Alfred Kubin, The Other Side, Trans. By Mike Mitchell, Dedalus, 2000. [1909.]
"Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) was one of the major graphic artists of the 20th century who was widely known for his illustrations of writers of the fantastic such as Balzac, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gustav Meyrink and Edgar Allan Poe, of whom he illustrated at least 50 books. In his combination of the darkly decadent, the fantastic and the grotesque, in his evocations of dream and nightmare, his creation of an atmosphere of mystery and fear he resembles Mervyn Peake."
"One day as I was searching around the internet minding my own business, innocent and unsuspecting of any imminent peril, I stumbled upon a webpage called The Strangest Books Ever Written. There was a list for strange fiction and a list for strange nonfiction. Right there close to the top of the strange fiction list was The Other Side by Alfred Kubin.
After a bit of research I discovered that he was an early twentieth century expressionist artist and illustrator. He had a very gloomy life to match his macabre artwork. The Other Side was the only novel he wrote and it was widely considered to be one of the most unusual and macabre books ever written.I was hooked, so I ordered it. It was available in a new english translation by Mike Mitchell from Dedalus Books.
In the beginning of the story a mysterious stranger arrives at the Munich home of a artist and his wife. After introducing himself the stranger explains the reason for his visit.
"I am not speaking in my own name, but for a man whom you, perhaps, have forgotten, but who still remembers you well. This man has at his disposal what is by European standards, untold wealth. I am speaking of your former classmate, Claus Patera. Please do not interrupt me! By a strange chance, Patera came into possession of what is probably the largest fortune in the world. Your old friend then set out upon the realization of an idea for which access to fairly inexhaustible financial resources is absolutely prerequisite. He resolved to found a dream realm. This is a complex matter, but I will be brief.He goes on:
"Patera, he continued, feels an extraordinarily strong aversion to all kinds of progress. To be precise, to all kinds of scientific progress. Please take this literally, for in it lies the main idea behind the Dream Realm. The Realm is shut off from the rest of the world by a surrounding wall and protected against any attack by strong fortifications. There is a single gate for entry and exit, facilitating strict control of people and goods. The dream realm is a sanctuary for all those who are unhappy with modern civilization and contains everything necessary to cater to their bodily needs. It is not at all the intention of the lord of this country to create a utopia, a kind of model state for the future. Although provision has been made to ensure there are no material shortages, the whole thrust of the principal aims of this community is directed less towards the maintenance of property and goods, the population, individuals. No, definitely not! ...But I see a smile of disbelief on your lips. It is difficult I know, almost too difficult for mere words to describe what Patera hopes to achieve with his Dream Realm."
The artist and his wife think it over and decide to go. They make a very long journey to the far east ending up finally at the outer wall of the Dream Realm. They pass through the single gate and board a train that takes them across dismal swamps and forests to Pearl, the capital of the Dream Realm.
On their arrival in Pearl, they immediately discover that all is not right in the Dream Realm. To begin with the sky is always overcast. Never can you see the sun or the stars. Everything looks drab and dingy in dreary shades of greenish grey. Nothing is new here. Everything from buildings to silverware is old and worn.
We later find out that all the buildings have macabre and violent histories. Structures where horrible crimes were committed have been moved to the Dream Realm from all over the world. Even the everyday objects seem to have an unwholesome past. It seems as if an unseen force is controlling both people and events in this bizarre place.
A village adjacent to the city is the home of a tribe of blue eyed holy men who are the Dream Realms original inhabitants. These people seem all to be in a perpetual trance. We learn that Patera visited these mystics before conceiving the Dream Realm.
Things become increasingly bizarre. People start becoming violent. Murders are committed with increasing intensity. Many people die of mysterious illnesses. Plagues of insects inundate the city. Wild animals start invading the city and attacking people. Then even domesticated animals become vicious and turn on their masters.
When our hero finally does find Patera, he seems to be in a trance, and his face keeps changing into first one person then another and another until finally it seems as if faces from all over the realm and even the entire world are passing across Pateras skull.
