«At last, the Czech literary avant-garde between the wars is the subject of a book as lively as its most intoxicating poetic creations. Like his mentor and friend Roman Jakobson, Thomas G. Winner was a linguistic polymath, a capacious thinker, and the embodiment of all that was most admirable in the cosmopolitan tradition of European scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. Winners imagination and formidable skills as a scholar are on impressive display in this book, which covers the visual arts, theater, music, and philosophy. Anyone seeking an introduction to the intensely vibrant culture of Czech modernism can do no better than this study, the lifework of one of the most thoughtful interpreters of literature of the twentieth century.» (Edward Dimendberg, Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, University of California, Irvine)