On Valerie, Nezval, Max Ernst, and Collage: Variations on a Theme

by Giuseppe Dierna

The Reverend Father Dulac Dessalé: “Rise, bride of Jesus. Follow

me, my beauty, to the cracks in the walls, I who am called cock-
roach and kill-joy . . .” 1

in place of a prologue

Vítězslav Nezval’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was written in

1935 at the height of Surrealist activity in Czechoslovakia, but
stayed tucked away in a drawer for a decade before being pub-
lished. Perhaps the most surrealistic of Nezval’s fiction, it is a text
where the Gothic novel and dream theory combine to produce
one of his more compelling works.2

the gothic novel

Valerie clearly belongs to the tradition of both the roman noir and
the serial novel — tales dispensed in weekly booklets quickly crum-
pled by impatient readers — by virtue of the author’s deliberate use
of some of the compositional elements that define this particular
literary genre.3 The entire plot, for example, revolves around a sin-
gle protagonist, and the narrative structure is broken into short

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chapters where many things happen — a repeating microstructure
that concludes with a sudden, unexpected turn of events. Nezval,
however, has stripped these devices of their earlier function, which
was to keep the reader’s attention and pique interest for further
installments. And if we are to adopt Louise Reybaud’s definition,
the genre is also defined by a typical constellation of characters:

Take a young, unhappy, persecuted woman. Place next to

her a brutal blood-thirsty tyrant, a refined, virtuous squire,
and a hypocritical, perfidious confidant. Once you have all
these characters in hand, briskly mix together into six,
eight, or ten installments and serve warm.4

Yet in Valerie, Nezval frequently likes to break these rules,

when for example he refuses to define with any sort of precision
the time and place where the action is occurring. In other words,
though he drew on Gothic and serial novels for his model, he
placed “certain limitations” on how this model was to be
employed. Wherever possible he lets the narrative slip into the
indeterminate and inexact, ill-defined feelings joining with the
imprecision of tangential details.

a romanticism of the impossible

As is generally known, with the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924

the French Surrealists began immediately to revalue the most gory
offshoot of nineteenth-century Romanticism, the Gothic novel,

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which they held up as the antithesis of “realistic,” psychological
prose. In 1931 ex-surrealist Antonin Artaud publishes his transla-
tion-adaptation of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, one of the most
popular Gothic novels, and in 1932 André Breton writes:

All those castles of Otranto, of Udolfo, of the Pyrenees, of

Lovel, of Athlin, crevassed with great cracks and eaten by
subterranean passages, persisted in the shadiest corner of
my mind in living their factitious life, in presenting their
curious phosphorescence.5

Nezval echoes a similar sentiment in his Foreword to Valerie:

“I wrote this novel out of a love of the mystique in those ancient
tales, superstitions and romances, printed in Gothic script,
which used to flit before my eyes, declining to convey to me
their content.” 6
Though it certainly was not unusual for the Czech avant-garde
to devote attention to genres that were considered “lowbrow,” in
the 1920s their poetics of the “miraculous” and exoticism differed
from their contemporaries among the French Surrealists in that it
steered clear of violence and intractable contrasts, mysteries, enig-
mas, and literature noir. But by the end of this generally optimistic
decade the artistic conception of the Prague Poetists began to
change. In 1929 the Odeon publishing house (which from the
outset supported the group’s publications) brought out a Czech
translation of Lautréamont’s Les chants de Maldoror, the selection
having been made by Karel Teige and Philippe Soupault,7 and
between 1929 and 1930 ten installments of Pierre Souvestra and

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Marcel Allain’s Fantômas adventures, with collages by Jindřich
Štyrský as cover art. So captivated was Štyrský that he wrote in
Odeon’s Literary Bulletin: “In the Fantômas series there is concen-
trated so much horror, blood, and corpses, and yet so much
poetry, moonlit nights, garden parties, the sea, and maidenly
charm, it is simply unthinkable that its author was a mediocre
scribbler-storyteller.” 8
One of the key aspects marking the transition of the Czech
avant-garde from Poetism to Surrealism is just this replacement of
the world of poetry and earthly joys, which was the ideological
linchpin of Poetism, with the macabre and dramatic world of the
subconscious and unknown — Teige’s “black revolutionary roman-
ticism.” Max Ernst thus takes the place of Le Douanier Rousseau.
Teige’s comment about the Romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha in
a 1936 essay is telling:

In the Romantic fondness for phantoms and for the lurid,

for evil and for vice as a means of disturbing the moral
order, for dream, delirium, and the open acceptance of
erotic desire [. . .] in this speculative mix of dream, won-
der, and adventure we see a tendency to escape the narrow
confines into which the bourgeoisie have placed Beauty,
which it has identified with Good.9

And in one of the manifestoes of Poetism, “Kapka inkoustu”

[A Drop of Ink] (1928), Nezval remarks that “the zeal for war is an
infernal obsession devised for the emasculation and eradication of
mankind. The fact that mankind is prey to this deception is

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evinced by a special aura, a veiled drama.”10 But a few years later, as
if echoing the speculations of Edmund Burke on horror as a form
of the sublime, at the premiere of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu in
Prague’s Metro cinema in 1933 he declares: “In art horror is delight-
ful [. . .] In art horror must be more than horror, it must be poetry
if we are not to mistake it for the reading of crime tabloids.”11
When Poetism was finally able to accept the principle that the
nature of drama, and therefore that which inspires horror, can be
the bearer of beauty, the Czech avant-garde entered the subse-
quent, Surrealist phase of its development.

