La lettura critica dell'unanimismo nella polemica tra Karel Čapek e F.X. Šalda

The 1913 controversy between Karel Čapek and F.X. Šalda is best known for its focus on Flaubert and F.V. Krejčí, but it also involved the critics' evaluation of “unanimism”, the French literary movement begun by Jules Romains. In one of his essays, Čapek includes unanimism in a list of several different “isms” that show in his opinion the energy and liveliness of contemporary France; still, he clearly recognizes that none of these trends is to be considered dogmatically as the only possible manifestation of modernity. This vitalistic approach to art is dismissed by Šalda, who endorses the primacy of individual poetic expression and blames young Czechs in Čapek’s entourage for blindly following literary fashion. While it is true that Čapek never subscribes to unanimism, his writings indeed display a certain tendency to take advantage of the generational gap as an excuse to avoid further argumentation. Another issue Šalda raises in the debate concerns methodology and the use of critical sources. Čapek is accused of paraphrasing French articles and even of reading mediocre, unreliable periodicals. Moreover, the use Šalda makes of the essay on unanimism authored by Florian-Parmentier is primarily meant to undermine Čapek's credibility rather than to offer a new analysis of Romains's work. By the end of the controversy Čapek addresses some of the points raised by his opponent: he examines more closely the sociological and psychological foundation of the “Unanime” (Durkheim, Le Bon) and finally becomes less enthusastic about this concept of collective conciousness.