Vítězslav Nezval. Parrot on a Motorcycle. On Poetic Craft

Abstract

The manifesto “Parrot on a Motorcycle. On Poetic Craft” was created by Vítězslav Nezval (1900–1958), a Czech poet, writer, and translator, and the most prominent representative of the Czech avant-garde. This programmatic document became one of the first manifestations of the specific Czech avant-garde movement known as poetism. The text of the manifesto was first published in July 1924 in the journal Host (The Guest), which was considered in the 1920s to be the tribune of Czech expressionists, and later in the Pantomime anthology (Pantomima, September 1924), a publication that was pivotal for the formation of poetism. The manifesto has been translated into Russian before; however, the translation by L.N. Budagova, which was included in Nezval's two-volume selected works, is based on the version of the manifesto published in Pantomime. In contrast, the present translation is based on the version from the journal Host, which was later included in the anthology of Czech avant-garde manifestos published by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The translation is formatted in accordance with the original journal publication, preserving the text's layout in two columns. This reflects the parallel development of the two semantic parts of the manifesto: the poetic part (“Parrot on a Motorcycle”) and the “theoretical” part (“On Poetic Craft”).

Funding

The research was funded by the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 25-28-02368, https://rscf.ru/en/project/25-28-02368/

Received 26 February 2026

Revised 6 April 2026

Accepted 2 June 2026

For citation: Vinokurova, L.A., 2026. Vítězslav Nezval. Parrot on a Motorcycle. On Poetic Craft. Slavic World in the Third Millennium, 21 (1–2), pp. 326–333. https://doi.org/10.31168/2412-6446.2026.21.1-2.18