Book Description

In the summer of 1935, Vít?zslav Nezval, already one of the most celebrated Czech poets of his generation, embarked on a period of manic creativity that would result in three volumes of poetry written and published in a two-year span (1935-37), mirrored by three volumes of memoir-like poetic prose. These collections would not only reshape Czech poetry, blending approaches developed by the French Surrealists with national cultural sensibilities and political concerns, taken together they are among the highest achievements of the interwar avant-garde. Each of the three volumes adopted a different principle of Surrealism as its general modus operandi. For Woman in the Plural (1936), the first volume in this loose trilogy, it was objective chance (while the third and final volume, The Absolute Gravedigger (1937), adopted the paranoiac-critical method).As the title suggests, the collection is an extended meditation on the female form, the images of which Nezval spins zoetrope-like to convey novel and hallucinatory ways to conceive Woman's mythical, divine, and creative power. Aligned with the international modernism of the era, Woman in the Plural addresses the social and political instability of the 1930s while also serving to display Nezval's prodigious talents in a variety of forms, styles, and genres. Alongside the madcap, entertainingly profound poetry in couplets, litanies, and stanzas of varying lengths, the collection also includes pages from Nezval's dream journal, a set of exuberant Surrealist exercises, and a full-length play of chance encounters with "a woman like any other." Never before translated into English, this is a vibrant, volatile collection, a true tour de force from one of the greatest poets of the European avant-garde.