At one point in his remarkable new book, Peter Zusi quotes Czech writer Vitězslav Nezval’s description of the moment when he and Karel Teige “discovered” Poetism, 1920s Czechoslovakia’s trademark avant-garde movement. It was a spring evening, and on a stroll through Prague, among “the rosary beads of streetlights, vomiting drunkards, old beggar-women, and the make-up of prostitutes,” the two men “found a way out from the disharmony of those mummified, poisonous, and wearisome views of the world” (31). Nezval, Zusi dryly notes later, “seemed to need personalized foundation myths for his major developmental shifts.” (55)

It is a striking moment, for if either of these two figures has assumed mythological status in studies of the Czechoslovak avant-garde, it is Teige. This myth rests on the sheer scope of Teige’s critical and artistic work, which traversed architecture, visual media, literature, graphic design, and more. To an equal degree, it has to do with the brevity of his life, which was cut short in 1951, when Teige (a principled Marxist to the end) was hounded by former allies who, as Czechoslovak Stalinism ascended, made political compromises that Teige himself never would. As Zusi observes, however, outside of Czechoslovak studies, the myth vanishes, and Teige remains confoundingly underexamined. While he was in frequent, fruitful dialogue with figures like Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and El Lissitzky, his work has never been absorbed into modernist studies the way theirs has. All of this defines Zusi’s twofold effort: on one hand, to reinsert Teige within the transnational interwar cultural context in which he always belonged; on the other, to deconstruct and reassemble the myth by analyzing the forces that shaped Teige’s work and its vision of a unified avant-garde.

This is no easy task, for Teige was a true polymath. By extension, a Teige scholar must also work across his dizzying number of interests, and Zusi is more than up to the task. Drawing on Teige’s publications, diaries, artworks, and a vast set of secondary sources, he surveys what Teige wrote, what he read, and what he did not read, deftly situating him vis-à-vis figures like G. W. F. Hegel and Friedreich Nietzsche, the Russian and international Constructivists, and Walter Benjamin, as well as domestic interlocutors like literary critic F. X. Šalda, Jan Mukařovský and the Prague Linguistic Circle, and Nezval. This amounts to more than an intellectual biography of one man. It is a revised cultural, intellectual, and political history of the Czechoslovak avant-garde that simultaneously reconfigures histories of interwar modernism and opens new directions for its study.

Take Ch. 6, which begins with Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (1935). By examining Teige’s 1920s writings on what Benjamin described as the decline of the aura of art, Zusi makes the case (in dialogue with Miriam Bratu Hansen, among others) that the essay was less a groundbreaking intervention than a reflection of its time. The point, he emphasizes, is not to argue that Teige got there first. Rather, it is to complicate the picture of the interwar avant-garde that has been drawn through reliance on the languages in which western scholars tend to work (French, German, Russian), and to ask where else the period’s ideas took root, how they circulated, and what this means.

Scholarship like this requires nuanced work in Czech, and Zusi’s dynamic English-language renderings of Teige’s writing are among the book’s gems. Indeed, Teige has been only partially translated (typically within collections on the interwar avant-garde), and if there is one thing that this book makes the reader want more of, it is a complete set of translations, which would be invaluable for research and teaching.

The other thing is the man himself. While The Integrity of the Avant-Garde begins with a biographical chapter, the majority of the book addresses the theoretical and philosophical planes of Zusi’s analysis. Yet this opening chapter is so rich, and Zusi’s observations about Teige so sensitive, that this reviewer, at least, would have gladly read a book-length version of it, perhaps intertwined with philosophy and theory. At times, there’s a novelist’s sensibility to these observations: for instance, Zusi writes of Teige’s nature as “not that of the lone wolf, the prophet in the desert; to fully become himself he needed to be part of something larger than himself” (273). Sentences like these, which illuminate the irreducibly human dimensions of intellectual and political work in the twentieth century, will doubtless help Zusi’s reworking of this avant-garde myth reach the new audiences Teige so richly deserves.