In the summer of 1935, Vitezslav Nezval, already one of the most
celebrated Czech poets of his generation, embarked on a period of manic
creativity that would result in three volumes of poetry written and
published in a two-year span (1935-37), mirrored by three volumes of
memoir-like poetic prose. These collections would not only reshape Czech
poetry, blending approaches developed by the French Surrealists with
national cultural sensibilities and political concerns, taken together
they are among the highest achievements of the interwar avant-garde.
Each of the three volumes adopted a different principle of Surrealism as
its general modus operandi. For Woman in the Plural (1936), the first
volume in this loose trilogy, it was objective chance (while the third
and final volume, The Absolute Gravedigger (1937), adopted the
paranoiac-critical method).
Appearing in English translation for the first time, Woman in the
Plural displays Nezval's prodigious talents in a variety of forms,
styles, and genres as he spins images of the female form like a zoetrope
to create novel and hallucinatory ways of conceiving woman's mythical,
divine, and creative power. It is an eclectic collection that mixes
profound free verse, at times reading like a cascade of automatic
writing, with pages from Nezval's dream journal, an exuberant set of
Surrealist exercises, and a full-length play of chance encounters with
"a woman like any other," all the while addressing the social and
political uncertainties of the 1930s. Led off by Karel Teige's original
collages from the first edition, Woman in the Plural is a vibrant and
volatile tour de force from one of the greatest European writers of the
20th century.