"His eyes were like two empty mirrors reflecting infinity. The thought crossed my mind that Patera was not alive at all. If the dead could look, that is what their gaze would be like."
Any attempt to escape from the dream realm is futile. The violence continues to escalate as the evil force controlling everything consumes the city of Pearl in a chaotic apocalypse.
The book ends with our protagonist finding the "real" world too much like the Dream Realm for comfort.
"When I ventured back into the world of the living, I discovered that my god only held half-sway. In everything, both great and small, he had to share with an adversary who wanted life. The forces of repulsion and attraction, the twin poles of the earth with their currents, the alternation of the seasons, day and night, black and white - these are battles.
Kubin adds a drawing of an eyeless morbid Patera like face on the final page with the cryptic phrase:
"The Demiurge is a hybrid."
The dystopia described in this book, published in Austria in 1906, closely predicts events that occurred in the decades following it's publication, with often uncanny and disturbing similarity.
The rise of militarism and nationalism resulting in the first and second world wars, the rise of Nazism, Hitlers omnipotent god like influence on millions, the holocaust, even the horrible final hours of der fuhrer in his bunker in Berlin are closely foreshadowed in this prophetic book.
Analogies may easily be drawn to ideas like Jung's collective subconscious, the cycles of change of taoism,and the karmic principle of hinduism and jainism, and alarmingly to events in the present.
This book is a definite must read. It should be required reading in the hope that the warning signs of violent psychosis shown by an entire society may someday be heeded preventing future bloodbaths and perhaps accomplishing homosapiens next great evolutionary step into a truly self aware being, no longer controlled by ancient demons and evil forces." - dxsuperpremium.com
"The work of Austrian Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) fits loosely within an Expressionist/Decadent/proto-Surrealist tradition. A highly praised artist, he produced only one major work of fiction: The Other Side, published in 1908, and excerpted in our The Weird compendium as an early precursor or influencer of modern weird fiction. Although still underrated, the novel has managed to retain a cult status simply because it has long been a favorite of a variety of writers and artists. It would be hard to believe, for example, that Mervyn Peake had not read Kubin prior to writing his Gormenghast novels. (The Other Side is perhaps most akin in tone to Peake’s Titus Alone.)
The details of Kubin’s life relevant to his fiction are these: his mother died when he was ten, he had a sexualized relationship with an older, pregnant woman when he was eleven, and his father was a tyrant whose death in part triggered the writing of The Other Side. Kubin, in his nonfiction, is amazingly frank about all of these personal issues, giving us rare insight into motivation and influence.
These events, as well as unhappy romances, contributed to his uneasy, melancholic state, which manifested itself in unique visions, which then manifested in his art as the truest way of portraying the nightmares occurring in his head. Kubin had no internal editor telling him “no, this is too much.” Moreover, he may not even have realized that what he was creating might startle people. Did it amuse or horrify him when gentlemen and ladies who viewed his art reportedly fainted?
There’s the sense, too, in reading the praise of Kubin’s contemporaries that they found him too rough, too flawed, and yet it’s impossible to separate out the “good” from the “bad” – a condition common to some of the best “weird” writers and artists. As Austrian critic Richard Schaukal noted in a 1903 review, “He has not studied drawing. That is clear at a glance. But what does that tell us when confronted with this stunning oeuvre!” Given these underpinnings of Kubin’s inspiration, it’s perhaps remarkable that The Other Side has as much story as it does; not merely a series of images strung together, it is a true masterpiece of rising tension and horror.
The Other Side tells the tale of a Munich draftsman asked by an old schoolmate named Patera to visit the newly established Dream Kingdom, somewhere in Central Asia. Patera rules the Dream Kingdom from the capital city of Pearl. The wealthy Patera has had a European city uprooted and brought to its new location, along with sixty-five thousand inhabitants. The narrator, after some hesitation, agrees to visit and travels with his wife through Constantinople through Batum, Batu, Krasnovodsk, and Samarkand—Samarkand being the last of any identifying landmarks on their journey.
