Fatln kniha – Dvoj Cyklus rozkoe a smrti Miloe Martena Kantokov Jana (2025)

This Czech-language scholarly book examines Milo Martens prose Cycle of Pleasure and Death in its two versions: the original from 1907 and the final version from 1925, shaped by the authors direct experience of war. Rather than treating Martens creative work merely as an adjunct to his criticism and essays, the study focuses on the two versions of the cycle themselves. Their stylized literariness, book design and treatment of discourses about the degeneration of humanity and the contagion of art make the first version a decadent poisonous book, whose reading is staged as a fatal initiation into a world beyond good and evil. Drawing on archival research, the book traces the circumstances of Martens rewriting of the work and presents the distinctive confession of an intellectual caught in the machinery of history, shaping his own identity between East and West and between their texts and languages.