In the history of the European avant-garde, zone compositions have appeared along the seams between entities. Likewise Czech avant-gardists saw Apollinaire’s Zone as a poem of transition, and it is essential to identify whence and whither, and to subsequently correct the established explanation of the Czech historical avantgarde’s attitude towards memory and the past. The early Czech avant-garde saw itself as a movement without a history, emerging from point zero, but zone compositions are substantially oriented towards the past. Memory, past and myth form an integral part of zone compositions — the forms of the modern-age epic. Within the context of the long compositions of European modernism, this study analyses Czech zone compositions as a special form of the epic, as an alternative pole of the Czech historical avant-garde.
The present study deals with Růžena Svobodová’s prose work from the turn of the century. It views the novels Zamotaná vlákna (Tangled Threads, 1899), Milenky (Mistresses, 1902) and the collection of short stories Pěšinkami srdce (The Paths of the Heart, 1902) as aesthetic phenomena, through which it is to some extent possible to (re-)construct the literary debate going on at that time, its trends and its transformations. By interpreting these novels and short stories against the backdrop of our knowledge of the author’s early works, as well as by comparing their journal and book versions, we aim to identify new elements in their content and form, which are essentially a manifestation of movements in the literary field.