The Age of Free Jongleurs: The Art of the People and the Czech Avant-Garde

This article explores the Czech interwar avant-garde’s interest in folklore and popular culture. Like most of its international counterparts, the Czech avantgarde was convinced that institutions like art and literature had outlived their historical validity. It also had little use for bourgeois conceptions of “the nation” and “the people,” so often seen as the basis of folklore. But it engaged intensely with the cultural legacy of marginalized classes and with the possibility of new ways of expressing the cultural attitudes of the masses, both in the current moment of heightened social struggle, and in a vision of a future society where class differentiation would be abolished alongside the differentiation between specialist artists and non-specialist audiences or consumers. The search for a new art of the people found expression, most notably, in poet Vítězslav Nezval’s demonstrative vitalization of low genres; in artist and theorist Karel Teige’s championing of the circus and urban street culture, which he saw as elements of a “new folk art”; and in literary critic Bedřich Václavek’s attempt to trace the circulation of modern poetry and songs that entered the shared repertoire of emerging classes. This complex interplay of new and old, I argue, offers a model for the prefiguration of a new world that still might survive the end of this one.