island had long been known as ðofín, after Austrian Emperor Franz-Joseph's mother Archduchess Sophia. 

The gallery encompasses the tower and onion dome of a water mill dating from 1489.  But its architect Otakar Novotný had surrounded this relic of Amagic Prague@ with a white glass and concrete housing that was uncompromising in its modernist purity, making it a showpiece of what Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson three years before had dubbed The International Style.  The visual disruption was not unlike that occasioned six decades later by Frank Gehry's Dancing House, known as AFred and Ginger@ after the way its two asymmetric towers lean amorously into one another a mile or so upstream on Jirásek Square.

The asanace was in full swing when Apollinaire visited Prague in 1902.  Had he been less transfixed by metaphorical clocks, he might have taken away a more contemporary image of the ancient city in the shape of a picture postcard.  It carried a photograph of buildings in various stages of demolition, silhouetted against the gothic twin towers of the Týn Cathedral on the Old Town Square.  Produced by the firm of Karel Bellmann, the card bore the jaunty legend AGreetings from Prague!@ 

As for André Breton, seeing, from a distance, its Atowers that bristle like no others@ C a Prague in which, never having been there, he was already quite at home C and long ago intoxicated by Apollinare's alcohols C the father of surrealism was just as blind to the (sur)realities all around him.  The modernity of the landscape he was surveying is no more belied by Prague=s bristling towers than is Paris=s by the conjuncture of the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame.

III C temporalities

A little further along the riverbank stands, to this day, an empty housing for a figure that was unceremoniously transplanted to the lapidarium of the National Museum shortly after Czechoslovakia became an independent state in 1918, Austrian Emperor Francis I.  The embankment, the oldest in Prague, which used once to be named for Francis too, shortly afterwards became Masarykovo nábÍeñí in honor of the new state=s Apresident-liberator@ Tomáš Masaryk. 

A competition was held in 1926 for a memorial to the Anational composer@ BedÍich Smetana to fill in the space left vacant by the departed Habsburg.  The winning project was by the architect Pavel Janák, the painter František Kysela, and the sculptor Otto Gutfreund.  Janák and Gutfreund had both been leading lights of the prewar avant-garde Skupina výtvarných um�lcç, founded in 1911.  Janák went on to design Prague's celebrated functionalist villa colony overlooking the city at Baba (1928-33) and eventually succeeded Joñe Ple…nik as official architect to Prague Castle. 

Gutfreund was one of the earliest cubist sculptors anywhere in the world.  After the war he turned to civic realism.  Working in brightly-painted clay and plaster, he took many of his subjects from the pulsating repertoire of the modern city.  His 1925 sketches for the decorations for Janák=s so-called Arondocubist@ Riunione Adriatica building, entitled AModern Life,@ include plaster reliefs of a coffee house, an office, a bar, dance C a modern-dress couple, not the traditional gossamer-clad muse C and, as befits the roaring twenties, jazz.

The plans for the Smetana memorial, however, played on different imageries.  According to Gutfreund's submission to the jury, it was to be surrounded by a Amonumental wall@ which would visually replicate the movements of Smetana's symphonic poem AMy Country@ C  Vyšehrad, Vltava, From Bohemia's Woods and Fields, Šárka, Tábor, Blaník C  patriotic motifs all, soaked in the sentimental pathos of the nineteenth century.  Unorthodox in its style C as we would expect of this artist  C  the monument itself would be made up of ten free-standing groups, representing, in Gutfreund=s own words again, Athe voices of the land, to which Smetana listened.@ ^[9]   Gutfreund=s title for the monument was AThe Genius of Music Revives the Nation.@  The sculptor drowned while swimming in the Vltava the following year, and the Smetana memorial was never built.

