Ta, jež povstala z krystalu

The novelist Vladimír Raffel (1898–1967) is not one of the writers whose name is mentioned too often in literary history. This essential intellectual, however prolific and undeniably creative, produced essentially all of his work in the 1920s, only to retire artistically for the rest of his life and devote himself “only” to his psychiatric practice. Nevertheless, he left an indelible mark on the history of Czech literature. The edition entitled She Who Rose from Crystal represents Raffel's complete, book-published short story work published between 1927 and 1930, which, in the context of the avant-garde work of the time, bears the characteristic attributes of a fascination with modern technology (electricity, machines, cinema, and others), which Raffel, originally a doctor by profession, modifies with imaginative inspirations stemming from his profession, his interest in modern philosophy, his in-depth knowledge of modernist French literature, and his efforts at a laconic literary experiment. Raffel's cycles Electric Stories, Body Stories, Pathetic Stories, Dance Stories and Ancient Stories, hitherto rather overlooked, plastically complement and, to the same extent, slightly blur the image of the Czech interwar avant-garde through the work of this artistic solitaire with a rich imagination and a sense of stylistic and intellectual precision. The author's texts are complemented by an accompanying study by Vladimír Papoušek (author of Raffel's monograph I Sing to the Electric Body). – Published in cooperation with the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.