(darkness again) childhood

The Gothic novel interested Nezval not only for its ability to flush
out hidden, “subterranean” human instincts, but also as a way to
extract childhood memories, as if a magnet reaching into the very
depths of memory. His fascination with Murnau’s film was evi-
dent:

The material for the fantastic in Nosferatu is reality, real

objects, obsolete objects, therefore capable of touching our
memories and our dreams, and in this reality lies the film’s
surrealistic charm.12

And as if he were drawing on the magic of objects mentioned by

Breton in Mad Love (“The objects that, between the lassitude of some
and the desire of others, go off to dream at the antique fair . . .”),

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which again appear in Jiří Sever’s cycle of photographs Bez protijedů
[No Antidote],13 Nezval continues:

What makes this old film surrealist is the peculiar selection

of objects which here have their presence [. . .] And if I’m
to express this schematically, they are generally objects
having a patina. That is, what I call a patina is the special
aura surrounding these objects, which are no longer used
in practical life, which were current in our childhood and
have now gone out of fashion and use, having become a
bit ridiculous and very poetic, and while not the most
attractive, they hold captive many of our memories of the
past.14

In addition to rediscovering the time of childhood concealed

in the banal and rather predictable plot structure of the Gothic
novel, Nezval also sets himself the task in Valerie of altering lan-
guage. The attention he gives to language in the novel is far from
negligible. The reader notices right off a stylistic distinction
between the language of direct speech (used by the characters) and
that of indirect speech (used by the narrator), which becomes a
linguistic cliché when the novelistic stereotypes of Valerie, Orlík,
and the other characters are juxtaposed next to the lyrical,
metaphorical voice of the narrator. The syntax imitates the sen-
tence structure of nineteenth-century Czech, and the rhythm of
compound sentences increasingly slows and disintegrates. In this
context, Orlík’s first letter — with its vapid rhetoric, its almost
puerile earnestness — is an excellent example of clever apocrypha.

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The atmosphere of the Gothic novel is also suggested by the
constant repetition of adverbs such as “unexpectedly,” “at once,”
“suddenly,” and a whole host of “howevers,” “althoughs,” and
“yets,” often employed not for the purpose of moving the plot
forward, but to give the false impression that something unfore-
seen has happened, or to jolt and startle the drowsing reader.15
In his attempt to rediscover the Gothic aura and the time of
childhood, Nezval selected words that had been either phased out
of common lexical usage or extracted directly from the traditional
vocabulary of the serial novel, words that were as outdated as the
objects embellishing the background of Murnau’s film: constable,
bed jacket, scapular, burial ground, a convent school for young
girls, an oil lamp . . .

and the butterflies have begun to sing

The magic of oil lamps! A round oil lamp standing on the cliff (the
moon) watches the river’s current carrying off the corset-swan in
Toyen’s collage made for the anthology Neither Swan nor Moon,
published in 1936 by the Czechoslovak Surrealists to commemorate
the one-hundredth anniversary of K. H. Mácha’s death. Nezval
himself in Prague Walker fantasizes about an encounter on Old Town
Square where a widow appears to him who “as a sign of mourning
is carrying a large mirror under her left arm and under her right an
oil lamp of the kind no longer in use,” or how in the locked halls
of the National Museum he encounters a “somnambulant woman
with a lamp in her hand, wandering through the centuries.”16

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 What attracted and fascinated the Surrealists, however, was not
only the undeniable mystery of these oil lamps and lanterns —
“projectionists of images,” “talismans of dreams” (Bachelard)17 —
but the coming together of moths and an entire array of nocturnal
insects toward the source of light. Like the tiny mayflies excitedly
circling the skeleton-candle rising from a candleholder in one of
Toyen’s drawings from her 1944 cycle War, Hide Yourself!, the
Surrealists, too, were drawn to the almost irresistible Baroque
enchantment with light engulfing the body.18
Under figure no. 120 in Max Ernst’s collage novel La femme
100 têtes appears the following caption: “And the butterflies have
begun to sing.” Small butterflies and insects of all types assemble
around the flame of a gaslight, while looming in the background is
a gloomy cemetery with tombstones and skeletons.19 Lamps and
moths often meet in the photographs of Brassaï from the 1930s. In
one of Toyen’s later collages, Natural Law (1946), a lone oil lamp
standing on a table in an empty room casts a triangle of light,
inviting an agitated swarm of tiny winged creatures, and Nezval in
Woman in the Plural recalls “my nights like flies meeting Chinese
lanterns over a pile of feathers.”20
On the novel’s first page “Valerie, an oil lamp in her hand,
entered the yard” and immediately: “A moth circled the lamp.
Then a second, and a third” (13). After a while the setting grows
even more tenebrous: “Not that the lamp could be recognized:
swirling about it were moths from all the surrounding gardens”
(14). And when Valerie quickly runs home in fright at the sight of
her (menstrual) blood: “The moths flew after the lamp as she took