By no means was this Gutfreund's only essay in nation-building.  Most famous is his memorial C squat, lumpish, self-consciously primitive, and damned at the time by the poet Otakar BÍezina as Avulgar, foreign, ugly, un-Czech, un-Slav@ ^[10] C to Boñena N�mcová=s Babi…ka, which stands in the lush meadows of Babi…ka=s Valley in RatiboÍice near „eská Skalice in north-east Bohemia.  Babi…ka [Granny, 1853], subtitled APictures from Country Life,@ is the most beloved, and iconic, of all Czech literary works.  The valley takes its name from the novel, not the other way around. 

Josef „apek C elder brother of the writer Karel, who gave the twentieth century the word and image robot C and Václav Špála were also members of the Skupina.  Later they were founders of the Tvrdošíjní, or Obstinates, who threw down the prewar modernist gauntlet again with their 1918 exhibition AAnd yet ...@   The title quotes the words Galileo supposedly muttered under his breath following his enforced recantation of heliocentrism in 1632: Aeppur si muove,@ Aand yet it moves.@  It was Josef „apek who provided the linocut illustrations for the first Czech translation, by his brother Karel, of Apollinaire=s AZone,@ which appeared in the communist poet S. K. Neumann=s magazine „erven C  a major vehicle for Tvrdošíjní graphics C in June 1919.

Both „apek and Špála drew many of their subjects in the 1920s, however, from Czech country life, employing a visual vocabulary of modernist simplification to contemporize and amplify a message of eternal bucolic simplicity C villages, the geometric patterns of fields, the harvest, dogs and cats, rain on cottage roofs, women peeling potatoes, children flying kites C a message of timeless Czechness.

Stylistics apart, this message would not have been ill-received at the Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition in Prague in 1895, which drew over two million visitors to Stromovka Park to marvel at simulations of a passing world that was busily being reconstituted as a Anational tradition.@  These painters= visual abstractions differ in technique, rather than in spirit, from the Exhibition=s earlier transubstantiation of villagers= Sunday best into a Anational costume.@  Nor, after the next war, would such visualizations altogether displease Czech communists.   They had their own fondness for folkish simplicities, representative of that grandest of modern abstractions C Athe people.@   Despite the regime=s often pathological antipathy to artistic modernism of all stripes, the work of „apek and Špála generally enjoyed official favor.

Recourse to Aelemental visual vocabularies@ does not C  necessarily C  imply  Atranscendence of national boundaries@ or hostility to Athe forces of traditionalism and nationalism,@ in inter-war Central Europe or anywhere else.  Consider this manifesto, entitled AAgainst Xenomania,@ published by futurist guru F. T. Marinetti in the Italian Gazetta del Popolo on 24 September 1931 and subsequently reproduced in his Futurist Cookbook C

Like most other European avant-garde currents, futurism flowed through Prague too.  Marinetti=s open avowal of fascism did not prevent his play AThe Captives@ from being staged at the avant-garde Liberated Theater in April 1929.  The stage-sets were by JindÍich Štyrský, who was to be a founder of the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group a few years later.

While contemplating conjunctures of sewing machines and umbrellas, we might finally pause to register the exhibition with which Veletrñní palác C the home, since 1994, of the Czech National Gallery=s modern art collection C opened its doors on 28 October 1928, marking the tenth anniversary of Czechoslovak independence.

OldÍich Tyl and Josef Fuchs= vast, factory-like Veletrñní palác C the name means Trade Fair Palace C epitomizes the functionalist esthetic.  From the outside the building is flat and angular, the planar surface of its curtain walls broken only by horizontal ribbons of windows.  Within lay a cavernous large exhibition hall, a seven-story atrium, a cinema, restaurants, cafes.  Veletrñní=s original intention was not to display modern art but to showcase the products of modern industry.  The architects= sketches called for neon advertisements to blaze and blare across the palace=s front. 

