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Reading Václav Havel by David Danaher

through its composition, which intentionally imitates the sonata form. Winner concludes Chapter 3 by Nezval's inspiration by visual arts manifested most patently by his poem "The Breakfast in the Grass," an obvious reference to Manet's canvas of the same name. The sister arts tradition also played an important role in poems of the 1984 Nobel Prize laureate Jaroslav Seifert, scrutinized in chapter four. Even some of his output from the "proletarian art" period, Winner observes, "suggests the images of Rousseau le douanier as well as early paintings by Chagall" (112). Despite a trip to France with Teige in the mid-1920s, when the two poets "passed by the Louvre with contempt" (115), Seifert's literary pictorialism had its French source—Apollinaire's Calligrammes utilization of the visual aspect of writing. Some of his other experiments with synesthesia, though, are closer in their technique to Baudelaire's "Correspondences," associating sounds with colors and perfumes. Vladislav Vancura—the subject of chapter five—was the only member of Devetsil who was not a poet. Yet, despite this, his works are unavailable in western languages because "his poetic prose has proved resistant to translation" (131). Winner explains that this is due to the marked idiosyncrasy of Vancura's language. His narrators—the dominant voices in all of his works—employ, as Winner puts it, "a complex, sometimes baroque style characterized by archaizing lexicon and syntax and with participial and gerundial formulations unacceptable to the Czech oral style" (135). Chapter six traces in a rather brief manner "The Relation of the Prague Linguistic Circle to Poetism" (157) and, through many documents, illustrates a close friendship between Roman Jakobson, Seifert and Nezval, and Jan Mukarovsky and Vancura. On the theoretical level, it reports about the Prague Structuralists' spirited defense of their Poetist comrades against local linguistic purists. The bone of contention was the purists' demand that writers strictly adhere to the norms of literary Czech, which the transgressive avant-gardists flouted whenever it suited their purpose. The book closes with the transition from Poetism to the newest Parisian dernier en'—Surrealism initiated by Teige around 1934. Winner's work is useful for anybody interested in modern Czech literature. Besides a number of close readings of several canonical works it presents extensive English translations of many difficult texts. I recommend it without qualification.