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it with her to light the way down the long corridor leading to her
room” (20).
Similarly, it seems to Valerie as if the moths are the sole inhab-
itants of the Chirico-like deserted town square to where Valerie has
strayed: “Her eyes settled on a tall gas lamp with moths fluttering
around it” ( 39). Yet when Valerie and Orlík have moved to the idyl-
lic region of the novel’s last chapter, we learn that “The lodge was
so high up that not a single moth came flying to the lamp” (193).21
And it should be kept in mind that the Czech noční můra (lit. night
moth) means a nightmare, an incubus.

a week of wonders

In his Nosferatu speech Nezval outlined the elements of analogy

found in poetry and dream that were used to elicit fear in the
viewer (the miraculous in contrast to logic and the “highly absurd
display of the principle of causality”).22 A careful reading of Valerie
reveals it to be an exact description of a dream that gradually
passes into the realm of reality, only to end up in the realm of
myth, a surreal Eden resounding with Mácha’s verse.
That the entire first part of the novel — until Chapter xxxii —
is a narrative of the dream that Valerie is having on the night of her
first menstruation is substantiated by various allusions which
Nezval has scattered between the lines. In reference to the heroine
he says, for example, that “She supposed she was asleep” (48), or
“She stretched out in the carriage as if on a bed” (19), or that “her
spirit wandered like that of someone sleeping” (39).23

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 The novel’s locations also correspond to the author’s impulse
to make the countryside a setting for horror. There are the oppres-
sive atmosphere of the vault under the grandmother’s house and
the close spaces of more common interior, such as the attic and
the henhouse. Even the exteriors, when they become the scene of
the action, conform to this schema. They are either indeterminate,
repeating themselves as if a bad dream (“For the third time, with-
out knowing how, she had entered a deserted square that seemed
to be enchanted” ( 39)) or they are as dark and oppressive as the
interiors. The same goes for the sounds that — again as in a dream
— come to Valerie’s ear muffled and faint (we never know whether
the sound is actual or just a general impression), for everywhere
around her the “silence was so intense she could hear the brook
running” (14).
The dream-like nature of the novel’s first part is further
confirmed by the composition of Valerie’s character. Once again
borrowing elements from the serial novel, Nezval has given her
the ability to be everywhere at once. She continually appears in a
variety of settings either in an active role or as a “passive observer.”
Everything we as readers learn about the course of events (and
thus even misleading information) comes to us via Valerie, who
is in turn identified with the narrator’s voice, his contours and
limitations.

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 max ernst

In his preface to Bridge, Nezval states that Valerie is a “concretely

irrational psychic collage freely borrowing from the genre of so-
called pulp literature everything belonging to the nethermost
regions of our unconscious,”24 and if it is true that he was generally
influenced by Ernst’s work from Une semaine de bonté (1934), then
we should consider what influence the collage as a compositional
technique and source of inspiration had on this curious novel.
Nezval was certainly familiar with Ernst’s collages. He saw them
exhibited in Prague (as he often mentioned in the 1930s), or in
Paris in 1933,25 and the novel’s title clearly suggests a mix of Ernst’s
collage novel and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.26 Further
reference to Une semaine de bonté is made by the missionary in his
sermon: “You are an alabaster hand extended in a house of plague,
infested with flies” (33), which seems to come straight from Ernst’s
“Third Visible Poem” where a long row of clasped white hands is
situated before an empty arid backdrop with a lone egg in an
eggcup an isolated, impassive viewer.27
Similarly, the constable with the head of a polecat evidently
comes from those men with the heads of lions, roosters, and birds
that inhabit the pages of Ernst’s collage novel, even though
humans with the heads of animals (roosters, ostriches, owls, etc.)
began to appear in abundance in Savinio’s work circa 1930-32.28
And in de Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros (1929) — which according
to Karel Teige was the “most magnificent novel in the world” —
“the enigmatic, perturbing, alarming quality of the heads of birds

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had more than once sent Hebdomeros off into complicated med-
itations [. . .] In general he considered birds’ heads as bad omens,
even bearers of misfortune.” 29
In my opinion, however, it is another of Ernst’s collage novels,
A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil (1930), which provides a more
direct model for Valerie. Indeed, at its very outset we read:

On Good Friday night of the shameful year 1930 a child

hardly sixteen years old dipped her hands in a sewer,
pricked her skin and with her blood traced these lines:
To Love the Holy and dip one’s hands in a sewer, such is
happiness for us, the children of Mary.
[She then] went to bed and had the dream that we will try
to relate through pictures in this book.30

From here the novel is narrated in 79 collages, accompanied by

captions at the bottom of the page narrating the young heroine
Marceline-Marie’s quest for the “heavenly groom” in an atmos-
phere of sensual mysticism: “Dear Lord, fondle me as you knew so
well how to do, during the unforgettable night when . . . my soul
was flooded with heavenly dew . . .”31 We are reminded here of the
subtle ambiguity of several passages in Valerie, like the homily from
Chapter iv, for example, which naturally takes as its model the
Song of Songs. And finally the relationship between Marceline-
Marie and the cleric, a relationship built on sexual desire, again
obliges us to draw parallels between Valerie and the missionary on
the one hand and Ernst’s young maiden and the priest on the
other:

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 The priest, gone mad between two masses: “You’re the one
who infests ships, and crawls over the sleeping passengers
at night. You give off a sweetish odor in my most intimate
depths. You are . . .” (Religious silence.)32

“who am i? i myself, my sister or this obscure beetle?”