Le Corbusier, who visited Prague in October 1928, had his quarrels with Veletrñní.  But he still judged it to be Aan extraordinarily significant building,@ a realized enterprise that was consonant with his own imaginings.  It taught him C  there is a shadow of envy here C Ahow I must create large buildings, I, who so far have built only some averagely small houses on miserly budgets.@ ^[12]

Incongruously C for the standpoints, at least, from which histories of the modern are normally written C this cathedral of modernism was inaugurated with the first public showing of Alfons Mucha=s completed ASlav Epic,@ a cycle of twenty gargantuan historical canvases narrating the Czech national odyssey as part of a millennial Slavic apotheosis. ^[13]   The AEpic@ has routinely been judged by critics then and since as a throwback to the nineteenth century, a work academic in conception and anachronistic in style. 

Anticipating the upcoming show, Nová Praha reported that: Athe monumental hall of Veletrñní Palace will be transformed into a splendid cathedral of the Slav spirit, love, and ardor, in which the individual pictures will be like symbolic stations in the historical pilgrimage of Slavdom toward the final victory of the Slavic race.@ ^[14]

Didn=t it move?!

By one of those bizarre coincidences in which surrealists delight, during World War Two, when the Czech lands were occupied by the Wehrmacht, it was at Veletrñní Palace that Prague=s Jews were assembled by the neighboring Herrenvolk and the transports took them to Terezín, a fortress town named by Emperor Joseph II for his mother Empress Maria Theresa, now a way-station en route to Auschwitz and Treblinka.

IV C geographies

There were other vantage-points C other interweavings, other insinuations.   There were even attempts to cultivate Aan internationalist social milieu@ and Ato derive a universal language,@ albeit a language that remained strikingly European in the ways it enfolded the rest of the world. 

The Dev�tsil group, founded in Prague=s Café Union on 5 October 1920 by younger and angrier men, born around the year 1900, bluntly proclaimed the past dead C

Marinetti himself visited Prague in December the next year, directing a theatrical production of his AFuturist Syntheses,@ and giving a reading for Dev�tsil members at the apartment of their leading theoretician Karel Teige.  Teige and the poet Jaroslav Seifert spent the following summer in Paris, where they met Le Corbusier, Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, and other avant-garde figures.  On their return they published what was in effect a manifesto, the Revolutionary Miscellany Dev�tsil.   The Miscellany contained, among other contributions, poetry by Seifert, JiÍí Wolker, and Vít�zslav Nezval (his AThe Wonderful Magician@), fiction by Karel Schulz and Vladislav Van…ura, and essays on modern Russian art, proletarian theater, and C by Karel Teige C AThe New Proletarian Art.@ 

That same year Teige also edited, with the architect Jaromír Krejcar C who was later to become Milena Jesenská=s second husband C another famous Dev�tsil anthology, Life II, subtitled AA Collection of New Beauty.@   Much later, after a disillusioning sojourn in the USSR, Krejcar designed the much-acclaimed functionalist Czechoslovak pavilion at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris C the same exhibition at which Albert Speer=s German pavilion and Boris Iofan=s USSR pavilion stared each other down in monumental pomposity across the mall that led onward to the Eiffel Tower. 

The Revolutionary Miscellany carried a design by Krejcar for a large market hall framed by two skyscraper blocks.   Intended for Prague=s working-class district of ðiñkov, Seifert=s birthplace, it bore the title AMade in America.@

Side by side with this transatlantic gesture, the Miscellany also oriented itself to the New World to the east.  It provided a resume in Russian C not a language then much spoken in Bohemia.  The resume began with a spatio-temporal cartography, a map of modernity, of its own C

The cover for Jaroslav Seifert=s Sheer Love (1923), designed by Otakar Mrkvi…ka, montages these modernities C discordant and cacophonous, to latter-day eyes.  An ocean liner and an airplane traverse the sky over the National Museum on Prague=s Wenceslas Square, which has been freshly furnished with skyscrapers, the tallest of them topped by a five-pointed red star. 

