Jazyková komika: estetická studie [Linguistic humor: an aesthetic study].

Brouk, Bohuslav.

Prague: Václav Petr, 1941. Octavo. Original decorative card wrappers, with the publisher’s original printed wrap-around band; 120, [2] pp. Very good. Wrappers by the painter Karel Černý.

First edition of this work by Czech psychoanalyst, philosopher, art theoretician, and writer Bohuslav Brouk, one of the first promoters of Freud’s work in Czechoslovakia. He was a close friend of Karel Teige and a co-founder of the Czech Surrealist Group in 1934. Considered one of the most original minds of the Czech avant-garde, he was also seen as its enfant terrible. Brouk’s postscript for Štyrský’s Emily Comes to Me in a Dream (1933), a defense of erotic literature, revealed his great interest in sexual freedom, individual creativity, and modern artistic tendencies. His research in the early 1930s focused on topics such as masturbation, sexology, and fetishes, and his works were often censored. With a trenchant wit and rhetorical talent, he set out to destroy what he saw as everyday myths that make a meaningless existence bearable: ethics, work, sport, and marriage, among others. After the war, he was an outstanding public critic of communist ideology and fled the country after the 1948 coup. KVK and OCLC show copies at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Chicago, Illinois, British Library, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, FU Berlin, Stockholm, Bamberg, Würzburg, Zürich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Regensburg.

Book ID: P5041

Price: $450.00