A Prague Flaneur

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 Vítězslav Nezval, who wanted to continue to support the Soviet Union, and those who condemned Stalin’s show trials, purges, and executions. Nezval chronicles this tumultuous period by embedding it in a paean to Prague, wondering if the city, and everything about the city h...