The narrator soon finds that the Dream Kingdom is, well, a kingdom of dreams. People experience or live “only in moods” and shape all outer being at will “through the maximum possible cooperative effort.” A huge wall keeps out the world and “the sun never shone, never were the moon or the stars visible at night….Here, illusions simply were reality.”
Over time, strange rituals and aberrations have sprung up. Pearl also shifts in odd ways, and in this sense has a kinship with M. John Harrison’s far-future Viriconium, which also functions from more of a metaphorical than a chronological foundation. This doesn’t bother the narrator at first, but as the city’s changes become more and more grotesque, it’s clear that the Dream Kingdom is faltering, descending into madness.
Despite the claustrophic atmosphere and unseen horrors that form the emotional foundation of the novel, The Other Side is remarkable not just for its vivid imagery, laden with surrealistic subtext, but for how the relatively modern aspects of the novel—American tourists, for example—are perfectly integrated into a timeless, festering milieu. The battle that occurs between the irrational and rational as the Dream Kingdom disintegrates takes on an updated Grand Guignol quality that oddly enough has the texture of modern-day war. It’s almost as if the novel channels Apocalypse Now by way of Hieronymus Bosch.
Where did The Other Side come from, other than from Kubin’s visionary art? Consider this tangle of influence: Kubin had been commissioned to illustrate a book of Edgar Allen Poe novellas by a Munich publisher in 1907. At roughly the same time, Kubin met with Gustav Meyrink to discuss illustrations for Meyrink’s novel-in-progress The Golem. When Meyrink hit a snag in finishing The Golem, Kubin took his preliminary sketches and found ways to use some of them in The Other Side. Not long after publication of The Other Side, Franz Kafka read and enjoyed it, and then later used elements from it in the creation of his own The Castle. (Kubin might have been aware of Kafka’s early work, as well.)
Labels like “outsider artist” aside, Kubin was definitely connected to the creative communities of his day. Indeed, when Kubin arrived in Munich,Germany, to study art as a teenager, who should he be discovered by than the iconic Franz Blei, who was also one of Kafka’s friends.
Blei gives us a semi-amused description of Kubin as a “frail young boy who was always dressed in black and had a pale face that was always straining a little to grow dark and pretending to be as shy as a young world that had been dragged from a hollow into the light.” (Blei was a bit mischievous, his bestiary of modern literature describing Meyrink, for example, as “the only mooncalf who dropped to earth and which is now in captivity…Officers of the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army and German Deputies wanted to ban the public exhibition of the Meyrink because, so they said, it gave a distorted reflection of them in its one big eye.”)
That Kubin was a creator who either “was compelled by forces that guided his hand,” or trained himself to be so compelled, is clear even from his description of his reaction to an exhibition of Max Klinger’s etchings in Munich in 1882:
I grew moody…And now I was suddenly inundated with visions of pictures in black and white – it is impossible to describe what a thousand-fold treasure my imagination poured out before me. Quickly I left the theater, for the music and the mass of lights now disturbed me, and I wandered aimlessly in the dark streets, overcome and literally ravished by a dark power that conjured up before my mind strange creatures, houses, landscapes, grotesque and frightful situations.
In that context for Kubin’s inspiration, there’s perhaps no finer evocation of the effect Kubin achieves in his art and in The Other Side than this 1903 description from the Berliner Illustrirte: “This art always dreams of the last things in apocalyptic fantasy; its beings and forms are not of this world, and you cannot measure them by the ruler of correctness or anatomical possibility; they are complete distortion, total gruesome exaggeration; just as their landscapes dream away in the eternal twilight behind time and space. But you will always find one thing in this art, which dispenses with every depiction, every illustration of being, it has a convincing power to make things present and will grip you and sweep you away, conveying to you ideas and moods of uncanny reality that will burn themselves into your brain as if with hot iron punches…the suggestion of this foreboding art of the soul, the rare, the distant, the lustfully dreadful…is always powerful and enduring.”
