Wolker and Nezval

ALFRED FRENCH

The year 1918, which marked the end of a political epoch in the Czech lands, was felt by the Czech writers themselves to be both an end and a beginning. If they expressed one common motif at the time, it was the conviction that this was, above all, the moment of tremendous change. To those who had personally been exposed to the hazards of war, or who had actively campaigned for the new state, the new era of peace and independence seemed like the promised and long-awaited exodus from the wilderness. A generation schooled to revere its past as the source of its strength linked the future with a tradition stretching back to the Hussites, for the new start was expected not only to denote the end of foreign domination, but also to introduce a new order of social justice, conceived in the image of medieval Tabor. At this historic turning-point, it was the continuity of past and future that was symbolised in the great fanfares which ceremoniously inaugurated the new state. The sense of crisis was present in the work of all the youngest writers, but the fanfares were singularly absent. To the elder generation, perhaps, the postwar settlement marked a revolution satisfactorily accomplished; to the younger generation, the revolution had hardly begun. Certainly, if the old guard expected to receive from their juniors respectful admira- tion or gratitude for a great work done, they were sadly disappointed. Disclaiming all responsibility for a past which they regarded as strange and repugnant, the younger writers drew a sharp line between the generations and swept into limbo some of the most cherished traditions of their elders. To the young, writers like V. Dyk and J. S. Machar were no longer the standard-bearers of literature, but merely curious survivals from a vanished past. Not continuity, but discontinuity was the keynote of the youngest writers' work. The angry young men of the early twenties were more interested in Moscow than in Tabor. It is always hard to bridge the gulf between those who have known war and those who have not. In the early twenties, a coolness seems to 984 Alfred French have sprung up between the generations, in many cases because of the long absence of fathers from homes to which they returned almost as strangers. In matters of art, the rift was all but complete. But it was not only the war which was to blame. Those who were young in the pre- ceding century had seen religious dogma assailed by science, and a rigid social hierarchy weakened by industrial development; but their faith in man and progress had remained as firm as ever. To the narrow circle of the initiated, Freud had exposed the ugliness of man in his individual aspect, and Marx had shattered the illusion of harmonious social progress; yet scepticism was slow to gather force, and it was war, illustrating the theoretical assaults of the sceptics, which caused the final avalanche. After the war, the older generation could salvage their be- liefs, seeking to build a new world in the image of the past, but the new generation, unencumbered with the beliefs of the old, sought a new creed and a new world. Those who still believed in reason and logic saw in scientific materialism a way to bring order out of chaos: im- pressed with the triumph of the Bolsheviks, they embraced Marxism; having lost faith in organised religion, they groped towards what they conceived as the mystical solidarity of the proletariat. Outstanding among the writers of this generation were the two young poets, Wolker and Nezval, who, between 1918 and 1924, wrote in the same atmos- phere, shared the same beliefs, and moved in the same society. Their social aims were similar, but their paths were different: the times had made them both revolutionaries, yet, as artists, they were in many respects at opposite poles, and their very divergence reveals how broad was the revolutionary platform of their time. It was the critic Bedrich Vaclavek who said that Wolker personified the entry of ethical persuasion into modern Czech literature; by this he meant that Wolker abandoned the autonomous position of art, and aimed at a literary form whose chief purpose was to change the social environment. This view of Wolker is supported by the majority of his poems, by his three plays, and by his theoretical essays. While he did not, of course, regard persuasion as the sole purpose of his writings, he evidently did regard them as a suitable weapon in the social struggle. Since he considered his political programme to be the ending of man's exploitation of man, and the liberation of the proletariat, the term applied to his school, that is, Proletarian Literature, was fitting. This type of literature, however, suffers from a disadvantage which can easily be fatal to its interest. It is ipso facto didactic, and a didactic work of art can succeed only if it is lit by a quality which transforms its aim in Wolker and Nezval 985 such a way as to catch the reader's imagination. In general, social verse becomes poetry when it can make a direct appeal to men's inner beliefs or instincts; when it can call to its aid cherished traditions, putting the present issue in the context of the past, and clothing it with poetic mystery. Like many successful tendentious writers, Wolker, in