Even though the motive of doubling the heroine, originally the

“victimized maiden,” is part and parcel of the compositional
framework of the Gothic novel since the time of Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto (1764),33 we may also assume the name of the main
heroine in A Little Girl Dreams is important for the implications it
might have for Valerie. Ernst writes of his heroine:

This double first name is of prime importance in the evo-

lution of the dream that follows. Because it is probably due
to the troubles provoked by the coupling of the two names
of such a very different signification that we will see her slit
herself up the middle of her back from the very beginning
of the dream and wear appearances of two distinct but
closely related persons. “Two sisters,” she told herself in
dreaming, and called one of them “Marceline” and the
other “Marie,” or “I” and “my sister.” 34

The halving of the main heroine into two figures is crucial. It

allows for the physical transformation of Marceline-Marie in vari-
ous collages (just as it allows for the introduction of the theme of

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a girl searching for her identity: “Who am I? I myself, my sister or this
obscure beetle?”35), while at the same time it compels us to view
Valerie and Orlík as two halves of the same being. The entire story
of Valerie is a series of events which eventually culminates in the
reunification of this original being.
Considering the work from this perspective raises other ques-
tions, such as that of woman (love), which in turn is part of the
wider Surrealist theme of searching for one’s soul mate, one’s
opposite half. As Plato stated in Symposium: “For though ‘hermaph-
rodite’ is only used nowaday as a term of contempt, there really
was a man-woman in those days, a being which was half male and
half female.” Zeus, however, cut the being into two halves and
from that time on “it left each half with a desperate yearning for
the other, and they ran together and flung their arms around each
other’s necks, and asked for nothing better than to be rolled into
one.”36 And this is a model that forms the backdrop of a number
of Surrealist works from the 1930s.37
The reader is presented with the fact that in the whole novel
neither Valerie nor Orlík (nor actually any of the other characters)
is clearly defined in terms of their sex. We should keep in mind the
scenes where Valerie receives a passionate kiss from her cousin, her
falling asleep in Hedviga’s embrace, or when Orlík dresses in the
girl’s clothing and later comments to Valerie that he is like her sis-
ter. Likewise, Orlík confides that the constable tried to abuse him
in the past, which brings us to another motif running through the
novel: incest.
The only relationships that fit the mold of “normality,” even

212
though they seem to be intentionally given a negative hue, are
those between the missionary Gratian and Valerie (rather violent)
and her grandmother, and the sexual flirtations between Elsa and
Andrei, the coachman. The other relationships are kept strictly
within the family (into which the Polecat could be included as for
a long while he is considered the father of both Valerie and Orlík).
The form these relationships take often borders on the absurd and
ludicrous: Valerie loves Orlík, her own brother; Elsa, Valerie’s and
Orlík’s grandmother, makes a pass at the latter, her own grandson,
and she kisses Valerie with such passion that we are left in disbelief.
The Polecat for his part tries to abuse Orlík as well as Valerie (his
own children according to the “truth” of the moment provided by
the narrator), while at the end of the novel, as he is on the verge of
dying from a lack of blood, he sucks life from Valerie’s blood-
stained lips, which restores to him his lost strength. In A Little Girl
Dreams, Ernst writes: “The father: ‘Your kiss seems adult, my child.
Coming from God, it will go far. Go, my daughter, go ahead and
. . . count on me!’ ” The collage to which this caption belongs,
coming at the very beginning of the novel, depicts the forbidden
nature of an incestuous kiss between a man and a young girl (the
man’s daughter). By pasting a glass over the union of the lips it
seems Ernst wanted to stress that this act was being concealed.38
The seventeen-year-old twins, each subjected to complemen-
tary trials (of initiation) from which one rescues the other (trial
by water for Orlík, trial by fire for Valerie),39 at times exchanging
clothes, search for one another over the course of the entire
novel, often meeting for brief moments. But their quest is not

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consummated until the final chapter: after a number of swerves,
anxieties, and ordeals, the original androgyne is once again made
whole.

montage

Turning our attention from the thematic to the compositional, it is

conspicuous the extent to which Ernst’s three collage novels were
also incorporated into the inner structure of Nezval’s narrative. If
Ernst borrowed illustrations from the French serial novel Les
damnées de Paris by Jules Mary (1883) for some of his collages in Une
semaine de bonté, changing their meaning in a very slight, almost
invisible manner so that they told an entirely new “story which the
reader can connect to the apparent content of the novel, as if the
content were additional and latent,”40 Nezval similarly enjoyed
playing with the compositional elements of the Gothic novel’s
codified system.
Similar to Ernst’s collage novels, Valerie works on two different
narrative levels: 1) as mentioned, that of the Gothic, the story of
poor Valerie tormented by the typical inhabitants of this genre (a
level that is weighed down by the ballast of situations and expres-
sions that are largely pointless for advancing the plot); 2) the level
of the reader, which Nezval accomplishes by incorporating ele-
ments of other genres, such as the head of a polecat affixed to the
figure of the constable, the sexual ambiguity of the missionary’s
words, or several images seeming to have been torn right out of