The Other Side still appeals to a modern reader because of these qualities, after many novels initially seen as more enduring have faded from memory." - Jeff VanderMeer
"A stunning exercise in subconscious dementia that preceded Kafka and the surrealists by nearly two decades. It was the only novel by the German artist Alfred Kubin, an adherent of the fantastic and grotesque best known for illustrating the works of Poe, Hoffman and Gustav Meyrink. THE OTHER SIDE, ably translated by Mike Mitchell, recalls all of those writers, but contains an aura that’s very much unique.
The concept is a grabber: Claus Patera, a deeply eccentric, supernaturally endowed individual, creates a dream-city in a remote region of Asia. I mean this literally: the city of Pearl is a dream-based community governed by the laws of the subconscious.
The story is told from the point of view of an artist, a former colleague of Patera who is invited to live in Pearl. The artist agrees and after a lengthy journey finds himself in a perpetually murky environ--the sun never shines in Pearl--with cobbled-together retro architecture and a populace of eccentrics. The protagonist quickly finds employment as a cartoonist at the Dream Mirror, the official newspaper of Pearl. He has trouble, however, affecting a meeting with Petera, who spends his days secluded in a maze-like building.
More immediate troubles include the “Great Clock Spell” that inexplicably grips Dreamlanders, and which the artist comes to share; it refers to a mysterious spell that draws Dreamlanders into a clock tower. There’s also a psychic disturbance called the “Brainstorm” that collectively afflicts the Dreamlanders, in addition to a plethora of miscellaneous sounds and hallucinations.
But things are changing. An American man turns up in Pearl and causes enormous discord. This individual may or may not be Patera himself in a different guise, as it’s established midway through that Patera can change his facial features at will. He also psychically controls the Dreamlanders and their surrounding environment, and is evidently losing his mind.
This latter fact causes the Dream Realm to grow increasingly irrational and nightmarish. Eventually the place implodes in a riot of violence, orgies and wonton destruction, not unlike a surreal variant on THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII. It’s in this section that the Poe connection is most evident, with the narrative overtaken by all manner of horrific grotesquerie.
But in my view the novel’s best portions come earlier, in the artist’s mundane yet baffling observations of day-to-day life in Pearl. These sections powerfully evoke the flavor of existence in this dream-country via a kind of subconscious travelogue, evoked with such astonishing imaginative vividness I couldn’t help but wonder if Alfred Kubin had actually visited this city and then reported back on what he found. " - Fright
"My knowledge of European weird and fantastic fiction is scanty, to say the least, and I haven’t, so far as I know, previously encountered Alfred Kubin. Based on this extract, I am already eager to read the rest of The Other Side, and I am curious as to how this extract fits into the broader picture.
Here we have the city of Pearl. We’re told that Pearl is ‘strange and oppressive’ in the introduction, but given no clue as to what form that strangeness and oppression might involve. However, we quickly learn that there is some sort of political struggle under way, and that Pearl’s inhabitants are also succumbing to ‘an irresistible sleeping sickness’, something that is implicitly linked to the political situation. An inexplicable desire to sleep often suggests either an unwillingness to act, or else an extreme retreat from a situation as it is; either way, one speculates that the sleeping disease is a communal response to the situation. It is notable, for example, that animals have not been affected; also, at least some animals seem to work alongside the humans.
But the sleeping disease is only a precursor to what comes next, though perhaps the catalyst, given that sleep is the relaxation of the grip of the conscious mind on the world. The sleeping mind can run riot in dreams, and at the same time, while the people sleep, the rest of the inhabitants of the Dream Realm (surely no coincidence there) also run riot, with animals of all kinds, the unseen denizens, suddenly becoming vividly visible, with plagues of insects sweeping through, large carnivores invading the houses. The presence of animals, literal as it seems to be, is inevitably also a symbolic embodiment of the fear of the townsfolk. Kubin’s narrator is very matter of fact about these invasions, and in that matter of factness perhaps lies the deepest horror. The factual recounting of this invasion, this sudden and ongoing super-abundance of animals renders the abnormal normal momentarily, before the reader mentally overbalances, trying to deal with the thought of suddenly finding fourteen rabbits in one’s bed, or snakes everywhere.
