I presented an early version of this essay at the Czech Workshop held at the University of Michigan in April 2005. I am grateful to Jiřídf ich Toman, organizer of the workshop, and to all the other participants for the productive discussion that ensued. In addition, I would like to thank Tim Beasley-Murray as well as the anonymous referees for and editors of Slavic Review for their helpful criticism and suggestions.

1. History, of course, is messier than my schema: far too many avant-gardists found themselves embracing totalitarian sympathies. But the cultural ideologues in power rarely returned the sentiment. This should make clear that despite any totalizing or even totalitarian impulse one may wish to ascribe to the avant-garde (as Boris Groys does, for example, in his influential The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle [Princeton, 1992]) this movement cannot be equated with tendentiousness. Groys also argues that in the extreme case of Stalinist socialist realism, the criterion of clear tendendousness became eerily coded and can be seen as posidng the transformation of society in aesthetic terms, as a “party-minded, collective surrealism“ (52). But however surreal socialist realism may ultimately have become, it was nonetheless motivated by criteria of political control rather than ideals of individual creative revolt and experimental freedom: in diis respect the division between political efficacy and aesdietic innovation remained clear.

2. The troubled relationship between the “two avant-gardes” is a classic theme in the scholarship: see, for example, Calinescu, Matei, Five Faces of Moderníty: Modernísm, Avant- Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, 1987), 112-16Google Scholar; and Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Fitzgerald, Gerald (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 8–12 Google Scholar. My examination here focuses on left-wing avant-gardes of the early and mid-twentieth century, since diey confronted the question of political engagement most directly. Texts such as Lev Trotskii's Literature and Revolution, Walter Benjamin's “The Author as Producer,“ Andre Breton's “The Political Position of Today's Art,” Jean-Paul Sartre's “What Is Literature?“ and Theodor W. Adorno's “Commitment” are among the most famous documents of the various “aesthetics and politics” debates of this period. Arguments that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels diemselves leaned toward an aesthetic that was modernist in their time (see, e.g., Rose, Margaret A., Marx's Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts [Cambridge, Eng., 1984])Google Scholar do not change the historical record of antimodernist cultural politics in communist states.

3. Kusák, Alexej, Kultura a politika v Československu, 1945-1956 (Prague, 1998), 23 Google Scholar. Where not indicated otherwise, translations are my own.

4. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the political function of the forged manuscripts in constructing die “imagined community” of the nascent Czech nation. The most famous manuscripts emerged in 1817-18 and were conclusively demonstrated to be forgeries in 1886. See Macura, Vladimir, Znamení zrodu: České obrození jako kulturní typ (Prague, 1983), 127–28Google Scholar. For discussions in English, see, e.g., Reynolds, Susan Helen, “A Scandal in Bohemia: Herder, Goethe, Masaryk, and the ‘War of the Manuscripts,'” Publications oftheEnglish Goethe Society 72 (2003): 53-67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, Alfred, “Forging Czechs: The Reinvention of National Identity in the Bohemian Lands,” in Ryan, Judith and Thomas, Alfred, eds., Cultures of Forgery: Making Nations, Making Selves (New York, 2003), esp. 41–44 Google Scholar; Macura, Vladimir, “Problems and Paradoxes of the National Revival,” in Teich, Mikuláš, ed., Bohemia in History (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 182-97Google Scholar; Jakobson, Roman, “In Memory of V V Hanka,” in Jakobson, , Language in Literature, ed. Pomorska, Krystyna and Rudy, Stephen (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 397–405 Google Scholar; and Otáhal, Milan, “The Manuscript Controversy in the Czech National Revival,” Cross Currents 5 (1986): 247-77Google Scholar. On Kollár, see Pynsent, Robert B., Questions of Identity: Czech and Slovak Ideas of Nationality and Personality (Budapest, 1994), 43-99, esp. 59Google Scholar.

