Walpurgis Night (novel)

Written in a grotesque manner, the novel combines the traditional Meyrinka elements - mysticism, based on the mixing of various esoteric doctrines, and sarcastic irony over the world of inert philistines, in this case - over the Austrian aristocrats from Gradishin and associated bureaucratic officials.

The events of the novel take place during the First World War in Prague , the favorite city of Meyrink, which was already the scene of his first novel , and to which the writer attributed the magical essence.

The plot revolves around two pairs of characters - the imperial court physician Tadeusz Flugbaylya and his former mistress, fallen into poverty old prostitute nicknamed Bohemian Lisa, and the young violinist Ottakara Vondreyka, the illegitimate son of the Countess Záhradky "of sorts Bořivoj", and his beloved niece Countess Polyxenes.

This list is joined by the mysterious actor Zrtsadlo, in which Flugbeil at the moment of illumination sees the otherworldly creature, not a man, but only the point where demonic forces are concentrated, and Molla Osman, an initiate in the Eastern Mysteries, is the only person on whom these forces do not act .

The main events are connected with the sorcerous Walpurgis night , when, according to belief, the gap between the worlds opens, and the usual causal relationships for some time cease to operate. Developing this mythology, once used by Goethe , Meyrink constructs an image of the Cosmic Walpurgis Night to explain the horror of world war and the coming social revolution by invading the human world of demonic otherworldly forces.

The culmination of the novel is a bloody uprising in Prague, resurrecting paintings from the Hussite Wars .

Subsequently, Meyrink's novel was perceived as a kind of warning, because a year later, a nationalist action really occurred in Prague, suppressed, as in the novel, by imperial troops.

In the "Walpurgis Night" in one form or another, often parody or grotesque, esoteric scenes are used, passing through the thread through all Meyrink's novels: the initiation, the applicant's magical path, the alchemical marriage, the performance of a hero in which a series of ancestors revives, of a generic destination.

In 1963, the novel was published in French translation with an extensive preface by the famous esoteric writer (“Gnostic”) Raymond Abellio and a glossary compiled by the enthusiast of “secret doctrines” Gerard Aime, who revived the general public’s interest in a half-forgotten Austrian author.

The texts of French researchers, containing curious, but not always reliable information ^[1] , were used by the popularizers of Meyrink's work in Russia E. Golovin , J. Stefanov, V. Kryukov.

In Russia, the novel was known as far back as the 1920s, and commentators of Meyrink suggest that the image of Archibald Archibaldovich at Bulgakov refers to one of the characters of “Walpurgis Night”: Mr. Wenzel Bzdinka, the owner of the Green Frog institution ^[2] .

• Meyrink G. La Nuit de Walpurgis / Préface de Raymond Abellio . Glossaire de Gérard Heym . - P .: La Colombe, 1963
• Stefanov Yu. , Vinarova L. Comments // Meyrink G. Selected Works. V. 2. - M .: Ladomir, 2000. - ISBN 5-86218-371-X

• Illustrations by V. L. Zimakov for the 2009 edition
• Golovin E. Gustav Meyrink's Black Birds