The encroachment of nature is, in science fiction, usually a more gradual process, but nonetheless is usually a signal that humanity is no longer in the ascendant. People vanish from the picture, buildings gently begin to decay; there is something picturesque, almost nostalgic in the return to pre-civilised conditions, with maybe a few people hanging on, living once more in sympathy with nature. In ‘The Other Side’, however, the speed of the changes, their simultaneity, is part of what makes this so terrifying, accentuated by the way that the human inhabitants of Pearl accept the situation, perhaps because they can do nothing else.
After the invasion of animals comes the ‘sickness of inanimate matter’, the decay of building materials, textiles, ceramics, those things that we invest so much in, without which life seems impossible. And the next threat is to life itself, as the narrator realises when he stops to consider the fate of his own body.
Is he assailed by madness as he runs through the palace, seeking Patera, to plead for his life? Or does madness lie in believing in the existence of Patera in the first place? Can one place all one’s hope in such power? The narrator’s realisation is that, effectively, it doesn’t matter what he does: ‘I took strength in the consciousness of my own impotence’, and this is the point at which he shuts out ‘doubts and anxieties’. This is where the extract finished, and I find myself wondering what will happen to the narrator; what will he choose to see or to ignore in the future, having calmly recounted everything so far. Indeed, what are the other inhabitants of the Dream Realm seeing?
This is an interesting story to start this collection, particularly the matter-of-fact tone of the recounting of extraordinary events, and the moment when the narrator realises he can no longer simply observe and narrate, but is a part of the story too, the abstract becoming personal. What does it all mean? It is unclear, except insofar as the whole extract is obviously a metaphor of sorts for the collapse of a regime, society, civilisation, a strange mixture of hope and despair." - Maureen Kincaid Speller
"Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations. - Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
While it has become quite an obscure book these days, The Other Side was pretty revolutionary at the time it was written back in 1908. In his narrative, Kubin combines philosophical ideas with decadence themes and both surreal and weird images to form the vanguard of early European Weird, predating both Kafka and Meyrink (who Kubin knew), and the French surrealists. The story revolves around a mysterious city in Asia built by its almost godlike ruler, but at the core it is really about both human nature, anxiety and the absurdity of existence.
The novel begins when the protagonist is visited by a man working in the employ of one of his old school friends, Claus Patera, who comes bearing a message. He tells him that since they were in school together, Patera has become rich through adventuring and has built his own city in Asia, Perle, within his Dreaming Kingdom, where the protagonist and his wife are both invited to join him. Despite being initially sceptical, he agrees to move after being shown a picture of Patera and is written a generous cheque of one hundred thousand marks. He and his wife travel over land and sea to start a new life in the city of Perle.
When he arrives in Perle, he finds that things are not like they are in the outside world. Firstly, the sun never shines there (it is only two years after the city is destroyed the he sees sunlight again), creating an atmosphere composed of browns and greys reminiscent of Kubin’s art. Under Patera’s wishes, nothing modern is allowed to be taken into the city, only old things, and progress is expressly banned, setting the city back over fifty years from the standard in most European countries. All of the buildings in the city have been bought from cities across Europe and as the protagonist later discovers, they all have rather sordid histories. They are provided with a place to live, money and the main character is provided with a job at the local paper (as he is an artist) but their initial good fortune doesn’t last. His wife, who was never a well person in general takes ill (eventually succumbing to her illness) and he learns that fortunes can turn from good to bad in a drop of the hat as absurdism seems to hold sway. A wealthy man can find himself destitute after a visit from city officials demanding he pays debts he has no knowledge of, and vice versa should a poor man find himself the recipient of some unexplained windfall. Those who retain their wealthy status have to suffer other forms of unseen misfortune, such as Melitta, the doctor’s wife, who the protagonist discovers begging in squalor on the street.