5. Kusák, , Kultura apolitika, 26 Google Scholar, and 121. Also see Janoušek, Pavel et al., eds., Dějiny České literatury 1945-1989(Prague, 2007), 2:24–25 Google Scholar. Kusák identifies this reception as the implicit conceptual framework adopted by Stanislav Kostka Neumann and Zdeněk Nejedlý, two of the most dogmatic Marxist critics of modernist and avant-gardist trends in the interwar period. In the 1900s and 1910s Neumann had been one of the groundbreaking poets of the Czech anarchist and civilist movements, but from the early 1920s on he became known for his increasingly crass denunciations of “bourgeois intellectuals” (and in particular for his strident critique of André Gide's Return from the USSR) and his unrelenting rejection of modernism in general, which exercised great influence in the post-1948 period. Nejedlý, by training a music historian, ultimately became minister of education after 1948 and the first president of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He was a major shaper of cultural policy during the Gottwald era. See Kusák, , Kultura apolitika, 24 Google Scholar, 72, and 135; Sayer, Derek, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, 1998), 217-18 and 303-9Google Scholar; and Hořec, Jaromir, Doba ortelů: Dokumenty — Vzpominky — Iluze a Skutečnosti (Brno, 1992), 68-72Google Scholar.

6. Stanislav Kostka Neumann, “Umění v sociální revoluci” (1923), in Vlašín, Štěpán, ed., Avantgarda známá a neznámá, vol. 1, Od proletářského umění k poetismu, 1919-1924 (Prague, 1971), 1:457 Google Scholar.

7. For important studies with good bibliographies on Czech structuralism in English, Striedter, seejurij, Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism Reconsidered (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Galan, František William, Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946 (Austin, 1985)Google Scholar. For recent re-appreciations of the significance of Czech functionalism within the history of modernist architecture, see Jean-Louis Cohen's “Introduction” to Teige, Karel, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings, trans. Irena Žantovská Murray and David Britt (Los Angeles, 2000)Google Scholar, esp. 1-5 and the references in Cohen's notes; and Sayer, Derek, “The Unbearable Lightness of Building—A Cautionary Tale,” Grey Rooml6 (2004): 6–35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp.10-16. In the context of early twentieth-century Czech functionalist discourses one should also mention the economic theory of the economist, philosopher, and politician Karel Englis, whom Mukařovský cited as an influence on Prague structuralism.

8. On mutual influences between Mukařovský and Teige, see Chvatík, Květoslav, “Karel Teige jako teoretik avantgardy,” Od avantgardy k druhé moderně (Cestami filozofie a literatury) (Prague, 2004), 96–98 Google Scholar. Jan Mukařovský explicitly noted the influence of architectural notions of functionalism on Prague School structuralism in “The Place of the Aesthetic Function among the Other Functions,” in Steiner, Peter and Burbank, John, eds. and trans., Structure, Sign, and Function: Selected Essays (New Haven, 1978), 37 Google Scholar. See also Mukařovský, “On the Problem of Functions in Architecture,” ibid., 239. The cross-pollination between the scholarly activities of the Prague School and the endeavors of Czech avant-garde artists, writers, and architects in the 1920s and 1930s was grounded not only in a sense of shared purpose but also, often enough, in personal friendships. See in this regard the poet Vitezslav Nezval's effusive dedication to Mukařovský in Pet prstu, (Brno, 1932), 3-5. On the broader interconnections between avant-gardists and Prague School structuralists (especially Roman Jakobson), see Toman, Jiřídřich, The Magic of a Common Language: Jakobson, Malhesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), chap. 11 Google Scholar; Effenberger, Vratislav, “Roman Jakobson and the Czech Avant-Garde between Two Wars,” trans. Urwin, Iris, American Journal of Semiotics 2 (1983): 13–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Veltrusky, Jifi, ‘Jan Mukařovský's Structural Poetics and Esthetics,” Poetics Today 2, no. lb (Winter 1980-1981): 129 Google Scholar; and Chvatík, Květoslav, Strukturalismus a avantgarda (Prague, 1970)Google Scholar.

