Poetry and Revolution brings together three previously untranslated essays by the Czechoslovak avant-garde theorist Karel Teige, accompanied by a polemical introduction by Peter Zusi placing Teige's thinking in the context of debates on "Western" and "Eastern" Marxism.
Poetry and Revolution brings together three previously untranslated essays by the Czechoslovak avant-garde theorist Karel Teige: "Poem, World, Humanity" (1930), "Intellectuals and Revolution" (1933), and "Poetry and Revolution" (1936), accompanied by an introduction by Peter Zusi. In these three articles, which are characterized by his growing interest in Surrealism, Teige calls for the withering away of inherited forms of art. Building on Marx and Engels' vision of communism as the end of the division of labor, Teige argues that in this new world, "art will cease to be art," the conflict between art and society will be resolved, and beauty will become "the epiphenomenon of all life's manifestations." He sees Surrealism as a means of liberating the human spirit and aligning the "principle of pleasure" with the "principle of reality." Teige's thinking could be relevant for our contemporary era, characterized by the resurgence of fascism and cultural conservatism; these essays represent an ambitious attempt to define a new socialist consciousness and consider the subjective and cultural effects of revolutionary politics.
Poetry and Revolution is published in a softcover edition with white foil stamp print and includes illustrations inspired by the Central European avant-garde.
Peter Zusi is the Director of New York University Prague. He taught in the Slavic Department at Harvard and at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He is the author of
The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition (Cambridge: Legenda, 2024) as well as a wide range of articles, chapters, and reviews on Czech, German, and comparative literature. He has particular interests in
Franz Kafka,
Walter Benjamin, discourses on architecture and visual culture, and social philosophy and theory of modernism and the avant-garde. He is co-editor of the FRINGE Series at UCL Press.
Karel Teige (1900–1951) was a Czechoslovak art and architecture theorist, organizer, book designer and typographer and a prominent yet often forgotten figure of the Marxist wing of the interwar avant-garde. He was a founding member of the art and architecture association Devětsil (1920–1931), of the Czechoslovak group at the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (1929–1932), and of the Left Front (1929–1938), an association of anti-fascist progressive artists, architects, and intellectuals, and a key figure of the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group. From 1929 to 1930, Teige briefly taught at the
Bauhaus; he maintained correspondence with influential artists, architects, and intellectuals of his time such as
Le Corbusier, Hannes Meyer, André Breton, and the Vesnin brothers. Regarded as a "Trotskyist degenerate," Teige had his published work suppressed for decades.