his poems, seems more the evangelist than the agitator. A realist in his view of the world, he, like Nezval and the young Hora, exploited mysticism in his art. The world of Wolker's poems is permeated by a harmony which is not of this earth. In that world, all nature, material things, men, the saints, and the angels, all operate in a close and mysterious correspond- ence: their common element is humanity; all is anthropomorphised. The stars come visiting the poet; the moon settles comfortably on his chair; at his request they go out to seek his sweetheart (Vzddlena mild). God will come to supper (Haj), as once before He came in the likeness of a beggar (Zebraci). The Virgin, whose picture hangs in his room, is the object of an erotic daydream: when he comes home from the hunt she will step down to comfort him (Hojl). On Saturday night, the drunks on their way home run into God: because they see everything threefold, they see Him in His triple function as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; in each form He meets them with a cheerful greeting (Ze soboty na nedeli). By a form of pictorial composition, objects are brought into relationship, not only with the poet, but also with each other. His window becomes a glass ship, anchored to the shore of his room; it will sail the seven seas, until at last the venturer returns rejoicing to his home (Okno). Death fits easily into the world, which is only a resting place on the way (Smrt): the world itself is only a road to heaven, and the poet is the star of Bethlehem (Poutnici). There are no dead in the cemetery; they live on in the trees that soar to heaven (Hrbitov and Kazani na hore). In the long poem, Svaty Kopecek, Wolker describes the village where he spent his holidays. The whole scene portrays a mystical harmony in which all is homely and familiar; its busy life reflects the continuity of the genera- tions and the life-giving rhythm of the seasons. Here the dead and the living link hands; a common feeling unites all the members of this idyllic community. The poet is the tongue of a bell that calls all humani- ty to carry together the burden of a happiness too heavy for the few. In Wolker's second book of verse (Tezka hodina), the leitmotif is the problem of human suffering. This is the flaw in his world, and since that world is totally interconnected, there can be no harmony until the flaw has been eradicated. In the Balada o nenarozenem diteti, poverty 986 Alfred French destroyes a human relationship. A child, begotten in the warmth of affection, dies in the cold atmosphere of the surgery, for the lovers are too poor to give it the chance to live; but in killing the unborn child, the girl destroys part of herself, and cuts herself off from her kind. The doctor's hands were pure carbolic his voice as cold as ice ... He stripped away her blouse and with his fingers drummed upon her breast a funeral march. Woman, do you hear, do you catch that voice, that burning at your breast? Now it cried a final cry. Now it died. Meantime the lover stood closely by the door, the threshold of the room. And yet his eyes betrayed his mind, and would not stay behind, but trailed convulsively behind her agony, behind the funeral train: on grating wheels the train goes by, amid the autumn wind . .. In the poem, Tvár za sklent, the hungry face pressed to the café window penetrates the glass and transforms the revellers within to corpses; Wolker is now the accuser. Since his world is interdependent, the happi- ness of one member is achieved only at the expense of another. The eyes of his lover encompass all the world; he sees a workman fall to his death from scaffolding, and accuses her of responsibility for allowing it to happen (Basen milostná). He sits in a café and sees in the face of a prostitute the image of his mistress, whose drowned face looks up to his from below the surface of a pool; she had killed herself for the happiness of himself and his lover (Setkání). To be happy oneself while others suffer has become an occasion for guilt: to extirpate the guilt, a sacrifice is necessary. In Balada o ¿nw,the dreamer sees the world decay- ing about him, in horrible contrast to his visions of a better world. To save the world the supreme sacrifice is demanded, that of the dream itself. The poem closes in an apocalyptic scene of revolt: it is the day of reckoning, when dreams perish. The poet hears the bugles calling relent- lessly; there is no escape (Cepobiti). But the arms men bear may destroy them; class hatred is itself a deadly poison to him who carries it (U roentgenu). In the tradition of 19th century humanism, Wolker was fired by the Wolker and Nezval 987 doctrine of the unity of mankind (and, at a further stage, the unity of all sentient creatures). In his world, the ultimate punishment was isolation from the human kind: this attitude appears very clearly in personal poems (Samota), and it is elaborated in parable form in the lyric-epic, Balada o ndmofnikovi (apparently inspired by Coleridge's Ancient Mariner). A sailor, by his unfaithfulness, causes the suicide of a "light" woman; on his return home he finds his own wife is herself unfaithful. In anger, he kills his watchdog for failing in his duty; the intricate pattern of his relationships is