9. See Robert B. Pynsent, "Conclusory Essay: Decadence, Decay and Innovation," in Pynsent, Robert B., ed., Decadence and Innovation: Austro-Hungarian Life and Art at the Turn of the Century (London, 1989), 121 Google Scholar. As Pynsent points out elsewhere, the preceding generation of writers such as Jaroslav Vrchlickyand Julius Zeyer had already initiated the break with revivalist rhetoric; see Pynsent, “Czech Decadence,” in Cornis-Pope, Marcel and Neubauer, John, eds., History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Amsterdam, 2004), 349 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One of the other major documents of the Czech moderna, the “Manifest České moderny” (1895), does state explicidy political aims, such as greater cooperation between Czechs and Bohemian Germans, universal suffrage, and greater integration of women into social and cultural life. This is clearly a call for a tolerant politics, however, and thus fits well with the critical individualism espoused elsewhere in the “Manifesto” and with the cosmopolitanism of these finde- siecle movements as a whole.

10. František Xaver Šalda, “H. P. Berlage: Grundlagen und Entwicklung der Architektur“ (1909), in Mukařovský, Jan, Vodicka, Felix, and Dvorak, Karel, eds., Soubor dila F. X. Šaldy (Prague, 1953), 16:353 Google Scholar.

11. To be sure, Šalda's claims would not have been seconded by the editors of Moderní revue, such as Jiří Karásek, who wrote, for example, that “the attempt to make art socially useful and beneficial leads to the denigration of art into literary craft.” Karásek, “Sociální uzitecnost umění” (1895), here cited from Urban, Otto M. and Merhaut, Lubos, eds., Moderní revue, 1894-1925 (Prague, 1995), 292 Google Scholar. There were numerous points of contention among the protagonists behind Moderní revue, Volne smery, and the “Manifest,” but Šalda's line of argument was influential not only within the discourse of the Czech fin de sieclebut also among the interwar avant-garde. Even the explicitly elitist and individualist figures of the fin de siecle (including Karásek himself) never shunned nationalist themes, although their treatment was often idiosyncratic; see Pynsent, “Czech Decadence,” 351. Peter Bugge, synthesizing arguments by Macura and Pynsent, claims: “Czech decadence has, to be decadent, to reject anything ‘naturally’ or ‘conventionally’ Czech, but this gesture of negation not only inscribes it in an archetypically Czech tradition, it also puts it in the service of a project it by nature had to rebel against: the development of Czech national culture“; see Bugge, , “Naked Masks: Artiiur Breisky or How to Be a Czech Decadent,” Slovo a smysl/ Word cV Sense 5 (2006): 262 Google Scholar.

12. An overview in English of Teige's extremely varied interests and activities is presented in Dluhosch, Eric and Svácha, Rostislav, eds., Karel Teige, 1900-1951: L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Moderníst Avant- Garde (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)Google Scholar.

13. In cultural debates on the Left, Teige typically took the more radical side. This began early: in 1921 Teige argued tfiat Devětsil should openly declare loyalty to communism rather Uian support a more generalized and nonpartisan idea of revolution; see Effenberger, Vratislav, “Nové umění,” which appears as the afterword to Karel Teige, Vybor z dila (hereafter VzD), ed. Brabec, Jifi, Effenberger, Vratislav, Chvatík, Květoslav, and Kalivoda, Robert, 3 vols. (Prague, 1966-94), 1:584 Google Scholar. Rostislav Svacha has documented Teige's conflicts with Devětsil's architectural section (Ardev) over his strict understanding of the functionalist imperative; see Svacha, , The Architecture of NewPrague, 1895-1945, trans. Buchler, Alexandra (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 275–76Google Scholar. These conflicts clearly presaged Teige's famous polemic with Le Corbusier over the “academicism” of the latter's Mundaneum project (major documents of this debate are translated in Oppositions 4 [1974]: 83-108). Finally, in the so-called Generational Discussion that shook Devětsil at the end of the 1920s, Teige took die side of those defending the ascent of the hard-line Element Gottwald leadership within the Czech Communist Party—an allegiance that is bitterly ironic in light of postwar developments (see the commentary in VzD, 1:566-68).

14. Josef Vojvodik has trenchantly analyzed parallels between the historical distortions and absolutizing rhetoric in certain key texts from the surrealist period and later dogmatic communist practice; see Vojvodik, , “Četba jako deformování a permanentni zranování textu: Nekolik poznamek ke koncepci machovskeho sborniku Ani labut'aniLůna (1936),” in Bydzovska, Lenka and Srp, Karel, eds., Česky surrealismus, 1929-1953 (Prague, 1996), 219-35Google Scholar.

