MySpace a place for friends

GUSTAV MEYRINK - (January 19, 1868 – December 4, 1932)

Gustav Meyrink was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria). He was the illegitimate son of Baron Karl von Varnbüler von und zu Hemmingen and actress Maria Wilhelmina Adelheyd Meier. Until thirteen years of age Meyrink lived in Munich, where he completed elementary school. He then stayed in Hamburg for a short time. Then his mother moved to Prague in 1883.

Meyrink lived in Prague for twenty years and has depicted it many times in his works . Prague does not appear as background, but as a character in most of the short stories of The German Philistine's Horn cycle, as well as the novels The Golem and Walpurgis Night, and determines the tone of the most important part of the novel The Angel of the West Window. It is clearly visible through slightly abstract architecture of The White Dominican.
In Prague an event occurred which played a providential role in Meyrink's life. Meyrink described it in the autobiographical short story "The Pilot". That day, August 14, 1892, on Assumption Eve, Meyrink, 24 years old, was standing at his table with a gun at his hand, strongly determined to shoot himself. At that moment he heard a strange scratch and someone's hand put a tiny booklet under his door. The booklet was called Afterlife. Meyrink was shocked by this dramatic coincidence and started to study the literature of the occult. Having studied theosophy, Kabbala, christian Sophiology and Eastern mysticism, he also tried to practise (in the beginning, quite naively). Until his death Meyrink practised yoga. It was hatha-yoga which helped him to work off serious back pain exacerbated by diabetes. Results of these studies are clearly seen in Meyrink's works, which almost always deal with various occult traditions. Gershom Sholem, an expert in Jewish mysticism, has stated that Meyrink's works are based on superficial sources and have no ties with any authentic tradition. He was, after all, a fiction writer.
At that time Meyrink also was a member of the famous Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London. This is proved by the letter from William Wynn Westcott (1893), which has remained in Meyrink's private archives.
In 1902 Meyrink was charged with fraud. He was charged with using spiritualism in order to benefit from banking operations. Though in two months he was released from jail, his banking career was over. His jailhouse experiences are depicted in his most famous novel, The Golem.
In 1900s Meyrink started publishing satiric short stories in the Simplicissimus magazine, signing it under his mother's surname. On spring 1903 first Meyrink's book The Hot Soldier and Other Stories was released. Approximately at the same time he moved to Vienna. Almost immediately after his arrival another compilation of his short stories, The Orchid. Strange stories, was released. On May 8, 1905 Meyrink married Philomene Bernt, whom he had known since 1896. On July 16, 1906 his daughter Sybil Felizata was born.
In 1908 the third compilation of short stories, Waxworks, was published.
On January 17, 1908, just the day before Meyrink's fortieth birthday, the second son, Harro Fortunat, was born. Subsequently the main character in the second Meyrink's novel The Green Face was given the same name.
Being in dire straits, Meyrink started working as a translator and he became a prolific one; in five years he managed to translate into German fifteen volumes of Charles Dickens. He continued translating until his death, including various occult works and even Book of the Dead.
In 1911 Meyrink with his family moved to the little Bavarian town Starnberg, and in 1913 in Munich the book called The German Philistine's Horn was released. It was a compilation of short stories from the previous three books and several new ones.
In 1915 the first and the most famous Meyrink's novel, The Golem, was published, though its drafts may be traced back to 1908. The novel is rooted in Jewish legend about a rabbi who made a living being called golem (גולם) out of clay and animated him with a Kabbalistic spell. The main character is Athanasius Pernath, a contemporary artist from Prague. It is left to the reader to decide whether Pernath is simply writing down his hallucinations or gradually turning into a real golem. The novel was a huge success, an unprecedented amount of copies of it were published. In 1916 one more compilation of short stories, Bats, and soon the second novel, The Green Face, came into the world. The number of copies sold of The Green Face reached 40,000, and 100,000 of The Golem.
The next year the third novel, Walpurgis Night, was written. It was the strange coincidence, that the novel about popular riots, which were instigated by the forces of evil and which flooded Prague with blood, was released in 1917.
By 1920 Meyrink's financial affairs improved so that he managed to buy a villa in Starnberg. The villa became known as "The House at the Last Lantern" after the name of the house from The Golem. There he and his family lived for the next eight years and two more masterpieces — The White Dominican and Meyrink's biggest novel The Angel of the West Window — were written.
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

