Surrealist encounters in modernist metropolises. Another monograph of magical Prague has been published
As the name suggests, the author’s focus is on contacts between Czech and foreign surrealists, which were so intense that, according to Sayer, Prague became the world’s second center of surrealism after Paris, even though local surrealism was “less mystical and less romantic than its French”. counterpart ’.
And why do we provocatively recommend Prague as the “capital” of the twentieth century? In his view, we should see the last century as a synonym for modernist efforts. For him, then, Prague is a place where various modernist dreams “fall apart again and again, where sooner or later the masks always fall down, so that the narrative of progress is as great as the fairy tales for the children they are.”
According to the author, the modern history of Prague is “a clear lesson in black humor”. Where else to get a better sense of irony and absurdity, a lasting suspicion of the meaning of great theories and of totalitarian ideologies, and at the same time a Rabelais enjoyment of how all social and intellectual claims to rationality indiscriminately subvert erotica?
The latter is given great attention in the book, both at the level of art and private lives. For example, the author cites contemporary testimonies of composers Vítězslava Kaprálová that “she was able to be faithful to several other people and