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one of those anatomical handbooks that so fascinated the
Surrealists. One senses that behind the words the Polecat delivers
in his sermon — “Your womb is an alabaster bowl, which I bless
with forefinger and thumb” (37) — lies the practice of gynecology,
informed perhaps by an illustrated Home Doctor, from which
Štyrský liberally took material for his collages to Nezval’s “Sexual
Nocturne” and his cycle Moveable Cabinet.41
That the novel continues to function simultaneously on these
two levels until Chapter xxxii allows flashes of a hidden, latent
layer, the world of sensuality — which in the Gothic novel is
confined to the removed margins of violence — to penetrate the
apparent tranquility of the guileless Valerie and her grandmother.
And as a hall of mirrors, or a combination of redundancies under-
scoring (and transforming into metaphor) the dual level of the
novel’s reading, like the long vaults under Bluebeard’s house where
lie women’s hands and legs, the undeclared fragments of annihi-
lated desire,42 Grandmother’s house also reveals to the reader its
own secret life, an inconceivable labyrinth of twisting and turning
subterranean passages that Valerie navigates in fear.

the monk and other models

The underground spaces of the Gothic novel, the long corridors

which “exist only for themselves, becoming the essence of the
building,”43 the crypts and burial sites, borrowed directly from The
Monk (a novel so loved by Nezval that he commissioned a private

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translation into Czech), form the focal point of the action, the
most advantageous place to glean information and move the plot
forward.44
Nezval borrowed, however, more from The Monk than just its
spatial structure (which had already been codified into the Gothic
tradition), he also made use of other elements (what have largely
become the genre’s topoi) such as the sleeping potion that simu-
lates the death of Antonia (in Valerie it is a pellet), or the themes
and motifs of disguises, incest, siblings separated at birth; and
even the story of Valerie’s mother, Matilda, who though
sequestered in a convent still manages to become pregnant, bears
a striking similarity to Agnes’s fate in The Monk. There are further
parallels: Gratian’s violent attempt to deflower Valerie is based on
the closing scene in the vaults of St. Clare, where Antonia is
defiled by the monk Ambrosio; the frantic nighttime ride of the
carriage without horses that in Lewis carries away the unsuspecting
Lorenzo and the Bleeding Nun is a direct precursor to the carriage
that drives off from Grandmother’s house only to return with
Valerie’s mother for a final reunion scene. Even the dynamic
between characters in Valerie mirrors The Monk. But whereas Nezval
divides the character of Ambrosio between the Polecat and
Gratian, his trio of Elsa, Gratian, and Valerie directly corresponds
to the triangle of Ambrosio, Matilda, and Antonia.45
I would suggest Marquis de Sade’s Justine, ou les Malheurs de la
Vertu as another model for Valerie. It seems Nezval took from
Justine both the motif of the victimized maiden and that of unrec-
iprocated kindness (which in the first two versions of Sade’s novel

216
is a structural element),46 and perhaps the final scene as well,
where lightning rends the sky and penetrates Justine’s body, rip-
ping her in two and thereby ending her terrestrial life in truly grue-
some fashion. In Valerie, it is a thunderclap that brings her long
week of wonders to an end.47
According to Silvio D’Arco Avalle:

Justine is not merely a persecuted innocent young girl [. . .]

Her adventures do more than demonstrate that it is virtue
and not vice which is usually punished, and the story is
primarily a sexual initiation that the heroine has refused in
the name of ethical principles without taking into consid-
eration the laws of nature.48

Yet Valerie is just the opposite: she is ardently seeking out her own
sexuality and the trials that would allow her to attain it. And the
place where this search occurs is the favored realm of the
Surrealists: the dream. But rather than being rough documentary
material encoded in subconscious communications in need of
interpretation, it has become theater, mise-en-scène, spectacle: the
dream has become the staging of the dream.49

(good night, echo)

Valerie can be divided into three parts, each of which corresponds

to three distinct locations: dream (i-xxxii); reality (xxxiii-xxxvi);
a “new” reality (xxxvii-xxxviii); or, to use other words, the sub-

217
conscious, the conscious, “surreality.” And it is precisely in this
privileged realm of dream that the most important events take
place. It is where Valerie gradually takes possession of her sexuality
(which is identified with her coming closer to Orlík, her missing
half ); where there are the trials of initiation by fire and water; and
where there is a continual succession of finding and losing. This
lasts until the end of Chapter xxxii, at which point the missionar-
ies leave and the scene calms so that Valerie can finally go home
and sleep without fear, because, as she thinks to herself: “I have
nothing to fear if he [Orlík] is this close-by” (169).
Chapters xxxiii to xxxvi are marked by a slow shift from
dream to reality. The reconnections that occurred on the dream
level should now be relocated to real time and space. Whereas the
preceding chapters were marked by opacity and vagueness, every-
thing, such as feelings and sounds, now gradually becomes more
defined even though they are phenomena lingering from the
dream realm.
The elements that mediate this passage from the subconscious
to the conscious are Orlík’s letter, confirming his presence on the
narrative plane to which he doesn’t belong (i.e., the layer of reality),
and the scapular. But these objects slowly fade away and disappear
(turn to dust), like the memories of a dream at daybreak. At this
moment nothing any longer prevents Valerie from connecting to
her missing half to reunify the androgyne. And this concluding
reunification (another reminder of the “recognition” of old serial
novels) takes place in the embrace of mother.50
Reality now has no meaning or consistency: the scapular dis-