The book, its afterword explains, Ahas no traditions besides its own.@   In Seifert=s poems Athere is romanticism of this great century.  In his poems lives Kladno, lives New York C lives Paris, lives Ji…ín, Prague, the entire world.@ ^[17]

How were this great century, that entire world, envisioned?  Romanticized?  With no doubt deliberate irony,  the best-known poem in Sheer Love, AAll the Beauties of the World,@ takes its title from a comic aria in the most Anational@ of all BedÍich Smetana=s operas, AThe Bartered Bride.@ 

The twenty-two-year-old Seifert throws down a gauntlet to art, of a kind common enough during those years from Paris to Petrograd C

The sea C open horizons C is a recurring motif in the avant-garde art of this landlocked country in the 1920s.  It flows through Dev�tsil=s so-called Apictorial poems.@   Karel Teige=s AGreetings from a Journey@ splices together a nautical flag, a Mediterranean town, a map, a pair of binoculars, and an envelope addressed to AMonsieur J. Seifert, PragueCðiñkov@; his ADeparture for Cythera@ C which he described as Aa moment in a lyric film@ C sequences an ocean liner, a yacht, staircases, a crane, the American Line logo, and the words AAu revoir!@ and ABon vent@ in constructivist space.  JindÍich Štyrský=s ASouvenir,@ a picture poem shaped just like a picture postcard, superimposes palm trees, a moon fish, a sea anemone, sailing ships, and a quintet of bathing beauties on a map of the Gulf of Genoa.  A girl poses in a swimsuit, too, in the forefront of Antonín Heythum=s AUnderground.@  This collages the distinctive London UndergrounD typography of the title  C an acknowledged classic of modernist design C with a street map of the City of London, a medley of English, French, and Dutch train tickets, and a penny stamp for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. ^[19]

Another poem in Sheer Love, entitled AA Black Man,@ draws on this same yearning imagery to lament Seifert=s own imprisonment in the parochial heart of Europe.  It is, in every sense, a Central European vision C

It is not in Prague that magic is to be found.  AWhy, why did fate mete out to us to live our life/ in the streets of this town on the fiftieth parallel line?@ Seifert complains.   Prague is pedestrian, mundane, a place where Alife never derails in its trace,@ where Aall emotion must wither before it even inflames.@ ^[21]  

Still, he remembers,

Paris, Acenter of art and science, focus of contemporary culture, cradle of modern architecture,@ as it was described in an advertisement in Dev�tsil=s magazine ReD for a tour guide to that city published by JindÍich Štyrský and his fellow-painter Toyen (Marie „ermínová) in 1927. ^[23]   The two Artificialists (as they were styling their then-abstract art) conduct us around AMusical Paris,@ AFashionable Paris,@ ALiterary Paris,@ and C inevitably C AArtistic Paris.@ They helpfully list the addresses of artists= ateliers. ^[24]

Štyrský and Toyen dwelt in the west on the Seine from 1925 to 1928, networking, exhibiting C Philippe Soupault, André Breton=s collaborator on Magnetic Fields, wrote the introduction to the catalog for their second Parisian show C drinking in all the beauties of the world C

If Seifert cannot have Africa C or, like his hero in AThe Sailor,@ possess Afive sweethearts,@ taste tears dropping Aonto bosoms that are red, black, yellow, brown, white@ ^[26] C why then AParis is at least one step closer to heavenly spheres.@ ^[27]

A couple of months before André Breton=s visit to Prague in 1935, the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group staged their first exhibition in the same Mánes Gallery.  On display were the paintings, sculptures, montages, and photographs of Štyrský, Toyen, and Vincenc Makovský.   Here our erstwhile guides to Paris à la mode, Artificialists no longer, are transmuted into something altogether more weighty, historic, even. 

