Jindřich Toman

This book on Jewish culture and literature focuses on the “quiet” decades of the nineteenth century, a scarcely written-about period of time in Bohemian Jewish history. Using a myriad of sources, including travelers’ accounts, poems, essays, short stories, guides, and newspaper articles, the volume explores Jewish expression, Jewish-Czech relations, and the changing attitudes toward Jews between the 1820s and 1880s. It offers close readings of writers like Karel Havlíček Borovský, Ján Kollár, Siegfried Kapper, and Jan Neruda, as well as lesser-known authors and sources. Combining skillful sustained analysis, judicious argumentation, and elegant writing, the book is a truly enriching reading experience.

Texts, Contexts, Reassessments

Bohemia’s Jews and Their Nineteenth Century

Functional Categories in Slavic Syntax. The Ann Arbor meeting

Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics

Many avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century found an entirely unique expression in Czechoslovakia. Cubism was perhaps the supreme instance of this; as Czech art historian Miroslav Lamac famously commented, around 1912, "Prague became the city of Cubism with Cubist apartment blocks full of Cubist flats furnished with Cubist furniture. The inhabitants could drink coffee from Cubist cups, put flowers in Cubist vases, keep the time on Cubist clocks, light their rooms with Cubist lamps and read books in Cubist type." Today a rich literature has arisen on Czech Cubist painting and architecture, but the role of book design in Czech Cubism has not been the subject of a study. This wonderful volume collects book designs by Frantisek Kysela, V. H. Brunner, Jaroslav Benda and Method Kaláb, tracing its impact on typography in early 1920s Czechoslovakia.

Czech Cubism and the book

Michael Makin

A Michigan Slavic Colloquium

On Karel Čapek

Jindrich Toman is especially adept at showing how characteristics of the spirit of the age, such as the ideal of collective activity, the idea of a synthesis of knowledge, and an emphasis on a socially defined commitment to scholarship, became embedded in the Prague Circle's program.

Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle

The Magic of a Common Language

Photomontage was pioneered as a technique in central Europe in the 1910s, where it flourished as an art form through the end of World War II. While German artists such as John Heartfield, Max Ernst and Hannah Höch used the medium to respond to the atrocities of war, other areas of Europe were simultaneously experiencing a newfound political autonomy as the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed. For these artists, namely Polish and Czech, photomontage manifested itself in a Surrealist approach to cut-and-paste imagery that emphasized its potential for visual poetry. Photo/Montage in Print traces the explosion of photomontage art in book cover design and illustrated magazines in the interwar period. Documenting the remarkable contributions of Czech artists in the creation of the visual language of modern print media, the publication includes some of the leading artists of the Czech avant garde such as Karel Teige, Jindrich Styrsky, Toyen, Ladislav Sutnar and Frantisek Muzika.

Jindřich Toman

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