Staging language: Milca Mayerova and the Czech book Alphabet

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Notes

This essay has benefited, in its many stages of development, from the insights of Jonathan Bolton, Lenka Bydzovska, Jeanne Nugent, Jindrich Toman, Daniel Vojtech, and most recently Perry Chapman and an anonymous reader for The Art Bulletin. Particular thanks go to Christine Poggi and, as always, Janine Mileaf for especially sensitive readings. I would like to express my gratitude as well to the family and students of Milca Mayerova, who have supported my research with unfailing generosity. Unattributed translations are my own.

(1.) F. X. Salda, "O nejmladsi poezii ceske" (On the newest Czech poetry), quoted in Vlasin et al., 1971, 12.

(2.) The original publication information is as follows: Vitezslav Nezval, Abeceda: Tanecni kompozice: Milca Mayerova (Alphabet: Dance compositions: Milca Mayerova), graphic design by Karel Teige, photographs by Karel Paspa (Prague: J. Otto, 1926). Issued in two thousand copies. Citations in this essay are taken from Nezval, Alphabet (2001).

(3.) For a complete listing of the secondary literature on Alphabet, see Matthew Witkovsky, "Avant-Garde and Center: Devetsil in Czech Culture, 1918-1938," Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2002, 81 n. 7. Comparisons of international scope are made inter alia in Lothar Lang, Konstruktivismus und Buchkunst (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1990), 130-32; and Timothy Benson, ed., Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 126-27. Sonia Reisingerova de Puineuf analyzes the book page by page, comparing Teige to El Lissitzky, in "Devetsil a la page," Les Cahiers du Musee National d'Art Moderne 78 (winter 2001-2): 70-87.

(4.) This is the opening claim of Esther Levinger's essay "Czech Avant-Garde Art: Poetry for the Five Senses," Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 513. Levinger also reproduces two pages from Alphabet, 523.

(5.) Karel Teige, "Poetismus," Host 3, nos. 9-10 (June 1924), reprinted in Karel Teige, Svet stavby a basne: Studie z 20. let; Vybor z dila (A world of construction and poetry: Studies from the 1920s; Selected works), ed. Jiri Brabec et al. (Prague: Ceskoslovensky spisovatel, 1966), vol. 1, 123; and Timothy O. Benson and Eva Forgacs, eds., Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910-1930 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 580 (translation modified).

(6.) Nezval, 10.

(7.) Velimir Khlebnikov, "Bukva kak takovaia" (The letter as such) (1913), trans. Herb Eagle, in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912-1928, ed. Anna Lawton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 63-64.

(8.) Nezval, 9.

(9.) Nezval, "Basen" (Poetry), in Falesny marias (Prague: Odeon, 1925), reprinted in Vlasin et al., 1972, 168.

(10.) Nezval, "Vitezslav Nezval o sobe" (Vitezslav Nezval on Vitezslav Nezval), Rozpravy Aventina 2, no. 2 (Oct. 7, 1926): 15.