destroyed, and, bewildered by his sense of guilt, he voluntarily condemns himself to isolation from mankind by service in a lighthouse. The prodigal son expiates his guilt by this ulti- mate sacrifice, and is mystically reunited with his kind in the fellowship of God, who watches the sea by his side. The world of Wolker is dominated by the idea of harmony and equilibrium: he is a classic example of the Orpheus type of artist. The legend of Orpheus tells of his power to draw into the rhythm of his melody even the stones and the trees: the total participation of the audience symbolises the triumph of art in creating from life a mystical harmony of all sentient and insentient things; it is the re-creation of man- kind's dream of a lost paradise. The consciousness of mutual estrange- ment, the division of mankind by sin, the sacrifice and atonement, the redemption, and the vision of final reconciliation - all these mystical elements are present in the world of Wolker's art. One of its greatest attractions is the harmonious formulation of old ideas in a modern social context. It was because, in the atmosphere of his time, the social issue dominated all others that his humanism found expression above all in revolutionary themes. But the revolution he portrayed was much more than a reorganisation of society's legal and economic arrangements; it was rather a spiritual purge, a Calvary before the rebirth of social man. One recalls the messianic ode (Delnicka madona) of J. Hora, whose early work anticipates the spirit of Proletarian art. In this poem, the new saviour, born in the slums and unnoted by the three Kings, grows to lead his people through revolution to freedom. Wolker's vision of the promised land is actually rather vague - it is neither in nor of this world. But the social motif, for which he is so justly celebrated, is the more impressive by reason of its mythological setting, and his popularity (especially among the bourgeois class against whom his revolution was intended) was, no doubt, partly due to the fact that in his audience he re-awakened feelings, aspirations, and dreams that were part of a very old tradition. 988 Alfred French

In many ways, Nezval, in his early poems, seems the antithesis of Wolker. While the latter was pre-eminently the poet of collective feelings, Nezval was above all an individualist. Where Wolker cultivated faith, discipline, solidarity, Nezval was sceptical, anarchic, eccentric. If Wolker conceived of the poet as a leader or teacher of men, Nezval pictured him as a magician, an acrobat, even as a clown. Wolker's doctrine of harmony implied the need to conform to the pattern of nature and man; to Nezval, the artist was distinguished by his ability to defy the laws of nature. It is in the long lyric-epic poem, Podivuhodny kouzelnik, that Nezval revealed at greatest length his attitude to life and art. The poem is a bewildering orgy of visions and hallucinations: everything is in flux, and the time and the scene shift constantly between the world of reality and of imagination. Walking at night beside the river in Prague, the poet steps into a land of dreams; he sees before him a convent that typifies the dry asceticism of his people, unawakened and barren. There he is a witness to the mystery of a virgin birth, the magician who will transform the world. He moves restlessly from place to place, searching constantly for some missing element: below the crust of the world, the fountain of life seeks to force its way into the liberation of light and air. The magician struggles always to fulfill himself, to attain life in its fullest sense, and in order to do so, he passes through a series of metamorphoses in which childhood memories merge into visions from the world of wish- fulfillment. In a sequence of fantasy linked by free association, he explores the limits of imaginative experience, moving between places and dimensions, avoiding everything that would limit his sovereign personali- ty. In a style reminiscent of the cinema (of which Nezval was an ardent enthusiast), the scene switches from the sea-bed to the moon, from the barricades of the city to the enchanted world of the dream lover. Pictures loom up and flash by, as in a grotesque nightmare - behind a window, a cat haunting the magician's childhood dreams, a regiment of the dead, a bronze forest, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, Apollinaire and Picasso. Behind the bewildering scene moves the eternal fountain, sym- bol of movement, power and change, and the magician himself£ moulding the myriad crystals of matter into new, unheard-of forms of reality. The theme of the poet-liberator appears again in the poem Akrobat. The people of Europe await the coming of the tumbler, as though the salvation of humanity hung on his skill and art. Amid unbearable sus- pense they watch his steps along the wire: his faith cannot match the immensity of the task, and he falls to his death. The poem turns back to the acrobat's childhood, and the reader is conducted through the intricate Wolker and Nezval 989 world of his memories, fears, and impressions - the raw material of his future art. When the acrobat's legs are stiff with pride and fear, a child takes his hand and leads him surely to the city of miracles. It is a world of