:: The Hot Soldier (Der heiße Soldat) 1903,
:: The Waxworks 1907,
:: The German Philistine's Horn 1909,
:: The Golem (Der Golem) 1914,
:: The Green Face (Das grüne Gesicht) 1916,
:: Walpurgis Night (Walpurgisnacht) 1917,
:: The Land of the Time-Leeches 1920,
:: The White Dominican (Der weiße Dominikaner) 1921
:: At the Threshold of the Beyond 1923,
:: The Angel of the West Window (Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster) 1927,

. [INCIPIT] 1. SLEEP. The moonlight is falling on to the foot of my bed. It lies there like a tremendous stone, flat and gleaming.

As the shape of the full moon begins to dwindle, and its right side start to wane - as age will treat a human face, leaving his trace of wrinkles first upon one hollowing cheek - my soul becomes a pray to vague unrest. It torments me.

At such times of night I cannot sleep; I cannot wake; in its half dreaming state my mind forms a curious compound of things it has seen, things it has read, things it has heard - streams, each with its own degree of clarity and colour, that intermingle, and penetrate my thoughts.

4HE IS FUMBLING HIS WAY NOW ALONG THE WALL; AT THIS MOMENT HE MUST BE LABORIOUSLY SPELLING OUT THE LETTERS OF MY NAME IN THE DARKNESS, ON MY DOOR... THE DOOR OPENS, AND HE COMES IN... WITH THE GAIT OF A MAN FOR EVER IN FEAR OF FALLING... UNFAMILIAR FACE CLEAN SHAVEN, WITH PROMINENT CHEEK BONES, EYES SLANTING... TERROR TAKES ME BY THE THROAT.

This is the first meeting of Athanasius Pernath, gem-cutter with a shadow in his past, with the Golem, the strange supernatural force reputated to haunt the ancient Ghetto of Prague. From this meeting grows an incredible web of experiences, set within the twisted crumbling walls and dark passages of the Ghetto around the turn of the century. Strange mystical visions, wonderful transformations, lurking terrors and perplexing revelations come into being around the twin personalities of Pernath and the Golem, against a background of hatred and frustrated love, malice and cabalistic saintliness.

The legend of the GOLEM has attracted the attention of many writers, including such important contemporary figures as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel. Gustav Meyrink's THE GOLEM its most famous fictional treatment and is one of the most famous supernatural novels in modern European literature. Besides being a masterpiece of fantastic fiction, it also has the distinction of being the first important expressionist novel, a work of international stature.

___________________________________________________

4[INCIPIT] CHAPTER ONE. The elegantly-dressed foreigner standing somewhat undecided on the pavement on the Jodenbreetstraat gazed at the strange inscription in remarkably ornate white letters on the black sign outside a shop diagonally opposite: CHIDHER GREEN'S HALL OF RIDDLES. Out of curiosity, or merely in order to get away from the jostling of the crowd, who were commenting with typical Dutch frankness on his frock coat, his gleaming top hat and his gloves, all things which seemed to have rarity value in this quarter of Amsterdam, he crossed the road between two greengrocer's carts drawn by dogs. He was followed by a couple of street-urchins with hunched shoulders, cavernous stomachs and low-slung backsides who slouched along behind him, their hands stuffed deep into the pockets of their incredibly baggy blue canvas trousers, thin clay pipes sticking out through their red neckerchiefs.