Karel Teige wrote the preface to the exhibition catalog.  He begins by sternly reminding us that

SURREALISM IS NOT AN ARTISTIC SCHOOL

To surrealists, art, painting, poetry, and theatrical creation and performance, he goes on to explain, are not the aim, but a tool and a means, one of the ways that can lead to liberation of the human spirit and human life itself, on condition that it identifies itself with the direction of the revolutionary movement of history ... The philosophy and world view of surrealism are dialectical materialism ... And if the surrealists pronounce the word REVOLUTION, they understand by it exactly the same thing as the followers of that social movement which is founded upon the dialectical materialist world view. ^[28]

Three years earlier, Štyrský, Toyen, and Makovský had been among the Czech artists exhibited, alongside Arp, Dalí, Ernst, De Chirico, Miró, and Tanguy, at the APoesie 1932" show held at the Mánes Gallery.  It was the largest surrealist exhibition yet to have taken place anywhere in the world outside of France itself.  Sutured into the displays of this self-proclaimed avant-garde C cannibalized, one might say C  were a group of what were described in the catalog as Anegro sculptures.@ ^[29]

These wanderings have taken us a long way from Babi…ka=s Valley.  Yet we have never once left Central Europe, any more than did Dev�tsil=s picture-postcards, just complicated its location C its place not on the geographers= maps, but where it matters, in the landscapes of the mind. 

Teige and Seifert also traveled further afield, though not to palm-fringed beaches on which black women loll.  They followed up their Parisian summer of 1922 with a visit, as part of a delegation of the Society for Economic and Cultural Relations with the New Russia, to the homeland of the proletariat and cradle of the New World in 1925.  Seifert was transported  B 

V C derangements

Fifteen years after his 1935 visit to Prague, in a Europe that had meantime been exploded to the clouds and was busily rearranging its global spaces and times into a surrealist landscape of First, Second, and Third Worlds, André Breton found it much more difficult to make himself understood in this corner of the world than he had ever imagined.  His concern C an urgent one C was with the fate of Záviš Kalandra, the communist journalist who had written so appreciatively in Halo-Noviny about his and Eluard=s activities in 1935.

Kalandra joined the Communist Party in 1923, at the age of twenty-one.  Along with wartime martyr Julius Fu…ík and future Minister of Information Václav Kopecký, he became one of the militant young newspapermen known as the Karlín Boys.  He left C or was kicked out of C the party in 1936, and founded a left opposition journal called The Proletarian.  He could not stomach the Moscow trials.  Nor could Karel Teige, who was to equate the Nazis= infamous Adegenerate art@ exhibition and Soviet denunciations of Amonstrous formalism@ when he introduced another Štyrský and Toyen show two years later at Topi…=s Salon. ^[31]  

Then and there this conjuncture was much less thinkable than the beauty of a chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.  Vít�zslav Nezval responded by Adissolving@ the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group with the comment: AIf Karel Teige was able ... to chuck Moscow and Berlin into one basket, this testifies not only to a moral, but also C and above all C to an intellectual mistake.@ ^[32]   Breton tried to reconcile Teige and Nezval, in vain.

In the same year as he parted ways with the party, Kalandra contributed to the Czechoslovak surrealists= iconoclastic homage to the nineteenth-century Czech romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha, Neither the swan nor the Moon, which was edited by Nezval and illustrated by Štyrský and Toyen. ^[33]   He spent the war in German concentration camps.  Arrested for Trotskyism in 1949, he was piggy-backed onto the trial of national socialist parliamentary deputy Milada Horáková, the umbrella to her sewing machine.

One of Bohemia=s more notable contributions to the theater of the absurd, the Horáková trial became an international cause célèbre.  André Breton signed a telegram to the Czechoslovak government pleading for clemency, together with Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Max Ernst, and other prominent French leftist intellectuals.  He also published a more personal  AOpen Letter to Paul Eluard,@ who had recently been a guest of the Czechoslovak government C

Eluard=s olympian reply is infamous:  AI already have too much on my hands with the innocent who proclaim their innocence to worry about the guilty who proclaim their guilt.@ ^[35]   

Záviš Kalandra was hanged for treason and espionage in Pankrác Prison in Prague in June 1950. 

