III In Odeon,16 no. 3, I published an article that was taken by a certain group of leftist cultural operatives as a backflip, with some ascribing to it a retrograde political tendency. And one fine fellow (Karel Teige) even reared his head to use my piece as a pretext for emptying his bladder of the personal bile filling it (see Tvorba, nos. 23 and 2417). I think it’s ludicrous and unnecessary to polemicize with these types of articles. I can only express regret at Teige’s behavior, which lately has verged on the ridiculous. In Tvorba, no. 24, I published a few remarks pertaining to my article in the last issue of Odeon. It can be taken as my response to Julius Fučík, Ivan Sekanina, and Ladislav Štoll.18 Both of Teige’s texts in Tvorba show his chaotic thought process, though to be sure he is less concerned with ideas and matters of principle than with the “case of Jindřich Štyrský.” I have nothing personal against Teige. I concede his undeniable service to modern Czechoslovak culture, even though clearly his activity has never been creative. He has always been a compiler, and the whole of his work is nothing but a compilation of others’ knowledge, others’ theories, others’ artistic approaches, others’ work, etc. Once the torchbearer in a wasteland, today Teige senses his own superfluousness. He has nothing new to offer. And this is the source of his hysteria and his arrant spinsterhood. Teige’s greatness lay in his ability to quickly assimilate the ideas and outcomes of others’ work and to take this paradoxical and complex bonanza that had come his way and toss fistfuls of it all around him until nothing was left for himself. 16 The magazine Odeon – Literární kurýr [Literary Courier Odeon] was published from 1929 to 1931 by Jan Fromek and edited by Jindřich Štyrský. 17 A biweekly leftist magazine for “literary, political, and art criticism” founded in 1925 by the leading literary critic F.X. Šalda and literary historian Otokar Fischer. 18 Julius Fučík (1903–43) was a hack and prominent member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, writing both for Rudé právo and Tvorba. Active in the anti-Nazi resistance, he was imprisoned, tortured, and hanged in Germany. Ivan Sekanina (1900–40) was a left-wing journalist and lawyer on the payroll of the Communist Party. An anti-fascist activist, he was arrested soon after Nazi Germany occupied the Czech lands in March 1939 and ultimately died in Sachsenhausen. Ladislav Štoll (1902–81) was a Marxist literary critic, editor of Rudé právo from 1934, and prominent postwar Communist politician and MP in the National Assembly.
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