체코 시 연구 II

A Study on Czech Poetry (2) : With Special Reference to Proletarian Poems

The unique tendency of Czech proletarian poetry reached to highest point during the early 1920s. Czech proletarian poets tried to use literature as an instrument for fighting against the separation of art from life which was a mode of modernism in Germany and France. The oldest generation of proletarian poets, Josef Hora had a genuine talent for combining romantic and tragic motifs in his poem 'Who is it Singing that Song'. But in a later book Working Day he emphasized the social motif. Hora was a poet of unending tensions, the background of the book is the urban working class. Seifert, however, differed from the would-be Proletarian poets. He was the son of a working-class father and grew up in the industrial urban area of Prague. In his first book, A City in Tears he portrays the urban proletariat with surety and without sentimentality. Through the poem 'The Crowd Speaks' he feels himself as one of the masses and he uses the cry 'We are the Crowd' in solemn repetition. The theme is the titanic strength of the marching masses at whose bidding even the sun itself would be extinguished if they spat into its face. In 1920 the Devětsil Arts Group was among the most energetic, radical and talented of the activist youth groups in Prague. The group officially launched its public life with a Manifest in a Prague newspaper on December 6th of 1920. They emphasized the idea of working in groups which could achieve much more than working alone. The initial 14 members are Zdeněk Kalista, Jiři Wolker, Josef Hora, Jaroslav Seifert, Antonín Matěj Píša, Svata Kadlec, S. K. Neumann, Jindřich Hořejší, Karel Teige and others, Nezval joined later on. They were avantgarde communists and devoted themselves to revolution in art, life, and politics. Later in 1922 some of them including Wolker, Kalista and Moravian critic F. Gotz founded a new journal Host, which was taken from that of Wolker's first book of poems. Wolker was one of most radical, energetic and talented Czech proletarian poets. He soon resigned from the Host and devoted himself to Devětsil. At any rate he rapidly became the spokesman for the Devětsil on artistic problems. He declared that Proletarian art must be aggressive, non-humanistic, and dogmatic, that social faith and inner truth was of utmost importance. His book The Difficult Hour was to become the classical example and the swansong of Proletarian literature. In the poem 'Ballad of the Stoker's Eyes' which proclaims the immorality of creative work, Wolker combines the theme of transubstantiation with that of sacrifice. A worker's sacrifice gives others happiness. Its motif is taken from biblical theme. The Difficult Hour marked the peak of Czech Proletarian literature, however the movement itself was near its end. With this end a complete new trend began appearing, which was the most powerful creative and original writing in Czech modern poetry that swallowed the former trend. It was Czech Poetism.