Two years later, the circus was in town again.  Prague hosted the still more spectacular show trial of former communist party general secretary Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other former high-ranking party and state officials.  Ten of the accused, the official indictment took care to point out, were Aof Jewish origin.@ ^[36]  

One of those executed was Vladimír (Vlado) Clementis, who succeeded the defenestrated Jan Masaryk, son of Tomáš, as Czechoslovakia=s foreign minister.  Clementis=s airbrushing out of photographs of party leader Klement Gottwald=s address from the Kinský Palace balcony in the Old Town Square in AVictorious February@ 1948 is notorious.  It provides the opening scene of Milan Kundera=s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, setting the stage for the much-quoted line AThe struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.@ ^[37]

Behind the balcony from which Gottwald harangued the masses is what used to be Franz Kafka=s gymnasium classroom C and below it, what was once his father Herman=s notions store.  Now the notions store has become the Franz Kafka bookstore, a haunt much visited by tourists.

André Breton=s other traveling companion to Prague in 1935 was the Czech painter Josef Šíma.  Šíma spent most of his adult life in Paris, where he settled permanently in 1921.  He was a long-distance member of Dev�tsil who exhibited regularly in Prague, as well as a founder of the French group Le Grand Jeu.  Though he was never a card-carrying surrealist, his paintings depict landscapes of the mind as surely as do Miró=s or Tanguy=s or De Chirico=s.   Šíma is, perhaps,  more lyrical.  His objects C a female torso, an egg, a cube C drift in a world of soft colors, often verging on but seldom quite resolving into pure abstraction. ^[38]

I set foot in Veletrñní Palace, which had been closed for twenty years after a devastating fire in 1974, for the first time in 1997.  It was nice to see so many works of twentieth-century Czech art, which I was familiar with from reproductions, presented as an orderly sequence of avant-gardes in an appropriately modernistic setting. ^[39]    But what struck me most, and stayed with me afterwards C disassembling this self-contained tale of artistic progress C was not a painting or a sculpture.  It was a found object, one might say, since I most certainly was not looking for it.

The picture, called AThe Sun of Other Worlds,@ was painted by Josef Šíma in 1936 C the year after he returned from his trip to Prague with Eluard and Breton, the same year Kalandra wrote his essay for Neither the swan nor the Moon.  The National Gallery purchased it in 1975.  It is a typical Šíma dreamscape C perhaps it is darker in its hues than many.  Or maybe that is just my imagination, as susceptible to Prague=s necromancy, its seductions that people cannot withstand, as Breton=s or Apollinaire=s.

What made this into a jarring objet trouvé was not the picture itself but the words that the artist had carved into the frame C ATo Vlado Clementis from his Šíma, 1948.@

VI C memories

When he came to introduce a monograph on Toyen, who had now permanently exiled herself in Paris, in 1953, André Breton struck a more wistful, elegiac note.  It is, he says, an era AWhen the sun, watched in anxious silence by myriad entreating eyes, plunges deeper into the water despairing as a cry ...@ 

Though it still entrances him, Prague is no longer a point de capiton with which he can anchor an entire continent of the poetic imagination.  He speaks now of Athe repression already weighing on Prague, the enchanted capital of Europe.@ ^[40]  

But he is not able to rethink its situation C the complexities, the ironies, the multiplicities of its modernities C in a story that is as much his own as Záviš Kalandra=s.  Where Maldoror would have been a useful guide, Breton=s instinct for unexpected juxtapositions and chance encounters for once deserts him.  

A faint but unmistakable aura of pure kitsch settles over the city on the fiftieth parallel, forever basking, like Seifert=s black women on their African beach, in the imagined delights of Europe=s ageless past.   The old images take on a new poignancy as they recede into nostalgia C

 Notes