Abstrakt
This article undertakes a significant correction of received narratives and chronologies of modernism via extensive sarchival research of an understudied chapter in the historyof Dada: the richly multi-directional and rambunctiou sactivities of its Prague and Bohemian practitioners. The article's scope encompasses literature, theatre, the visual arts and performance, all the better to respond to a complicated cultural-political context of divided, Czech and German, allegiances.
As the authors show, the loosely connected group's spoofing anti-authoritarian Dada gestures spilt over the (post)imperial cultural-political context and nettled even the figureheads of international Dada. The protagonist of these findings may well be Melchior Vischer, the author of the sole-known Dada novel (however self-defeating that definition may be), but the other revelations brought by the essay are no less noteworthy, including the marginal involvement in Prague Dada of a polytropic Jaroslav Hašek.