Bernet Waclaw - Próchno - Wydanie Pierwsza, [ornaments by M. Wawrzeniecki] Warsaw 1903

Bernet Waclaw - Próchno - First Edition,

Ornaments by Maryan Wawrzeniecki, Nakład Gebethner i Wolff, Warsaw 1903

Rarity

Hardcover half leather binding with hand marbled paper, ( contemporary). Block coherent, stamps of Bibl. Bochnia. Slight soiling of the corners of the initial pages. Very good condition.

A nice piece.

" The actiontakes place in the multinational artistic bohemian milieu of the late 19th century in an anonymous city (probably Berlin or Munich) and portrays the profiles of:An actor, a journalist, a musician, a playwright, as well as a painter, a doctor - a poet, an opera singer and a cabaret star, possessed by the Nietzschean theory of the superman, and exposing the degeneration (accentuated in the symbolic title) and moral decline of the artists, preaching the ideas of decadent art detached from life, whose only goal is often to rebel against the bourgeois world and spend their lives in idle conversations about great art.

The characters described in Próchno move in an artificial space, separated from ordinary reality. They live feverishly, manifesting decadent moods in an ostentatious, usually hysterical form. They peek into cafes convinced that "culture is done in cafes these days," but they don't despise second-rate cabaret either (there are, by the way, some real tingle-tangled amateurs among them).

They reach for stimulants favored by the modernists: black coffee, cognac, drink champagne and absinthe, in the fumes of opium smoke they proclaim their contempt for the daily drudgery that fills the existence of the average person. The bohemian, mostly nocturnal lifestyle is portrayed: in the café, on the street, in fumes of smoke and alcohol, in shabby mansards, as well as in the cemetery, where one of the main characters in the introductory part of the novel makes his great "confession of a child of age."