Peter Steiner

Poem as Manifesto: Mandel'štam's “Notre Dame”

Notre Dame Где римский судия судил чужой народ — Стоит базилика, и радостный и первый, Как некогда Адам, распластывая нервы, Играет мышцами крестовый легкий свод. Но выдает себя снаружи тайный план: Здесь позаботилась подпружных арок сила, Чтоб масса грузная стены не сокрушила, И свода дерзкого бездействует таран. Стихийный лабиринт, непостижимый лес, Души готической рассудочная пропасть, Египетская мощь и христианства робость, С тростинкой рядом — дуб, и всюду царь — отвес. Но чем внимательней, твердыня Notre Dame, Я изучал твои чудовищные ребра, Тем чаще думал я: из тяжести недоброй И я когда-нибудь прекрасное создам.

Justice in Prague, Political and Poetic: Some Reflections on the Slansky Trial (with Constant Reference to Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera)

This article deals with the proceedings against the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Rudolf Slánsky, and thirteen other high officials. The most striking feature of confessional trials such as his is the lack of any manifest culpability for gross miscarriages of justice. To explain the phenomenon, this essay draws an analogy to poetic techniques that inform Franz Kafkas universe of discourse (prolepsis, actualization of figures of speech, illocutions lacking conventional force). The concluding section illustrates how guilt that was suppressed for fifteen years burst into the open in Milan Kunderas novel The Joke, and how this text prefigured the discourse of reformist Communism during Prague spring of 1968.

From the History of the Pre-Marxist Aesthetics in Bohemia: Herbartian Formalism

ABSTRACT From a bird’s eye view, the history of nineteenth-century aesthetics can be cast in terms of strife between two mutually opposed philosophical camps. On the one hand, the champions of a content-oriented understanding of beauty as the sensory manifestation of the idea (the followers of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) and, on the other hand, the formalists (inspired by Johann Friedrich Herbart) who conceived of beauty as a purely relational category devoid of any content. This article focuses on the robust development of the formal school at Prague University after 1850 exemplified by the theories of Robert Zimmermann (1824–1898), Josef Durdík (1837–1902), and Otakar Hostinský (1847–1910). It concludes with posing the question whether the structuralist aesthetics advanced in mid-1930s by the Prague Linguistic Circle was not, in fact, an echo of the indigenous Herbartian formalism.