Meyrink's THE GREEN FACE is second in visionary power only to The Golem. By creating an all-pervading atmosphere of Kafkaesque mystery and uncertainty, Meyrink succedes in suggesting inexhaustible depths and heights of meaning. The Green Face was first published in 1916. In an Amsterdam that very much resembles the Prague of The Golem, a stranger, Hauberisser, enters by chance a magician's shop. The name on the shop, he believes, is Chidher Green; inside, among several strange customers, he hears an old man, who says his name is Green, explain that, like the Wandering Jew, he has been on earth 'ever since the moon has been circling the heavens'. When Hauberisser catches sight of the old man's face, it makes him sick with horror. The face haunts him. The rest of the novel chronicles Hauberisser's quest for the elusive and horrible old man. The Green Face has the classic Meyrink features: the mystical wedding, the galaxy of grotesque characters and the haunting atmosphere of the Ghetto.

___________________________________________________

4[INCIPIT] ZRCADLO THE ACTOR. A dog barked. Once. A second time. Then a noiseless hush, as if in the darkness the animal were pricking up its ears for any suspicious sounds. 'I think that was Brock barking', said old Baron Elsenwanger. 'That will probably be Schimding coming'. 'Lord hel us, that's no reason for banking', objected Countess Zahradka, an old woman with snow-white ringlets, a sharp Roman nose and bushy brows over her large, black, crazed eyes; she seemed irritated at Brock's unseemly behaviour, and shuffled the pack of cards even faster than she had been doing for the last half hour already. 'What does he actually do, all day long?' asked Dr. Thaddaeus Halberd. With his clean-shaven, intelligent, wrinkled face above an old-fashioned lace cravat, the former Physician to the Imperial Court looked like the spectre of one of his own ancestors; he was sitting opposite the Countess, curled up in a wing chair, his incredibly long, skinny legs drown up ape-like almost to his chin. The students on the Hradschin called him 'The Penguin' [...]

Comic and fantastic, gruesome and grotesque, WALPURGISNACHT uses Prague as the setting for a clash between German officialdom immured in the ancient castle above the Moldau, and a Czech revolution seething in the city below. History, myth and political reality merge in the apocalyptic climax as the rebels, urged on by a drum covered in human skin, storm the castle to crown a poor violinist 'Emperor of the World' in St Vitus Cathedral. Written in 1917, Walpurgisnacht continues the message of The Green Face, of a decadent society on the brink of collapse and of a Europe past salvation. In it we see Meyrink's exceptional narrative powers at their height.

___________________________________________________

4[INCIPIT] CHAPTER ONE. A strange feeling: this packet I am holding in my hand was all neatly tied up and sealed by a dead man! It is as if fine, invisible threads, delicate as a spider's web, lead out from it into a dark realm. The complex pattern of the string, the care with which the blue wrapping paper has been folded - it all bears silent witness to the purposeful designs of a living man sensing the approach of death; he gathers together letters, notes, caskets filled with once vital matters that already belong to the past, suffused  with memories that have long since faded, and he arranges them and wraps them up with half a thought for his future heir, for that distant, almost unknown person - me - who will know of his death and who will hear of it at the moment when this sealed packet, left to find its way in the realm of the living, reaches the hand it is destined for.

A complex and ambitious novel which centres on the life of the Elizabethan magus, John Dee, in England, Poland and Prague, as it intertwines past and present, dreams and visions, myth and reality in a world of the occult, culminating in the transmutation of physical reality into a higher spiritual existence. The narrator believes he is becoming possessed by the spirit of his ancestor John Dee. The adventnures of Dee and his disreputable colleague, an earless rogue called Edmund Kelley, form a rollicking 16th century variant on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as they con their way across Europe in a flurry of alchemy and conjured spirits. At one point, Kelley even persuades Dee that the success of an occult enterprise depends on his sleeping with Dee's wife. Past, present and assorted supernatural dimensions become interwined in this odd and thoroughly diverting tale.