the mad and the blessed, teeming with aimless, poetic joys, from which he gains a revelation of his own nature and destiny, and from which he returns to the world of men. The magician and the acrobat owe their power to their ability to suspend the normal routine of nature; they are men set apart from others, unbound by ordinary conventions and taboos, not merely eccen- tric, but exploiting their eccentricity. There is something not quite human about them; they lack humility, and in the act of defying nature, the magician is guilty of a kind of hubris. In its gay charade, the circus is larger than life, but many of its audacious feats are mere tricks; behind its gaudy façade there is something essentially irresponsible which is part of its charm. To both Wolker and Nezval, the poet was a bringer of revolution and a destroyer of the old order. To the former, revolution was a painful necessity - there was no other way; his acceptance of it was the result of a spiritual crisis in which he steeled himself to collective responsibility. The necessary sacrifice may be stoically borne, as in Balada o ocich topicovych, or it may be cataclysmic, as in the play, Hrob: in any case, it is fatal. The sacrifice is justified only by the end; Wolker's view of revolution is eminently constructive. In contrast, revolution in Nezval's poetic world is an act of self-fulfillment. The magician, who seeks always to express his inner urge, finds in the act of revolt a liberation of the spirit. Amid waving banners and gay cockades, he cheers the crowds to the barricades; it is an exuberant outburst of fighting élan, a world gay with carnival. To Wolker, revolution was a means to an end; to Nezval, revolution was the end. "His revolution can have no aim outside itself ... a revolution like a wild gallop after a quarry which is an unrealisable mirage ... a Saturnalia of the spirit, a chaos from which rises a star, a pandemonium" (Salda). Wolker's poetic world, with its assumption of a mystical unity, and the symbolism which he employs are essentially religious, (in Rosa Luxemburg even the red star of Communism is born from the wounds of Jesus). In the world of Nezval, the atmosphere is pagan and elemen- tal: it reveals not order but chaos; its guiding principle is not reason but instinct; its setting is not the solid earth, but the borderland of the mind. Nezval's poetry is characterised by the feeling of intoxication, that is to say, by the desire to elude the limitations of the empirical world by liberating the world of the subconscious. In composition, his addiction to 990 Alfred French the methods of free association was an expression of his desire to avoid the restraints of logic, and to escape the limitations of natural dimensions. Poetry was for him a wild adventure of the spirit, the high wire of the tightrope-walker from which one false step means disaster. In its lack of restraint, its worship of life and energy, its restless search for the bizarre and the untamed, the art of Nezval is essentially dionysiac. Art can be termed dionysiac if it glorifies the elemental, exalts the instincts, and rejects the restraints of reason. Intoxication, either physical or mental, is important because it helps to release the imagination from the censorship of the conscious mind. Dionysiac art, which may also be termed romantic, is diametrically opposed to classical art in that it deliberately shuns the ideal qualities of the latter - harmony, proportion, restraint, tranquillity, and emotional equilibrium. Its tech- nique is hypnotic: its catharsis is the liberation of suppressed energy as in a dream or trance, and the release, for the artist and audience, of a neurosis. The following passage, which is taken from the epic Edison, illus- trates these qualities in the work of the young Nezval:

One evening in October of that year sunk deep in sombre thought you paced along within the Menlo Park laboratory your little gifts and letters all around and as your fingers absently revolved the little mill in dreaming reverie from threads of carbon suddenly they shaped the bird whose eyes watch with us through the night the scourge that drives away the monstrous shades the glowing vision of the dreaming walks the angel set above the gable end the roses circling restaurants, cafés the fountains sparkling down dark boulevards the rosary above the river bridge the halo of the ladies of the night the garlands draped above the funnelled ships the tears that stream from high aloft to ground above the muffling city catafalque above the mummified cathedral shapes above the flitting souls in café smoke above the eternal ice of mirrored wine above the catafalque of city mists above my spirit's torn discordant strings on which I play and beg for lights for dreams for love - and weeping change the masks Wolker and Nezval 991

with passion of a minstrel old a prince the ruler of Balmoral's frenzied town through whose fair gate in dreams I pace along between the sombre ranks of captive serfs of murdered princes, raging dancing bands of madness driving on beribboned wheels of bells that toll sadistic passion's knell of hovering chimeras through the dark a drinker-in of charm and bloody foam a drinker-in of grinding viciousness through life and death in pain and loneliness.

