From the labyrinth of literary revaluations to which modern Czech literature has been subjected, the work of the gifted but unpredictable lyric poet Vítězslav Nezval (1900-1958) has emerged relatively unscathed. His literary career was a bewildering trail of shifting allegiances and paradoxical novelties —from Expressionist infantilism to elegant sophistication, from Dadaist anti-art to obsequious socialist realism: an anarchist in his youth, a surrealist in middle age, he ended as a laureate of the Czechoslovak Communist Establishment.
At the age of twenty Nezval came to Prague for university studies. Always a loner, he led a solitary life in the big city. His early poems are full of nostalgia for his Moravian home and lost childhood, sometimes recalled with more than a touch of childish nightmare. Prague in the early twenties was a place of tumbling pedestals and mushrooming social manifestoes: the newly silenced guns and the freshly inaugurated state seemed to be an earnest of a new start, and the end of a world discredited.