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integrates before Valerie’s eyes and Grandmother’s house, beset by
cracks, comes crashing down in much the same way and with a
similar roar like the House of Usher, or Castle Otranto. Dream
and reality have finally coalesced into what Breton in the First
Manifesto of Surrealism called: “a kind of absolute reality, a surre-
ality, if one may so speak.”51
The topography of the final chapter is quite the opposite of
those dark, close, oppressive spaces found in the previous chapters.
Now there appears an open sky and broad horizon.52 Even the
style of the prose shifts. The artificial and at times stilted language
of the characters as well as the metaphorical lyricism of the narra-
tor, which exuded such a powerful, dominant sensuality, have
ceased to have effect, fading away into a fairy-tale landscape, a
minor Arcadia, and Orlík’s greeting to nature is virtually the same
as Mácha’s pilgrim roaming the Krkonoše Mountains.53
All that remains is for Valerie with a final quiver to cuddle up
to Orlík, her twin and double, and begin to sing a last song, a song
addressed at the same time to both male and female lover: the
reunified androgyne is now speaking with a single voice. Having
narrated a quest, described the tenacious search for one’s identity
— close kin to Ernst’s A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil and
Breton’s Nadja — Valerie and Her Week of Wonders closes in the
serenity of gratification (where even Mácha’s antagonism between
the individual and nature has been mollified), in the sublimation
of conflict, in the “innocent, happy lost paradise of childhood.”

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 1. Max Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil / Rêve d’une petite
fille qui voulut entrer au carmel, trans. Dorothea Tanning (New York: George
Braziller, 1982), 48-49.
2. When Valerie and Her Week of Wonders came out in 1945, Czech
critics paid little attention to it. The reviews that did appear were largely
negative. Only Ludvík Kundera in a review in Mladý archy II (1945/46):
133-34, drew attention to the “novel itself,” acknowledging its origins in
the dark tradition of French and German Romanticism (while also making
reference to Ernst’s Une semain de bonté ).
3. Recognizing that Valerie was written in the vein of a serial novel,
Lhoták chose engravings from 19th-century illustrated magazines. The
illustration on p. 71, for example, originally appeared in Světozor (12 (1890):
137) under the caption “Parisian wedding,” while the illustration on p. 35
accompanied an account of “Stanley’s expedition to rescue Emin Pasha,”
(Světozor, 17 (1890): 201). In the review cited above, L. Kundera notes that
the majority of Lhoták’s illustrations were “originally images from old chil-
dren’s books, or travel books, from which Lhoták just made a selection.”
4. Louis Reybaud Jérôme Paturat à la recherche d’une position sociale, vol. 1
(Paris, 1842), 149. Reybaud further states: “Chiefly in the style, sir, will you
recognize the natural author of a serial novel. It is important that each
installment contains a succession of dramatic events, so that an umbilical
cord of a kind connects it to subsequent installments, thereby evoking, pro-
voking even, a craving and impatience to read further. Just a moment ago
you spoke of art; and this is art. The art or arousing desire, expectation.”
5. André Breton, Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and
Geoffrey T. Harris, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 99. A
Czech translation appeared in 1934.
6. Maurice Heine’s fascinating article on illustrations found in Gothic
novels, “Promenade à travers le roman noir,” Minotaure 5 (May 1935), could
have been another source of inspiration for Valerie.
7. The edition was translated into Czech by Teige and Jindřich Hořejší
and included drawings by Jindřich Štyrský.

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 8. Jindřich Štyrský, “Fantomas,” Odeon. Literárni kurýr, 1, no. 8
(Odeon, May 1930): 122.
9. Karel Teige, “Revoluční romantik K.H. Mácha,” in Ani labuť ani
Lůna, ed. Vítězslav Nezval (Prague: Otto Jirsák, 1936), 23-24. And further:
“Poetry as a manifestation of the contradictions between the primitive
dream of freedom and the disgraceful absence of freedom in a world of
classes [. . .] poetry as revolt, which has become an ingrained and all-
powerful need of the being destroyed by society, was set ablaze by dark
Romanticism” (24-25).
10. Vítězslav Nezval, “Kapka inkoustu,” ReD, 1, 9 (1927-28): 309.
11. Vítězslav Nezval, “Upír Nosferatu,” in Dílo, XXV (Prague:
Československý spisovatel, 1974), 465-466. On terror as a form of the sub-
lime see Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1756).
12. V. Nezval, “Upír Nosferatu,” 464.
13. André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 28. An excerpt originally appeared in
Documents 34 (June 1, 1934) and appeared in Czech translation in
Surrealismus (1936). Sever’s photographs appear in Ladislav Souček, Jiří
Sever (Prague: Odeon, 1968).
14. V. Nezval, “Upír Nosferatu,” 463-64. It is worth noting the simi-
larity between these objects and those “that can be found nowhere else:
old-fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse —
at least in the sense I give to the word and which I prefer,” mentioned by
Breton in Nadja [trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 52;
the Czech translation appeared in 1935]. Puppets, mannequins, and the
object interested the Surrealists only insofar that they maintained a very
loose connection to real referents, because, as Nezval explains in the pref-
ace to his play Milenci z kiosku [Kiosk Lovers] “by using junk items the
artist disposes the spectator to accepting and grasping this wave of the
surreal” (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1932), 16.
15. As Nezval explains: “The most typical element of surrealistic