15. Teige's often rigid Marxist convictions never hampered his ability to criticize the party line, most often in aesthetic questions but also on inflammatory political issues such as the 1936 Moscow trials. Indeed, Teige cited his “undisciplined nature” as the reason he never joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The official campaign against Teige after 1948 was most acerbically formulated in Mojmír Grygar's polemic: “Teigovština— trocistická agentura v naší kultuře,” Tvorba 20, nos. 42-44 (1951): 1008-10, 1036-38, and 1060-62. Teige's vilification is described (with considerable animus) by Horec, Doba ortelv, 97 and 103-5; and Černý, Václav, Paměti 1945-1972, 2d ed. (Brno, 1992), 251-52Google Scholar. Symptomatic in this context is the depressing exchange of letters between Teige and Ladislav Štoll in 1950, reproduced in VzD, 3:581-93, in which Teige attempted retroactively to explain his prewar positions. Štoll was minister of education and of culture during the 1950s and a central architect of official communist cultural ideology in Czechoslovakia after 1948; he was primarily responsible for the reductive historical model of twentieth-century Czech literature pitting “progressive” against “reactionary” camps, or, roughly, Neumann and the poet Jifi Wolker against Teige and the poet František Halas. For some time after Teige's death the rumor circulated (repeated by Andre Breton among others) that he had committed suicide in the face of official hounding. In fact he died of heart failure; see Effenberger, Vratislav, “Edicni poznámka,” in Teige, , Vyvojove proměny v umění(Prague, 1966), 336 Google Scholar; and Seifert, Jaroslav, Vsecky krásy světa (Prague, 1992), 509-11Google Scholar.

16. Neumann's role in this story is complex: in the 1920s and 1930s he was without doubt one of the most vociferous Czech critics of modernism, yet he had earlier been one of its most important supporters. In 1920 his journal Kmen published the first Czech translation of any text by Franz Kafka (Milena Jesenska's translation of “The Stoker“), and in 1919 another journal he edited, Cerven, published Karel Capek's translation of Guillaume Apollinaire's “Zone,” widely regarded as a watershed in the development of Czech modernist poetry. See, e.g., Mukařovský, Jan, “Francouzskd poesie K. Capka” (1936), in Cervenka, Miroslav and Jankovic, Milan, eds., StudieII(Brno, 2007), 300-304Google Scholar; and Garfinkle, Deborah, “Karel Capek's ‘Pasmo’ and the Construction of Literary Moderníty through the Art of Translation,” Slavic and East European Review 47', no. 3 (2003): 345-66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The young Devětsil generation took inspiration from Neumann's earlier poetry and essays and initially regarded him as a mentor: Jaroslav Seifert's first volume of poetry, Mesto v slzdch (1921) is dedicated to Neumann, “one of the kindest of poets.” More dramatically, Devětsil's breakthrough 1922 anthology, Zivot II, features a two-page spread where the title of Neumann's 1920 essay collection, At zije zivot! is splashed diagonally in red ink over the text—an innovative use of such overprinting in avant-garde typography. On Neumann's early support for Devětsil, see Chvatík, Květoslav, Bedfich Vdclavek a vyvoj České marxisticke estetiky (Prague, 1962), chap. 2 Google Scholar. Neumann's development away from modernism and toward a sharply agitational line was thus in many ways the inverse of Teige's and Devětsil's.

