The Word of Fear and the Fear of World In Czech Surrealism of 1930’s and 1940’s (trans. Hanna Marciniak) Cover Image

Świat strachu i strach przed światem w czeskim surrealizmie lat czterdziestych (przeł. Hanna Marciniak)
The Word of Fear and the Fear of World In Czech Surrealism of 1930’s and 1940’s (trans. Hanna Marciniak)

Author(s): Josef Vojvodík
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: Czech poetry; Surrealism; Anthropology; Body; Fear

Summary/Abstract: This essay is dedicated to specific aspects of literary and plastic art of anthropology of Czech surrealism. The time between the wars as “thirty years lasting war of the twentieth century” (H.-G. Gadamer), was at the same time an “Age of anxiety” (W. H. Auden), an époque of a deeply affected trust of the world. The experience of the consecutive rakishness of the known world, of its lost balance and its changing into a space hostile to human beings, is gaining its most concise expression in living the fear of world and its surrealistic outline of a world of fear. In this foreground arrive for the anthropology of Czech surrealism specific forms of destruction of the human body to a fragment, bizarre hybrid, an artificial fact or at the other sense to a shockingly amorphous, shapeless mass beyond the limits of anatomical articulation. The first chapter is dedicated to a phenomenological analysis of an experience of fear. Then I reconstruct motive of surrealistic metamorphosis of the body in the poetry of Vítĕzslav Nezval ('Absolutní hrobař') and specific modes of miniaturizing and reduction of space in the poetry of Jindřich Heisler and in paintings, and graphics of Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský.

  • Issue Year: 2007
  • Issue No: 6
  • Page Range: 50-77
  • Page Count: 28
  • Language: Polish