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horror is surprise. If we were to record our dreams we would probably
often use such words as ‘suddenly,’ ‘unexpectedly,’ ‘all at once,’ ‘at that
moment.’ ” In V. Nezval, “Upír Nosferatu,” 463.
16. Vítězslav Nezval, Pražský chodec (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1938), 161, 182.
Perhaps Nezval was thinking of Toyen’s collage for the Mácha anthology
when in his book for children Anička skřítek a slaměný Hubert [Anna the Elf
and Strawman Hubert] he writes: “and pour what’s left [in the bottle] into
the lovely stream where glowing lamps are floating” (Prague: Dědictví
Komenského, 1936), 56.
17. Gaston Bachelard, La flamme d’une chandelle (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1961).
18. As Fridrich Bridel (1619-1680) wrote in Co Bůh? Človek? (1658): “I
am the torch of Hell / the eternally burning flame / an unquelled fire /
food, nourishment, fodder.” The drawings from Toyen’s cycle Schovej se,
válko! were published in 1946 by Fr. Borový. They are reproduced in
Lenka Bydžovská and Karel Srp, eds., Český Surrealismus 1929-1953
(Prague: Argo, 1996), 343.
19. See Werner Spies, Max Ernst — Collagen, Inventar und Widerspruch
(Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1974), fig. 120. In English as Max Ernst
Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe, trans. John William Gabriel
(New York: Abrams, 1991).
20. Vítězslav Nezval, “Meteor,” in Žena v množném čísle, (Prague: Fr.
Borový, 1936), 25. Brassaï’s photographs appear in Minotaure 7 ( June 1935).
Toyen’s collage is reproduced in Štyrský – Toyen – Heisler (Paris: Centre G.
Pompidou, 1982), 51.
21. In Nezval’s novel Posedlosti [Obsessions], which anticipates many
of the themes he would return to in Valerie (the smell of incense in
churches, dreams of lustful monks, incest), the hero, Ludvík, is initially
saved from committing suicide by moths flying to a lamp (Prague: Sfinx,
1930), 243-45.
22. V. Nezval, “Upír Nosferatu,” 463.
23. Or: “A strange dream descended onto her eyelids, despite her

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being awake” (38); “She was moving as if in a dream” (45); “I’m acting like
a sleepwalker” (118).
24. Vítězslav Nezval, “Předmluva k dosavadnímu dílu,” in Most
(Prague: Fr. Borový, 1937), 54.
25. See in particular “Sexual Nocturne” in Edition 69 (Prague: Twisted
Spoon Press, 2004), 34 and Řetěz štěstí (Prague: V. Čejka, 1936), 90.
26. On the title page of the carbon copy, dedicted to Štyrský and
deposited together with the original in the Museum of Czech Literature,
next to the definitive title there is also an earlier working title: “Valerie and
the Twenty-seven Wonders,” with the subtitle: “A Surrealistic Novel.”
Both are crossed out.
27. Reproduced in Max Ernst, Une semaine de bonté: A Surrealistic Novel
in Collage (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), 195. I presume that
Nezval’s “alabaster hand” is also a reference to the “tiny alabaster hand”
mentioned by Štyrský in his dream of May 25, 1928 and in his short prose
“Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream” where he relates his first autoerotic expe-
rience from childhood. For both see Edition 69 op. cit. Among Nezval’s
papers is a copy of the fourth booklet of Une semaine de bonté (it was origi-
nally published in five booklets) bearing a dedication from Max Ernst.
28. See Fagiolo dell’Arco, Alberto Savinio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989) in par-
ticular figs. 43, 73-80, 89, 99, 101, 102.
29. Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1992),
16. Teige’s statement comes from Zvěrokruh, 1 (1930): 38. Yet another model
could be argued to have provided the general outlines for the Polecat
based on Nezval’s comment about Lautréamont a few years before: “the
poet of Maldoror appears to be an apocalyptic and Jesuit missionary,
who, spiritually tending toward order, suggests all the horrors of hell.
Hell is found in the human heart, in that horrific storehouse of evil,
which human reason has endowed with greater cruelty than blood has an
animal’s heart [. . .] It is no accident that the co-heroes of Maldoror’s
clairvoyant chants are the most revolting of beasts.” V. Nezval,
“Maldoror,” ReD, 2, no. 8 (1928/29): 262.

