A Dot on the Map: Some Remarks on the Magazine Nová Bratislava

Abstract

prohibitions against consulting the archives in the countries of the former communist block. Numerous research projects have allowed scholars to advance their knowledge of the active avant-garde circles in Central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s—a taboo subject during the postwar period. Some remarkable fi ndings have already brought to light a wealth of artistic creations. This impulse of rediscovery has offered new views of the theory of centers and peripheries: one removes Paris from its throne as the capital of arts, one pits the cosmopolitan Berlin against the infl uential Moscow, and between these east-west poles, one revalorizes Warsaw, Prague, Zagreb and Bucharest. However, within this revised historic-artistic geography, there are some areas of relative obscurity. There is considerable disparity between the amount of research into (and presentation of ) art and literature of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland on the one hand compared to that of Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia on the other. 1