17. Elsewhere I have examined howTeige's avant-garde positions of die mid and later 1920s retain sublated conceptual structures from the proletarian art period. See Zusi, Peter, “The Style of the Present: Karel Teige on Constructivism and Poetism,” Representations 88 (Fall 2004): 102-24Google Scholar. Also see Levinger, Esther, “Karel Teige on Cinema and Utopia,“ Slavic and East Europeanjournal 48, no. 2 (2004): 247-74Google Scholar; Pesat, Zdeněk, “Mezi proletafskou poezii a poetismem,” Ceskd UteraturabQ, no. 5 (2002): 500-505Google Scholar; and Brousek, Marketa, Der Poetismus: Die Lehrjahre der tschechischen Avantgarde und ihrer marxistischen Kritiker (Munich, 1975), 85 Google Scholar. Levinger's account, however, does not sufficiently distinguish between the early phases of Teige's development. Pesat's interpretation of proletarian art as a distortion of the “natural” developmental line of Czech poetics does not account for the ongoing development and echoes of proletarian art in socialist realism. Brousek contrasts the “fluid process” of Teige's development (85) to the “new beginning” marked by Nezval's joining of Devětsil (79). This critical tendency in fact echoes the judgment Šalda expressed in 1928 that “there is no break or abyss between the so-called proletarian and poetist layers of our youngest poetic movement.” Šalda, “O nejmladsi poesii České,” in Saldy, Soubor dilaF. X., ed. Mukařovský, Jan and Vodicka, Felix, vol. 8, Studie z České literatury (Prague, 1961), 134 Google Scholar. For Teige's own retrospective analysis of this period (albeit reflecting political pressures of the early 1950s), see his letter reproduced in VzD, 3:581-86.

18. Rajendra Chitnis, however, has recently examined similar themes in the early development of the modernist prose writer (and founding chairman of Devětsil) Vladislav Vancura; see Chitnis, , Vladislav Vancura: The Heart of the Czech Avant- Garde (Prague, 2007), 36-41Google Scholar.

19. I do not address here the often-discussed issue of how to differentiate modernism from the avant-garde—a distinction that rarely bothered theorists of the time. Teige, for example, commonly used the terms interchangeably. In regard to the issues to be examined below, the movements now termed the historical avant-garde assumed the most radically combative positions. My conviction is that if ambiguities can be revealed even in die face of these sharply pointed oppositions, then those ambiguities hold relevance even for the broader and more differentiated phenomena that have traditionally gone under the label of high modernism.

20. This can be seen as early as Josef Jungmann's Second Conversation on the Czech Language (1806): “What should I say about those [who] consider Czech a peasant language? Poor devils! They don't know that where it is at home every language is a peasant language, and that the peasant is the most important inhabitant of the land.” Jungmann, , “O jazyku Českém: Rozmlouvani druhé,” in Vodicka, Felix, ed., Boj o obrozeníndroda: Vyborz dilajosefa Jungmanna (Prague, 1948), 44 Google Scholar. Sayer gives a useful account of the ideological resonances of the notion of the ceskylid, especially around the turn of the twentieth century; see Sayer, , Coasts of Bohemia, 118-20Google Scholar. On Herder's influence in the Czech lands, see, e.g., Louzil, Jaromfr, “K zapasu o j. G. Herder u nas,” Ceskd literatura 53, no. 5 (2005): 637-53Google Scholar.

21. Teige, Karel, “Nové umění a lidova tvorba” (1921), in Vlašín, , ed., Avantgarda známá a neinámá, 1:150 Google Scholar. Slovdcko—a region on the border between Moravia and Slovakia— enjoyed a vogue among certain fin-de-siecle artists as the emblem of an ethnically and ethically “unspoiled” folk culture. See Wittlich, Petr, Prague Fin de Siecle, trans. Maev de la Guardia (Paris, 1992), 182-85Google Scholar.

22. Teige, Karel, “Umění dnes a zitra” (1922), in Teige, Karel and Seifert, jaroslav, eds., Revolucni sbornik Devětsil (Prague, 1922), 200 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.

23. See Teige, “Nové umění a lidova tvorba,” 152 Capek, Josef, Nejskromnějšíumění (\920; reprint, Prague, 1997)Google Scholar. Although the volume was published in 1920, several of the essays were published in journals in 1918-1919.

24. Nejskromnější umění also clearly anticipates the essays by Josef's brother, Capek, Karel, in Marsyas, cili na okraj literatury (Prague, 1931)Google Scholar. Before being collected into a single volume, Karel Capek's essays appeared in journals, for the most part in the late 1920s.

25. Capek, , Nejskromnější umění, 9 Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

26. Ibid., 12. Capek's discussion of use-value as a source of the particular power of the most humble art also led him to emphasize its “constructive intentions“; see ibid.,19.

