체코 시 연구 (1): Poetismus를 중심으로

Study on Czech Poetry (1)

Czech Poetism is a unique literary avant-garde movement during the Golden age of Czech literature between the two wars. Poetism is not itself art, but a style of living, an attitude, and a form of behaviour. It is favourable to the growth of art which is playful, unheroic, unphilosophical, mischievous, and fantastic. It flourishes in an atmosphere of gaiety and fun, and aims to draw the attention of its audience from the gloom of the factory and the home to the bright lights of man-made amusement. According to the Karel Teige's manifesto, ‘Poetism seeks to turn life into a magnificent entertainment, an eccentric carnival, a harlequinade of feeling and imagination, an intoxicating film track, a marvellous kaleidoscope. Its muses are kindly, gentle, and smiling, its glances are as fascinating and inscrutable as the glance of lovers.’ The poetists' preoccupation with the man-made world and the life of imagination always led them back to the theme of conflict - the antithesis between life as it is and life as it might be. Among poetists Vitěslav Nezval(1900-1958) is the most energetic. Originally he began his career in the 1920s as a proletarian poet, with Seifert and Teige, and Wolker, but reacted against doctrinaire rhetoric and propaganda infavour of what he called ‘Poetismus’. He then came under the influence of French dadaism and surrealism. He defended his deliberate exploitation of bizarre and illogical juxtapositions of imagination with an argument that language had to be dislocated into meaning. In 1922 Nezval had published his first book of verse, ‘The Bridge’. The title was suggested by Nezval's vision of Prague by night. The river which runs through the city is crossed by series of bridges, and to the poet looking over the moving water, each appeared as a flaming rosary connecting two pools of darkness, a symbol of human life in transit between two unknowns. In the same year he also published the poem ‘The Amazing Magician’, an epic of fantasy on an ambitious scale. This long, and at first sight chaotic poem gained much of its effect from the constant juxtaposition of the familiar and the unreal, set in a world uninhibited by convention or logical association. Nezval explained his methods in an essay included in his new book Pantomime. The essay rejected logic as a basis for poetry, whose themes could more properly be connected by associated sounds than by sense. In 1927 Nezval published the poem ‘The Acrobat’. It was a return to the theme of the poet-liberator, as in the earlier ‘The Amazing Magician'. In 1928 appeared the epic poem ‘Edison’. The theme once more is the liberation of mankind, but now the liberator is no longer the magician but the scientist. It is an epic in a new setting, an elaborate hymn to the technical miracles of the electric age. In 1929 appeared the beautiful poem ‘The Unknown Girl taken from the Seine’. Having taken all the world as his literary province, Nezval finds his theme in the body of a drowned girl drifting down the river in Paris. In 'The Unknown Girl' Nezval expresses, with very great delicacy, the fascination of the death-theme, combining the macabre with the erotic in a wealth of metaphors and images reminiscent of Freudian free play. In 1932 Nezval published two important collections of verse, The Glass Cape and Five Fingers. Both books contain many charming lyrics which show Nezval as a master of personal poetry. From 1933 he made trips abroad to Vienna, Paris, Milan, Venice, Provence, Marseilles and Monte Carlo. In Paris he met for the first time leaders of the French Surrealist Movement, a meeting which considerably affected his poetic development. After his return to Prague, and following a visit by Paul Eluard and Andr Breton, Nezval openly embraced the cause of Surrealism in poetry and art, and soon became the leader of a group of enthusiasts which included some associates from his earlier Poetist phase.