As Patera hand picks the people chosen to receive invites to the Kingdom and the borders are closed, the city’s population is composed of people predisposed to the strangeness of Patera’s new world. His neighbour is a good for nothing who terrorises them, being a general pain and banging on the door late at night. Under their apartment is a barber who is also a stoic and discusses philosophy with anyone who is nearby at the time, including his helper monkey. The doctor’s wife, Melitta, is quite scandalous as she cuckolds her husband with whoever she feels like and later in the novel takes to stripping in an erotic show. It is not unreasonable for see in her the unresolved feelings Kubin has about women due to his early experiences, as after the protagonist seduces her after his wife dies, it seems to be the first symbolic act of his decent into nihilism. Brendel, a friend to the protagonist, is obsessed with finding the perfect love and subjects each woman to a number of tests to see if they are worthy. He eventually falls for Melitta (despite her promiscuity) and continues to love her even following her death, removing the body from its grave. These are just a few of the interesting people who make up the city’s population. There is something about each of them, they are in some way disaffected, tainted, that serves as almost a precursor to the events that follow the arrival of the American.
Claus Patera himself is somewhat of an enigma. On arriving at the city the protagonist does everything possible in order to gain an audience with him but discovers that the administrative system in Perle is purposely an absurd bureaucratic nightmare. His wife claims to have seen him lighting lamps shortly before she becomes fatally ill and while he does not believe it is possible, when he finally manages to meet Patera, the ruler tells him that he has been watching him all along. One has to wonder how much of Kubin’s own father we can see in Patera. He is overbearing, controlling and all powerful as a father must seem to children when they are young. His absence and the anxiety that is causes the protagonist also seems like a common thread. After some begging, Patera agrees to help the protagonist in regards to his wife’s health and shortly after she dies, proving that you have to be careful what you wish for, and considering what follows in the novel her death may actually be a blessing after all. The extent of Patera’s power is ambiguous, but it is seems that he exercises an almost Nietzschean feat of will to create the city, both in the physical sense and the metaphysical. It is suggested that he is able to control the actions of everyone in the city and this is backed up by the fact that he is able to make everyone in the city (with the exception of his adversary the American) fall asleep at once. He also seems able to perform feats of almost godlike stature, although it is unsure if the things that happen to the city after the American’s revolt are caused by Patera, or if they are caused by the fact the population no longer see him as a god. Considering the influence of Schopenhauer on Kubin, it also gives us insight into an interesting occurrence when the protagonist finds him. Patera is a very handsome man and described as beautiful by Kubin in the novel, but when the protagonist eventually finds him, Patera’s face constantly changes from beauty to strange images that the protagonist finds threatening. It isn’t too much of a stretch to believe that Patera represents in some way the sublime as a symbol of turbulent nature, both in himself and the absurd way in which he runs the city.
As mentioned earlier, the arrival of the American, Hercules Bell of Philadelphia in the chapter The Adversary (perhaps a reference to the Hebrew Satan) acts as a catalyst for the destruction of the Dream Kingdom. The protagonist himself believes the only reason he is able to survive is that because after the shock of seducing Melitta on the day of his wife’s funeral, he ceases to care about anything and becomes almost nihilistic. Bell despises Patera and wants the Kingdom all for himself, his arrival causes an influx of immigrants and he lobbies to turn the people against their master. Bell’s rebellion leads to a plague of wild animals, the physical decay of the city itself and a descent into hedonism and grand scale violence as the city’s population destroys itself. Patera’s observation of the destruction, as well as the protagonist’s, may be an experiencing of those even fuller levels of the sublime in the realisation of the destructive force of nature and the insignificance of the individual in the face of existence. When all is said and done, there are very few survivors and Claus Patera is no more.
