Anationalism and the Search for a Universal Language: Esperantism and the European Avant-Garde

What is it about?

The paper analyses the relations between esperantism and the activities of the historical avant-garde on two different levels. Firstly, it discusses how both Esperanto and the avant-garde represented a radical response to the growing impulse of nationalist ideology in Europe and aimed, in different terms, at the creation of a new universal or ‘anational’ language. Secondly, the paper aims at a historical reconstruction of the connections between the transnational networks of Esperanto and the historical avant-garde, by focusing on publications of avant-garde texts in journals and anthologies in Esperanto and publications of texts in Esperanto in avant-garde journals in the early 20th century, as well as original experimental literature written in Esperanto in the period. The literary system of Esperanto served as a decentralised forum in which works and aesthetic concepts were picked up from the centres and then circulated along the periphery.

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