Put u mrak

Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893), the master of the French novella, in the collection Put in mrak (originally stories from the later period of his work) brings together some of his most gloomy and pessimistic stories.

Unlike Maupassant's earlier, more cheerful and erotic stories, the dark side of life dominates here. The author intensively presents themes of mental decline, paralysis, madness, the loneliness of old age, physical decomposition and the fear of death. The stories are written with extraordinary psychological precision and naturalistic cruelty, which is typical of Maupassant's late period, when he himself suffered from syphilis and difficulties with his psycho-physical health.

The most famous stories in this collection usually include motifs of obsession, hallucinations and inevitable decline (e.g. stories like Le Horla or similar themes of fear and madness). Maupassant is no longer just a chronicler of Norman life and bourgeois weaknesses, but a deep explorer of the darkness of the human soul.

The style, as always with Maupassant, is crystal clear, economical and masterful – every sentence has a purpose. The Journey into Darkness is considered representative of the pessimistic side of Maupassant's oeuvre and one of the most powerful testimonies to the fear of losing reason and identity in 19th-century French literature. The antiquarian edition from Velzek is rare.