The Other Side is a very interesting book, as Kubin is clearly grappling with existential problems through his stand-in in the protagonist. One enduring feature for weird fiction seems to be the idea of the sublime, something beautiful but at the same time alien and utterly horrifying. Through Kubin, it is acted out in a tragic farce with almost Grand-Guignol scenes through the eyes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and the decadents. It remains in my eyes a key text of the Weird fiction cannon and while it has been mostly forgotten by history, it seems to be having a little bit of a resurgence at the moment. It has been cited as an influence by Michael Cisco, was mentioned by China Mieville as one of the books that influenced The City and the City, and was recently announced of having the pride of place of being first in the VanderMeer’s upcoming Weird fiction anthology. Deserving to be read more widely, a great novel by a great artist. Currently out of print, but cheap enough to pick up an older copy; certainly worth both your time and your money.
After all, the demiurge is a hybrid." - Paul Charles Smith
"Alfred Kubin‘s The Other Side is one of the maddest things I’ve read in a long while. It’s mad in the way that Gogol’s The Nose is mad, or Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. That is, at times it seems normal, almost allegorical (you begin, at least, to feel there might be some meaning behind it all), but then just as you feel you’re getting a grasp on it, it leaps off again into incomprehensible madness.
The plot? – Well, it’s this. A man is persuaded by an old schoolfriend, Patera, who has since become immensely wealthy, to come and live in a closed society he has constructed, somewhere in northern China, called the Dream Kingdom. Billed as a sort of paradise which has forsaken the modern world, when he goes there he finds it doesn’t quite measure up to expectations. He becomes increasingly uncertain how (or if) the society is being governed, can never seem to meet with his friend Patera, and – well, after that things start getting rather weird: waking dreams, doppelgangers, unexplained plagues of animals, and a complete collapse not merely of moral fabric but seemingly all kinds of fabric.
What are the themes here, the ideas? – Maybe it’s about religion and the enlightenment, the lack of a guiding spirit in the world and how man can cope with its absence, the collapse of the ruling classes and the emergence of democracy, the revaluation of all values – yeah, that sort of thing.
Here’s a random passage, where he’s trying to get to meet with Patera:
Unfortunately, every sort of thing interfered, exactly as though some devil of mischance had taken a hand. First I was told that the Master was so overloaded with business that he could see no one. Another time he had gone on a trip. Then I heard that tickets for audiences could be obtained at the Archives. I went there. I walked through the gate, decorated with coats of arms, feeling as guilty as an anarchist. The doorman was asleep. I tried to find my way alone and entered a spacious antechamber. About a dozen officials were there.
For probably a quarter of an hour, no one noticed me at all, as though I were invisible. Finally, one of the functionaries asked me gruffly what I wanted. However, he did not wait for my answer but went on conversing with his neighbour. A somewhat pleasanter character bowed to me and inquired about my business. His wrinkled yellow face fell into severe furrows, he took a few puffs at his long pipe, and then motioned with it towards the next room. “In there!”
On the door was a notice: Do not knock. Inside, a man was asleep. I had to clear my throat three times before any sign of life came into his completely rigid, deeply reflective pose. Then I was favoured with a glance of majestic disdain.
"What do you want?” he growled. “Have you a summons? What papers have you brought with you?”
Here there was not the same curtness as outside; on the contrary, information came bubbling out.
“To receive your ticket for an audience you need in addition to your birth certificate, baptismal certificate, and marriage certificate, your father’s graduation diploma and your mother’s inoculation certificate. Turn left in the corridor. Administration Room 16, and make your declaration of means, education, and honorary orders. A character witness for your father-in-law is desirable but not absolutely essential.” Whereupon he nodded condescendingly, bent once more over the desk, and began to write with, as I could see, a dry pen.
If anyone’s thinking at this point that this all sounds very similar to a highly original and revered Czech writer who happened, like Kubin, to write in German, I would point out that these similarities must be found to be false, and for this very simple reason: that this certain Czech writer was highly original – possibly the most original writer ever – certainly the first person to write about the things that he wrote about – whereas Kubin’s novel was published in 1909." - Obooki's Obloquy
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