Prohra: Zpověď

Who was Pierre Minet? A poet-rebel whose genius was convinced by the companions of the High Game. A man of paradoxes and twists and turns, a mystical atheist, a bohemian and a vagabond, a rebellious dandy, a vagabond with nostalgia for the monarchy, who left school and his family at 16 and, like Rimbaud, fled to Paris, wandering the city. He finds a job at the Renault factory, but is fired shortly afterwards, falls off a ladder while straightening books at the Plon publishing house, and is forcibly taken back to Reims. He rages, breaking the window of the carriage on the way. A month later, another escape, Lecomte gives him 50 francs for the journey. Minet makes a living in all sorts of ways: he earns a living as a handyman, a messenger with books, an insurance agent, a figurehead on a film set, and later tries his hand as an American's secretary. On Saturday nights at that time, he often meets the "angelically patient" René Daumal, who has moved from Reims to Paris to study. They wander the city all night. In 1930, Minet still publishes his novel The Story of Eugene, but then goes silent. Due to health problems, he stays for a long time in hospitals and sanatoriums. He falls passionately in love with an American painter living in Paris, Liliana Fisk, who is thirty years his senior and helps him to survive. He distances himself from the High Game, refusing to be a writer. His "high game" has become love. However, he and Gilbert-Lecomte see each other and remain close until Lecomte's death from tetanus in late 1943. It is only in 1945-6 that Minet begins to write his most important work, the autobiographical novel Losing (published in 1947), in which he recounts his turbulent childhood, his encounters with the Simplists, the High Game, his life in Paris between the two world wars, and the death of Gilbert-Lecomte. It is the portraits of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and René Daumal that are among the most interesting passages in the novel. Pierre Minet sees reality beyond the obvious. He describes his "desertion from literature" with unusually precise self-reflection, often cruel and caustic. He tries to get to the roots of evil, just as George Bataille did ten years later in his essay Literature and Evil. "I am twice ashamed of myself," Minet confesses in Deception. "I murdered the poet in me and became an ordinary man. The mitigating circumstance, however, is that I have found the courage within myself to admit my defeat."

Czech edition