Prague Flaneur, A

By spring 1938, Prague is a city increasingly on tenterhooks in expectation of an attack by Nazi Germany. Earlier that year the pressure of the situation produced a schism in the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia between those who wanted to continue to support the Soviet Union and those who condemned Stalin’s show trials, purges, and executions. Vítězslav Nezval chronicles this tumultuous period by embedding it in a panegyric to Prague, wondering if the city, and everything about the city he loves, will survive the horrors that are about to be visited upon her. With Apollinaire serving as his guide, he introduces us to the cafés and pubs he would frequent, many of which no longer exist, the parks and various neighborhoods he lived in as a destitute student, the people he would meet on the street, musing on some of the figures central to his poetics, such as André Breton and Lautréamont. While at times lamenting the changing face of Prague and that Hitler might reduce it to rubble, Nezval takes us into the places that spontaneously spur him to reflect on the issues facing artists of the day and the precarious sociopolitical situation. This edition is a translation of the rare “original” first edition, before it was immediately pulled from the shelves in the wake of the Munich Agreement in September 1938, to emend and excise passages Nazi officials might take exception to. Included are Nezval’s original photographs and illustrations as well as an appendix that maps out the revisions made and translations of the longer passages that were inserted as replacement.