Nezval's Amazing Magician
A Czech Shamanist Epic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4205330 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alfred French (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1973 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 358-369 |
| Publication date | 1973-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Slavic Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0037-6779 • E-ISSN: 2325-7784 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2495968 |
| OpenAlex | W2326503073 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
From the labyrinth of literary revaluations to which modern Czech literature has been subjected, the work of the gifted but unpredictable lyric poet Vítězslav Nezval (1900-1958) has emerged relatively unscathed. His literary career was a bewildering trail of shifting allegiances and paradoxical novelties -from Expressionist infantilism to elegant sophistication, from Dadaist anti-art to obsequious socialist realism: an anarchist in his youth, a surrealist in middle age, he ended as a laureate of the Czechoslovak Communist Establishment.At the age of twenty Nezval came to Prague for university studies. Always a loner, he led a solitary life in the big city. His early poems are full of nostalgia for his Moravian home and lost childhood, sometimes recalled with more than a touch of childish nightmare. Prague in the early twenties was a place of tumbling pedestals and mushrooming social manifestoes: the newly silenced guns and the freshly inaugurated state seemed to be an earnest of a new start, and the end of a world discredited
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Communism · Czech · EPIC · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Realism · Sophistication · History · Law · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
|---|