The feeling of hypnosis and intoxication is very striking in Nezval's poems; and in his surrealist work of the early thirties it became both a leitmotif and a method of composition. He himself at one stage regarded his poetry as a form of spiritual alcohol, and sought inspiration from the example of those whose world was least bounded by logical restraint and conventional morality - magicians and illusionists, children, neurotics, and lunatics. "Only when one succeeds in breaking through all inner ties with morals and preconceived values, which picture for us an image of the human spirit in uniform, only when one escapes from the con- ventions of logical thought, can one reach the psyche. And love, because it is instinctive, helps us to break down these categories, in the same way as opium, alcohol, beauty, terror, and movement." 1 In their attitude to art, Wolker and Nezval may be considered anti- thetical types. As Wolker was essentially collective in his sympathies, Nezval was individualistic: the eccentricity which Wolker regarded with suspicion was cultivated by Nezval: in form, Wolker was a traditionalist, whereas Nezval was constantly an innovator. To Wolker, the supreme punishment was isolation from the group: to Nezval, this was the natural milieu of the artist, who is normally at tension with society. Wolker sought to immerse himself in the real world, using his poetic gifts to serve it: Nezval regarded the empirical world with irony, reserving his enthu- siasm for the world of the subconscious. Nezval gaily rejected the logic which to Wolker was basic: where Wolker was serious, Nezval was frivolous: where Wolker cultivated self-discipline, Nezval flirted with anarchy. Wolker's approach to art was classical in its emphasis on restraint, harmony, and proportion - a view which subordinates the part to the whole, and holds that man attains power and grace by obeying, not subverting, the natural law. Nezval, on the other hand, was a true romantic, cultivating the exotic and the bizarre, the monstrous and the 1 V. Nezval, writing in Literarni noviny, 16/1/1931. 992 Alfred French absurd: even these became poetry in the alchemy of his art. The qualities of balance and tranquillity were not strangers to Nezval, but he preferred to achieve his effect by their violation: if he accepted any normative principle, it was a need for the constant deformation of the conventional. ("The norm is the breaking of the norm.") Though a revolutionary in politics, Wolker, in his work, reveals a fundamental respect for tradition. To Nezval, the dynamic element in art, as in society, is decay; for the new can rise only by the death of the old. The foregoing remarks, which are not, of course, intended to give a full portrait of the two writers, may suffice to indicate how diverse was their response to a given situation: their social climate was the same, but the difference lay in themselves and in their conception of literature. When Wolker put forward the platform of Proletarian art during a discussion evening in 1922, it was Nezval who rose at challenge it. The nature of the opposition between the two concepts became clearer in subsequent debates: on the one hand, an art socially committed, collec- tive in feeling, and immediately comprehensible to the masses; on the other, an art unrestricted by service to politics, highly individualistic, and appealing in the first instance to the more limited audience of the initiated. Althoug the avantgardists agreed that the artist himself should be socially committed, they refused to concede the autonomy of art, or regard it primarily as a weapon in the cause of political revolution; their own aim was, in fact, to revolutionise art, and through art, life. The two conceptions competed for a while in friendly rivalry; but in 1923, illness removed Wolker from the arena, and his departure was decisive for the triumph of the avantgardists. Within a year, the theoreti- cian Teige was attacking Proletarian (and Soviet Proletkult) literature as romantic and sentimental, and the cult of Wolker was itself under fire. The latter's tragic death was fatal to the Proletarian cause in art, and the avantgardists continued their triumphant and iconoclastic progress under the revolutionary banners of Poetism, later of Surrealism. For fifteen years they led the way in Czech literature - rash, naive, extravagant, in much that they did; but brilliant, even in their imperfections.