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By spring 1938, Prague is a city increasingly on tenterhooks in expectation of an attack by Nazi Germany. Earlier that year the pressure of the situation produced a schism in the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia between Vítězslav Nezval, who wanted to continue to support the Soviet Union, and those who condemned Stalin's show trials, purges, and executions. Nezval chronicles this tumultuous period by embedding it in a paean to Prague, wondering if the city, and everything about the city he loves, will survive the horrors that are about to be visited upon her. With Apollinaire serving as his guide, he introduces us to the cafés and pubs he would frequent, many of which no longer exist, the various neighborhoods he lived in as a destitute student, the parks where he sought solace, and the people he would meet on the street, musing on some of the figures central to his poetics, such as André Breton and Lautréamont. While at times lamenting the changing face of Prague and that Hitler might reduce it to rubble, Nezval takes us into the places that spontaneously spur him to reflect on the issues facing artists of the day and the precarious sociopolitical situation. This translation is of the rare unexpurgated first edition and includes Nezval's photographs and illustrations as well as an appendix that maps out the significant revisions made later, providing additional translations of the longer passages that were inserted as replacement for what was expunged from the original edition.

In the summer of 1935, Vitezslav Nezval, already one of the most celebrated Czech poets of his generation, embarked on a period of manic creativity that would result in three volumes of poetry written and published in a two-year span (1935-37), mirrored by three volumes of memoir-like poetic prose. These collections would not only reshape Czech poetry, blending approaches developed by the French Surrealists with national cultural sensibilities and political concerns, taken together they are among the highest achievements of the interwar avant-garde. Each of the three volumes adopted a different principle of Surrealism as its general modus operandi. For Woman in the Plural (1936), the first volume in this loose trilogy, it was objective chance (while the third and final volume, The Absolute Gravedigger (1937), adopted the paranoiac-critical method). Appearing in English translation for the first time, Woman in the Plural displays Nezval's prodigious talents in a variety of forms, styles, and genres as he spins images of the female form like a zoetrope to create novel and hallucinatory ways of conceiving woman's mythical, divine, and creative power. It is an eclectic collection that mixes profound free verse, at times reading like a cascade of automatic writing, with pages from Nezval's dream journal, an exuberant set of Surrealist exercises, and a full-length play of chance encounters with "a woman like any other," all the while addressing the social and political uncertainties of the 1930s. Led off by Karel Teige's original collages from the first edition, Woman in the Plural is a vibrant and volatile tour de force from one of the greatest European writers of the 20th century.

The Absolute Gravedigger, published in 1937, is in many ways the culmination of Va-tÄ>zslav Nezval's work as an avant-garde poet, combining the Poetism of his earlier work and his turn to Surrealism in the 1930s with his political concerns in the years leading up to World War II. It is above all a collection of startling verbal and visual inventiveness. And while a number of salient political issues emerge from the Surrealist ommatidia, Nezval's imagination here is completely free-wheeling and untethered to any specific locale as he displays mastery of a variety of forms, from long-limbed imaginative free verse narratives to short, formally rhymed meditations in quatrains, to prose and even visual art (the volume includes six of his decalcomania images). Together with his previous two collections, The Absolute Gravedigger forms one of the most important corpora of interwar Surrealist poetry. Yet here Nezval's wild albeit restrained mix of absolute freedom and formal perfection has shifted its focus to explore the darker imagery of putrefaction and entropy, the line breaks in the shorter lyric poems slicing the language into fragments that float in the mind with open-ended meaning and a multiplicity of readings. Inspired by Salvador Dala-'s paranoiac-critical method, the poems go in directions that are at first unimaginable but continue to evolve unexpectedly until they resolve or dissolve -- like electron clouds, they have a form within which a seemingly chaotic energy reigns. Nezval's language, however, is under absolute control, allowing him to reach into the polychromatic clouds of Surrealist uncertainty to form shapes we recognize, though never expected to see, to meld images and concepts into a constantly developing and dazzling kaleidoscope.

Czech writer Vitezslav Nezval (1900-58) was one of the leading Surrealist poets of the 20th century. Prague with Fingers of Rain is his classic 1936 collection in which Prague's many-sided life - its glamorous history, various weathers, different kinds of people - becomes symbolic of what is contradictory and paradoxical in life itself.