Vítezslav Nezval – författare

Valérie och hennes underbara vecka är en skimrande legering av den gotiska romanen, den melodramatiska följetongen och fesagan. När Valérie får sin första menstruation omvandlas hennes verklighet av hastigt uppblossande begär. Likt en detektiv skärskådar Valérie skiftande identiteter och fördolda samband. Till slut blottlägger hon den hädiska hemligheten i familjehistoriens hjärta och finner den befriande sanningen om sig själv. Med lika delar svart humor och förtrollande äventyrslystnad har Vítezslav Nezval skapat en roman som raserar vanevardagens fängelse. Vítezslav Nezval var poet och var med och grundade surrealistgruppen i Prag år 1934. Han skrev Valérie och hennes underbara vecka året därpå, men romanen publicerades först tio år senare. Nu utkommer den för första gången på svenska, i översättning av Karin Mossdal.

Farewell and a Handkerchief-Poems from the Road is a collection that reflects on the month-long travels of Czech poet Vít?zslav Nezval through Vienna, Paris, southern France, and Italy. During this journey, on May 9, 1933, Nezval had a chance encounter with two of the surrealist movement’s most influential poets-André Breton and Paul Éluard-while sitting at the Cardinal Café on the Grands Boulevards in Paris, a meeting that proved transformative. After returning home, Nezval helped found the Czech Surrealist Group, along with Karel Teige, Jind?ich Stýrský, and Toyen. It became the only official group of its kind outside of France.

Czech writer Vitezslav Nezval (1900-58) was one of the leading Surrealist poets of the 20th century. "Prague with Fingers of Rain" is his classic 1936 collection in which Prague's many-sided life - its glamorous history, various weathers, different kinds of people - becomes symbolic of what is contradictory and paradoxical in life itself. Mixing real and surreal, Nezval evokes life's contradictoriness in a series of psalm-like poems of puzzled love and generous humanity. Nezval was perhaps the most prolific writer in Prague during the 1920s and 30s. An original member of the avant-garde group of artists Devetsil ("Butterbur", literally: "Nine Forces"), he was a founding figure of the Poetist movement. His numerous books included poetry collections, experimental plays and novels, memoirs, essays and translations. His best work is from the interwar period. Along with Karel Teige, Jindrich Aetyrsku, and Toyen, Nezval frequently travelled to Paris, engaging with the French surrealists. Forging a friendship with Andre Breton and Paul Aeluard, he was instrumental in founding The Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in 1934 (the first such group outside of France), serving as editor of the group's journal Surrealismus. His mastery of language and prosody was unparalleled - contemporaries referred to it as wizardry. Alongside with surrealist poetry, he wrote poems that sounded like genuine folksongs and for some time he teased the Czech literary public by the anonymous publication of three books attributed to a fictitious Robert David - one of 52 Villonesque ballades, another of 100 sonnets, all in strict classical form. His identity was guessed by the critics only because 'no one else would be able to do that'. This selection from his seminal collection has a specially commissioned foreword by Ivan Klima.

Written in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism but not published until 1945, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood. Drawing on Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Sade's Justine, K. H. Macha's May, and Murnau's Nosferatu as well as the form and language of the pulp serial novel, Nezval has constructed a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with a taste for chicken blood, changelings, a lecherous priest, a malicious grandmother desiring her lost youth, and an androgynous merging of brother with sister. Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror, the novel is a meditation on youth and age, sexuality and death - an exploration of the grotesque that juxtaposes high and low genres with shifting registers of language and moods, thus placing it squarely in the tradition of the Czech avant-garde.