27. Teige, Karel, “Nové umění proletářské” (1922), in VzD, 1:57 Google Scholar.

28. See Teige, “Umění dnes a zitra,” 189; and Teige, “Nové umění proletářské,” 58.

29. Teige, Karel, “Obrazy a pfedobrazy” (1921), in VzD, 1:26 Google Scholar; Teige, “Nové umění proletářské,” 45; and Teige's 1923 review of Ilia Erenburg's Yet It Turns, quoted in VzD, 1:520. The skepticism toward Italian futurism did not prevent Devětsil members from graciously hosting F. T. Marinetti at Teige's house.

30. Teige, “Obrazy a pfedobrazy,” 28. See also Teige, “Nové umění proletářské,” 49; and Teige, Karel, “Umění pfitomnosti,” in Zivot II: Nové umění, konstrukce, soudobd intelektuelni aktivita (Prague, 1922), 120 Google Scholar. Teige continued to characterize dada as the culminating product of bourgeois social crisis even after he began to appreciate its importance as a preparatory stage for later avant-garde movements. See his “Dada,” in Host 6 (1926): 38-39 and translated in Benson, Timothy O. and Forgacs, Eva, eds., Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 379-80Google Scholar. Also see Toman, Jiřídřich, “Dada Well-Constructed: Karel Teige's Early Rationalism,” in Umění 43, nos. 1-2 (1995): 29–33 Google Scholar; and Chalupecky, Jiřídřich, “O dada, surrealismu, a Českém umění,” in Cestou necestou (Jiříocany, 1999), 194-228Google Scholar.

31. Teige, “Obrazy a pfedobrazy,” 29. See also Teige's claim that peinturepure and the simultaneous poetry of Apollinaire presupposed “forms that were surprising, mechanical, and sharp, resembling the foundation of megalopolises with wide commercial avenues, factories, and skyscrapers” as well as “gigantic, monstrous, inhuman pistons, transmissions, and levers.” Teige, “Novym smerem” (1923), in Vlašín, , ed., Avantgarda mama a neznámá, 1:91 Google Scholar.

32. Teige, “Obrazy a pfedobrazy,” 27. See also Teige, “Novym smerem,” 93.

33. Precisely these resonances distinguish the Czech term from the German term volkisch and allowed Teige to construe lidovost as something potentially progressive and cosmopolitan. Teige's etymological interpretation, however, exerted litde influence. Over the course of the 1940s (and especially direcdy after the war) the adjective lidovy proved all too efficient in absorbing fascist (“volkisch“) connotations and indeed in fusing them with communist terminology (such as lidovd republika [peoples’ republic]); see Pynsent, Robert B., “Conclusory Essay: Activists, Jews, die Little Czech Man, and Germans,” Central Europe 5, no. 2 (2007): esp. 268-73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Teige, Karel, “Doba a umění” (1923), in Stavba a báseň (Prague, 1927), 28 Google Scholar. See also Teige, Karel, “K nové architektuře” (1923), in VzD, 1:120 Google Scholar. Cinema was perhaps die central phenomenon in which Teige saw ground being reclaimed against the alienadng tendencies of technology; see, e.g., “Foto kino film,” in Zivot II, 156. Teige's fascination with cinema was grounded not only in its status as a technological art form but also in its undeniable and spontaneous mass appeal. Thus, as Levinger remarks, Teige implicitly regarded cinema as “a modern form of proletarian art.” Levinger, “Karel Teige on Cinema and Utopia,” 247.

35. Teige can plausibly be counted, along with Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch, among the thinkers who anticipated the themes of a humanist or reform Marxism well before the publication of Marx's key early texts in Adoratskij, V, ed. Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1, pt. 3 (Berlin, 1932)Google Scholar. This is likely one of the reasons why Teige represented such an important inspiration for Czech reform Marxism in die 1960s: see, e.g., Kalivoda, Robert, Moderní duchovni skutecnost a marxismus (Prague, 1970)Google Scholar, and Chvatík, Květoslav, Smysl moderniho umění (Prague, 1965), esp. 78–79 Google Scholar.

