Příběh kmene
Story of a tribe

Zone compositions as an archive of the Czech interwar avant-garde

Summary/Abstract: In the history of the European avant-garde, zone compositions have appeared along the seams between entities. Likewise Czech avant-gardists saw Apollinaire’s Zone as a poem of transition, and it is essential to identify whence and whither, and to subsequently correct the established explanation of the Czech historical avantgarde’s attitude towards memory and the past. The early Czech avant-garde saw itself as a movement without a history, emerging from point zero, but zone compositions are substantially oriented towards the past. Memory, past and myth form an integral part of zone compositions — the forms of the modern-age epic. Within the context of the long compositions of European modernism, this study analyses Czech zone compositions as a special form of the epic, as an alternative pole of the Czech historical avant-garde.

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