The literary and cultural journal Moderní revue has decisive importance for understanding the Czech fin-de-siècle. During the journal's heyday from the mid-1890s to the early 1900s—the journal lasted until 1925, though its final decades saw its influence steadily decline—it was the central organ of Czech Decadence and was steered by four outstanding figures of early Czech modernism. Arnošt Procházka, the founding editor, found only mixed success as a poet but gained enormous cultural authority through his command of this journal. Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic is one of the most recognized names of Czech literary Decadence but also, at real personal risk, publicly condemned the injustice of the 1895 Oscar Wilde trial and broke taboos by publishing openly homoerotic poems in the pages of Moderní revue. Karel Hlaváček was a gifted illustrator and surely the outstanding poet of the group, whose 1898 cycle Mstivá kantiléna (Vengeful Cantilena) is a gem of early Czech modernist literature. Stanislav Kostka Neumann proved a literary chameleon, passing through decadent, anarchist, and Proletkult phases to end up as a luminary of hardline cultural orthodoxy in communist Czechoslovakia after World War II. In its glory years Moderní revue was often mocked for pretention and posturing, but it was vitally important as a conduit of wider European cultural impulses, from French Symbolism to Oscar Wilde to Friedrich Nietzsche, into Czech modernist culture.
Stewart's impressive study—originally a Habilitationsschrift though more readable than many such publications—is no straightforward literary history but rather examines the journal over the thirty years of its existence as an “institution of cultural transfer” and a “textual ensemble” (23, 33). He thus draws on two main methodological sources: first, periodical studies, which understands journals as complex entities requiring contextualization as a full corpus rather than as mere containers for discrete texts; and second, the multicultural, multilingual understanding of Prague modernism as harbor for subtle interactive dynamics between Czech- and German-language literature in this period.
The three capacious chapters and briefer “coda” of the study each apply distinct yet complementary frameworks to the material at hand. The first chapter provides a historical overview of the journal's themes, contributors, and international connections over the three decades of its existence, and traces its progression from radical aestheticism (which nonetheless had political repercussions through the journal's daring intervention in debates about Wilde's trial) to defense of its own orthodoxy as the journal became an established venue, to its aesthetically and politically hidebound final years, when the journal took increasingly vile positions marked by xenophobic nationalism, racism, and antisemitism. Chapter 2 investigates Decadence as cultural category both across Europe as a whole and in its particular Czech manifestation. This discussion effectively links theoretical tensions in the association of Decadence with “modernism” to the paradoxes of the journal's history, over the course of which the adjective moderní became increasingly unfitting. This chapter also includes extensive comparative discussion of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis with a prose-poem by Karel Hlaváček depicting the (metaphorical) transformation of its protagonist into a spider—a valuable contribution to the growing scholarship on “Kafka and Czech literature.” Chapter 3 examines the multi-medial nature of the journal's dual emphasis on literature and visual arts, as well as providing detailed analysis of how the design of the journal and its related book publications itself pursued programmatic aims. (Illustrations, unfortunately, are reproduced in regrettably small format.) The concluding coda uses Pierre Bourdieu's notions of “field” and “habitus” to investigate some of the polemics that were such a marked feature of the Czech cultural landscape at the time, some of which were truly petty and personal while others reflected significant discursive tensions.
One might wish for further examination of Czech cultural antecedents (authors such as Jakub Arbes, Jan Neruda, and Julius Zeyer), successors (the paradoxical relation of the journal to the 1920s avant-garde) and competitors (the journal Volné směry, propagating many similar cultural impulses yet separated by personal animosities) for the journal's particular conception of modernist Decadence. Many readers would also likely be interested to know that Moderní revue published several original poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (in German) in the late 1890s, a fact Stewart notes but does not discuss in any detail. It is, admittedly, mildly perverse to lament that a scrupulously researched, 500-page monograph has not examined even more topics. So perhaps the preceding comments can be reformulated as the hope that the author—for whom bohemistika constitutes only one of several areas of expertise—will find time and inspiration for related studies in the future.