36. Teige, Karel, “K teorii konstruktivismu” (1928), in VzD, 1:365 Google Scholar. Precisely this grounding of Teige's radical functionalism in a conception of humanism is what has too often been overlooked in accounts of Teige's famous 1929 polemic with Le Corbusier over the latter's design for the Mundaneum. See Zusi, “The Style of the Present,” 113-15.

37. See, e.g., Mukařovský, Jan, ed., Dějiny České literatury (Prague, 1995), 4:199 Google Scholar; and Levinger, “Karel Teige on Cinema and Utopia,” 251.

38. Teige, “Nové umění proletářské,” 58.

39. Ibid., 59.

40. The term is from Sus, Oleg, “Česky poetismus 1924,” Divadlo, no. 8 (October 1964): 28 Google Scholar.

41. Burger's, Peter Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Shaw, Michael (Minneapolis, 1984)Google Scholar represents the most influential formulation of these claims.

42. See Neumann, Stanislav Kostka, “K otázce umění třídního a proletářského“ (1923), in Konfese a konfrontace II: Stati o umění a kultuře (Prague, 1988), esp. 406–11Google Scholar. Also see Chvatík, , Bedfich Vdclavek, 73–76 Google Scholar.

43. See, in this respect, Stromsik, Jiff, “Rezeption der europaischen Moderne in der tschechischen Avantgarde,” in Schenk, Klaus, ed., Moderne in der deutschen und der tschechischen Literatur (Tubingen, 2000), 52–53 Google Scholar.

44. Wolker, Jifi [and Teige, Karel], “Proletářské umění” (1922), in Dilo jiřího Wolkera, ed. Novotný, Miloslav, 5di ed. (Prague, 1930), 1:288 Google Scholar. Levinger claims that “Devětsil's singular position was to reject all tendentious content” (248), and at the end of the same paragraph containing this claim even quotes from “Proletářské umění” while ignoring the call for artistic tendentiousness expressed so stridently in that essay. This confusion reflects Levinger's blurring of Devětsil's proletarian art and poetist phases: while her claim is valid for the period after Devětsil abandoned proletarian art, it is clearly not accurate for the earlier phases. Levinger's silence about this early commitment to tendentiousness forces her into logical contortions when she later tries to explain the emergence (which is in fact a re-emergence) of a crudely tendentious side to some of Teige's writings in the early 1930s. See Levinger, “Karel Teige on Cinema and Utopia,” 262-63.

45. To be sure, the Havlíček quote was particularly attractive to Teige and Wolker because it attempted to defend the category of tendentiousness against its cruder manifestations.

46. Teige, “Nové umění proletářské,” 49. Emphasis in the original.

47. Ibid., 54 (Teige's quotation of Havlíček Borovský, with Borovsky's emphasis) and 53 (his own comment).

48. Ibid., 55.

49. Ibid., 33. The argument over the freedom of the artist in relation to proletarian art began widi the critic Arne Novák's criticism of the text “Proletářské umění.” Wolker responded with an argument similar to Teige's quoted above. See “Ochránci umelěcké svobody” (1922), in DiloJifiho Wolkera, 1:292-94.

50. Teige, “Nové umění proletářské,” 33-34. Emphasis in the original.

51. See Zusi, Peter, “Echoes of the Epochal: Historicism and the Realism Debate,“ Comparative Literature 56, no. 3 (2004): 220 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wiendl, Jan, “Barbafi a apostolove: Crty k otazce tendencnosti a neporozumění v České literature pocatku 20. let 20. století,” Slovo a smysl/Word & Sense 2, no. 1 (2004): 160 Google Scholar.

52. Teige, “Umění dnes a zitra,” 200. Emphasis in the original. The term tendence started to become decisively derogatory for Teige shortiy after he wrote this article.

53. See Teige, “Doba a umění,” 36.

54. Ibid., 45.

55. In addition, one must bear in mind important Czech influences, such as Šalda's early proto-constructivist texts. See Brousek, , Der Poetismus, 103 Google Scholar; and Zusi, , “Style of the Present,” 106 Google Scholar.

56. Later Teige would become much more aware of mass culture's utility value for those controlling the culture industry, but this critical moment was absent in his earlier reflections.

57. On the various theoretical interpretations of Teige's dual program of the mid- 1920s, see Zusi, “The Style of die Present.“