Kmen: A Faraway Magazine About Which We Know Nothing

Abstract

Why should we read Kmen (The stem), a small, leftist Czech cultural magazine of the early 1920s? The journal's pages are crumbling in ill-funded Prague archives and, even where accessible, remain written in Czech. As with most literary magazines, most if not all of the contributions by notable writers—Franz Kafka, Roman Jakobson, Jaroslav Seifert, Franz Werfel—have been published elsewhere in multiple languages, almost all of them more widely spoken than Czech. Many of these notable contributions, furthermore, appear in Czech in translation only—we don't need to turn to Kmen's yel- lowing pages to fithese texts in some original, native environment or to gain access to the modernist quasi-aura of a text's fi rst mass-reproduction. Kmen was short-lived or, rather, its quality and purpose radically changed course several times before it petered out; its circulation was never large. Even if critical attention were to turn to the minor literature Kafka actually referenced in a well-known journal entry, Kmen falls short of the mark since a primary purpose of the journal was to represent texts originally written in German, English, French, and Russian. 1 Inconvenience and these arguments for its continued obscurity aside, however, there are reasons to resist Kmen's continued absence from literary history. In the unknown and disappearing stories told relationally on Kmen's pages, among the lines and bylines, transla- tion credits, and advertisements, Kmen gives us a glimpse of the mechanisms of modernism at work, how its international character was transmitted, and how its internationalism signifi ed a glimpse not just of a Prague or a Central