Gesto a skutečnost. Umění v meziválečném Československu. 1. Obyčejný život

Kateřina Piorecká, kol. 

The book Gesture and Reality. Art in Interwar Czechoslovakia provides answers to the question of how art affected the public space of the First Czechoslovak Republic.

The team of authors discussed the relationship between art and society across the humanities (literary studies, art history, theatre studies, musicology, film history, etc.). They intentionally chose two discourses that distinctly capture the dominant tendencies of First Republic society. In the first one, named after Karel Čapek’s novel Obyčejný život (An Ordinary Life), they focused on the establishment of the new state, the concept of Czechoslovakism, the transformation of cultural and national identities, and the position of the individual in the new state. For the second one, they borrowed the title of Vilém Werner’s drama Lidé na kře (People on the Ice Floe), which confronts the revolutionary ideas of the avant-garde and its social utopias with the ways art reacted to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as it is called. Both frameworks relate to the public or political life of society and deal with the phenomena the newly declared state struggled with: the question of national minorities, social problems, as well as political radicalism and extremism. The intention of the authors was not to tell another grand narrative about the interwar period, but to depict the contradictory position that art occupied in public life. To do this, they chose a micro-historical perspective. In a series of intertwining case studies, they offer a view of the individual events that linked the aesthetic and social developments of interwar Central European society. They drew on a close reading of the sources as well as the scholarly and critical debate of that time. They were interested in the questions of how specific artistic phenomena responded to the social and national problems: ow the new state found its roots in historical narratives, how the avant-garde sought its addressee among the proletarians, how the middle class found reassurance in convention and tame modernism, or how ruralists portrayed their hero (and reader) as someone who grows up in rural tradition and faith. Popular culture was also part of everyday social life, whether in the form of adventure stories, romance films, comedies, or popular songs. The first volume of the book juxtaposes the studies dealing with works of art that helped build the new state and the studies on works of art that expressed a desire for revolutionary change. Part of the volume are also the studies interpreting the criticisms of the state and social practice of that time. The authors, thus, observe the changing perceptions of who then was Czechoslovak, Czech, Slovak, or German. They analyse the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic from a Czech-German perspective. They examine the idealization of Slovakia and the problem of the emancipation of Slovaks within the common state. They paid attention to the social and artistic isolation of the Russian emigration. Last but not least, the book includes the studies on interwar social phenomena such as the changing position of women in society, the life of students and the new ways of spending leisure time (e.g., sports and tramping).

Specification
Authors Kateřina Piorecká,
kol.
Title Gesto a skutečnost. Umění v meziválečném Československu. 1. Obyčejný život
Publisher Academia
Co-Publisher Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR
Year of publication 2024
Page count 544
Format 20,5 × 26 cm
ISBN 978-80-7658-085-5