Vlkova 800/31: Memorial to Jaroslav Seifert

The plaque below the bust tells that ‘From 1907 to 1912, the Czech poet and Nobel Prize winner Jaroslav Seifert attended this school’. The school in question, in the district of Žižkov, is now named after the writer.

Strongly influenced by both Dadaism and surrealism, Seifert and his immediate circle were responsible for the foundation, in the 1920s, of a new avant-garde school of writing, ‘Poetism’, which advocated contradiction and discontinuity with the past. It is perhaps understandable that such a movement should find fertile ground in a country that was forging its own new political direction as an independent state.