The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture

4. Between Paris and Moscow: Sexuality and Politics in Interwar Czech Poetry and Film

4 Between Paris and Moscow Sexuality and Politics in Interwar Czech Poetry and Film According to standard accounts of modern Czech culture, the devastation caused by World War I (1914–18) brought an end to the Decadent depoliticization of literature. Literature now became a vehicle of protest and satire aimed against the conservative forces that had brought the conflict into being in the first place. In France Henri Barbusse , in Germany Erich Maria Remarque, and in England Siegfried Sassoon directed their moral fury at those leaders and members of the European establishment who allowed the devastation to take place; and poets like Wilfried Owen and Georg Trakl eulogized the loss of a whole generation. The interwar generation of European writers and artists was deeply scarred by the spiritual and biological consequences of this massive loss of human life and was forced to confront the nightmarish question: could the human race destroy itself and cease to exist entirely? This fear had far-reaching implications for the male imaginary of modernism . The crisis of masculinity is characteristic of much modernist literature between the wars. Well-known examples are Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Fritz Lang’s Weimar film Metropolis (1926), and Franz Kafka’s story “Brief an den Vater” (Letter to the Father, 1919). After 1918 there was a notable shift to the Left by Czech politicians and writers. In part this was a reaction to the futility of the Great War and the utopian desire to forge a new, fairer society on the ruins of the 104 old Habsburg empire. The frustration of the younger generation with the failure of the new republic to cure all social ills also led many members of the intelligentsia to seek solutions to social ills such as poverty and unemployment in radical, left-wing politics modeled on the example of Soviet Russia. The creation of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1921 was mirrored in the cultural sphere by the formation of new literary movements like the Brno Literary Group and the Prague-based Artistic Union Dev®tsil.1 Dev®tsil was founded in Prague on 5 October 1920. It was the product of a number of student writers at the Café Union in Prague. Their first venture had been the journal Orfeus, for which they cooperated with more established writers such as Josef Hora and Karel¢apek. After only three issues, the journal was discontinued and the young writers decided to branch out on their own. The Literary Group was tepid in its political views, but the Dev®tsil group was convinced that communism should determine the nature of Czechoslovak society. It drew its inspiration principally from writers such as Vladimir Mayakovsky , Demyan Bedny, and Anatoly Lunacharsky in Soviet Russia and from the Dadaist movement in the West. Its main theorist was Karel Teige (1900–51). Both the Literary Group and Dev®tsil made a conscious break with the prewar trends in Czech poetry and art. Writers rejected the creed of the art for art’s sake movement as exemplified by the cosmopolitanist Otakar Theer and the political program of the right-wing nationalist Viktor Dyk. Like many of their contemporaries in Germany, France, and Russia, they began to espouse a politically engaged view of art. The principal representative of this new Proletarian Poets movement was the middle-class Moravian JiÆí Wolker (1900–24). After his premature death from tuberculosis in 1924, however, the movement lost momentum and fellow Proletarian Poets soon turned away from the narrow tendentiousness of their previous verse to embrace the exhilaration of poetism founded by Karel Teige and Vít®zslav Nezval in 1924.2 If Wolker was the quintessential Proletarian Poet, Nezval was the bard of poetism, with its consciously hedonistic cultivation of modern pleasures such as film, radio, and jazz. Rejecting the tendentiousness of Wolker ’s Proletarian poetry, poetism was to emulate the intoxicating spirit of everyday life for its own sake, as exemplified by Nezval’s long poem “The Wondrous Magician” (1922). Later Nezval was to turn to surrealism , inspired by the French surrealist movement. Yet all three phases of the avant-garde were relatively brief and ultimately yielded to the dominance of socialist realism by the later 1930s. Between Paris and Moscow 105 • It would seem that the interwar development in Czech culture was characterized by a conscious break with prewar subjectivism and individualism in favor of engaged left-wing politics. That...