Vysoká hra

For the first time ever, a complete edition of the French revue Le Grand Jeu (The High Game), the magazine of the eponymous group whose activities from the end of 1927 to November 1932 represent one of the greatest spiritual adventures of the twentieth century. Among the founding members was the outstanding Czech painter Josef Šíma, who had lived in France since 1921. The High Game was not merely an artistic movement. It sought to transform vision, perception and thought, to explore new, liminal states of consciousness, to awaken the original, hidden faculties of the psyche, from extrasensory perception to states of clairvoyance and the transmission of consciousness. It touched on the luminous threads that are stretched between the visible and the invisible. \The participants in the High Game were neither dreamers nor mystics. They believed in sudden events, emphasizing the "eternal moments" triggered by seemingly insignificant events that bring one into a state of total receptivity. For them, the prerequisite for any revelation was rebellion. "To make everything and every moment a question. To question everything, to deny everything, and at the same time to accept everything." To reject the habitual way of seeing. To reject the crutches of every certainty, even the certainty of rebellion. This is not about literature or art, but about a basic, immediate experience, about "playing for real," with all the personal risk, without any compromise in life and work. Even one's own life is at stake. "The apparent coherence of this world collapses at the slightest impact," realizes Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His poetry tends toward the "experimental metaphysics" that separated High Play from surrealism. This metaphysics is based on a clear awareness of the unity of man, the world, the universe. \n \nFor experiments on the border between life and death, there is a price to pay. Both Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and René Daumal, who embraced the "high game" with all its consequences, die shortly after each other at the age of 36. But the astonishing power of the High Game in thought and poetry remains an urgent challenge for the twenty-first century.

Czech edition