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 30. Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, 8.
31. Ibid., 100-103.
32. Ibid., 52-53.
33. See Carla Corti, “Il doppio come paradigma fantastico-gotico,” Il
confronto letterario, 16 (1991): 310.
34. Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, 9-10.
35. Ibid., 50-51.
36. Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce in The Collected Dialogues of
Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1961), 542-543.
37. Cf. Xaviére Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard,
1971) for a limited interpretation of Plato by the French Surrealists. Also
see Albert Béguin’s erudite article “L’Androgyne,” Minotaure, 4, no. 11
(1938): 10-13, 66; and Jehan Sylvius and Pierre de Ruysnes (long held to be
Robert Desnos), La papesse du diable (1931) [The Devil’s Popess, trans. Iain
White (London: Atlas Press, 1999)], a winsome novella of fantastic-utopian
eroticism that has as its central figure the Great Androgyne, a new deity
ushered in by the Queen of the World, the Archimagess.
The motif of the androgyne undoubtedly piqued Nezval’s interest. In
a playful questionnaire circulated by the Czech Surrealists, “An attempt at
recognizing the irrationality of a fountain pen,” his answer to the question
“Define the sex of the object ‘pen’ ” was: “androgynous (hollow like a
female while elongated like a male).” In Surrealismus, op. cit., 35.
38. Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, 14-17.
39. And I think it is no accident that water and fire are the elements
of the second and third books respectively of Une semaine de bonté.
40. Cf. Werner Spies, “Die Semaine de Bonté unseres Jahrhunderts.” in
Max Ernst: Jenseits der Malerei — Das graphische Oeuvre. Exh. cat. (Hannover:
Kestner Museum, 1972).
41. Manuals similar to those “illustrated appendices from medical
folios” that young Ludvík of Posedlosti eagerly looks for in his family’s
library (74) and from which Nezval possibly drew to create the dream

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images in Chtěla okrást lorda Blamingtona (Prague: Odeon, 1930): the
mother with “her head covered by burning pustules,” or the grandmother
lying “eviscerated on the ground” (15). For reproductions of Štyrský’s
Stěhovací kabinet see Bydžovská and Srp, Český Surrealismus, 134-145.
42. Cf. V. Nezval, Řetéz štěstí, 160.
43. Jean Roudaut, “Les demeures dans le roman noir,” Critique no. 57-
58 (August-September 1959): 722.
44. In one poem from Žena v množném čísle Nezval writes: “Their
unrusted curls / Scented with cellars / I enjoyed entering like a monk /
With forbidden hymnals” (27).
45. And when Valerie finds Orlík on the square dressed in her clothes,
he angrily cries: “I’m not a girl, do you hear? I’m not a girl”(40). The
reader is at once reminded of the scene in The Monk where Matilda,
dressed as the novice Rosario, reveals her identity to Ambrosio and opens
her heart to him: “ ‘Father!’ continued He in faltering accents, ‘I am a
Woman!’ ” (1796; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 58.
46. When Orlík sees that Valerie is resolved to help her father who is
dying from a lack of blood, he warns her: “Don’t be a victim of your own
goodness!” (116).
47. Justine was first translated and published in Czech in 1932 (illus-
trated by Toyen) as volume 2 of Štyrský’s Edition 69 series (a fragment pre-
viously appearing in ReD, March 1929), and it was based on the original
1787 manuscript titled Les Infortunes de la Vertu, published by Maurice
Heine in Paris in 1930. Štyrský was also responsible for printing in Erotické
revue extracts from Sade’s Juliette (1930) and two of his short prose pieces
(1933). A number of pieces he dedicated to the “divine marquis” were pre-
liminary work on a planned biography that was left unfinished. Around
the same time, Heine connected Sade to the tradition of the Gothic
novel in his article “Le marquis de Sade et le roman noir,” La nouvelle revue
francaise (1933): 190-206.
48. Silvio D’Arco Avalle, “Da Santa Ulivia a Justine,” in Veselovskij-
Sade, La fanciulla perseguitata, (Milan: Bompiani, 1977), 15-16. There are,

225
however, several clear signals scattered throughout the novel’s dialogue
(“I’ve come to liberate you.”(91); “I don’t avoid suffering.” (92); “Well
then, give me your hand. I’ll lead you.” (92); “Orlík [. . .] why have you
forsaken me?”(159)) which give the impression that behind Valerie and
Orlík stands the figure of the suffering Christ, the origin and dominant
model for most of medieval hagiography from which Justine herself
descends. For another historical perspective on the evolution of the “per-
secuted maiden” theme see Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus
Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933).
49. Cf. Giovanna Franci, La messa in scena del terrore (Ravenna: Longo,
1982), 33-34.
50. After repeatedly stressing that the French Surrealists often
identified the woman with the mother, X. Gauthier ends his analysis with
the following: “In this fashion the Surrealist revolution again returns to the
innocent, happy lost paradise of childhood, the golden age of the begin-
ning. To remove the father, or to destroy him outright, implied a return to
the singular relationship with the mother, to remaining in her womb, a
return to the nirvana of the womb” (Surréalisme et sexualité, 224-25).
51. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)” in Manifestoes of
Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1972), 14.
52. The final chapter differs from those preceding it in that it lacks a
more precise title and there appears in it the only meta-narrative formula-
tion found in the entire novel: “All my readers will surely have recognized
the young pair” (193).
53. Cf. Karel Hynek Mácha, “Pouť krkonošská,” in Próza (Prague:
SNKLU, 1961), 109-110.

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