Queer Embodiment in the Czech Proto-Avant-Garde: Comparing the Poetry of Otokar Březina and Jiří Mordechai Langer

• In Event: Reframing Gender and Sexuality in Slavic Literary Modernisms and Avant-Gardes

Abstract

Otokar Březina (1868–1929) is the foremost representative of symbolism in Czech literature, remarkable for his cosmic beliefs, visionary metaphors and abstract spirituality. While Březina did not thematize physical eroticism in his work, the poet’s sexuality never aligned with mainstream models of the Czech/Austro-Hungarian fin de siècle. In fact, his poetry lends itself to a “queer” reading according to Nietzsche’s injunction in his “Gay Science”: “We, however, want to become who we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!” Because Březina’s work eludes everyday logic and requires a philosophically trained reader, its “queer” elements have not been sufficiently addressed in scholarship. In my paper, I seek to highlight the queer side of Březina by juxtaposing him with Jiří Mordechai Langer, a friend of Franz Kafka, whose Hasidic social life resulted in deeply homoerotic religious and poetic texts. When read together, Březina and Langer emerge as two queer outsiders who drew on major trends in fin de siècle discourse, from Nietzsche to the Kabbalah, to give literary form to non-heteronormative conceptions of spiritual existence. This symbolist legacy proved vital in the 1920s, when Březina (even before his death in 1929) became a major precursor to the Czech avant-garde, especially surrealism (Jindřich Štyrský, Toyen), contributing to the emergence of a Czech “minor literature” as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari.

Author

• Alexander Wöll, U of Potsdam (Germany)