By spring 1938, Prague is a city increasingly on tenterhooks in expectation of an attack by Nazi Germany. Earlier that year the pressure of the situation produced a schism in the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia between V tězslav Nezval, who wanted to continue to support the Soviet Union, and those who condemned Stalin's show trials, purges, and executions. Nezval chronicles this tumultuous period by embedding it in a paean to Prague, wondering...