Microscripts

by Robert Walser, Susan Bernofsky (Translator), Walter Benjamin (Contributor)

Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper (many of them written during his hospitalization in the Waldau sanatorium) covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author’s death in 1956. At first considered a secret code, the microscripts were eventually discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of a German script: a whole story could fit on the back of a business card.


Selected from the six-volume German transcriptions from the original microscripts, these 25 short pieces are gathered in this gorgeously illustrated co-publication with the Christine Burgin Gallery.  Each microscript is reproduced in full color in its original form: the detached cover of a trashy crime novel, a disappointing letter, a receipt of payment. Sometimes Walser used the pages of small tear-off calendars (but only after cutting them lengthwise and filling up each half with text). Schnapps, rotten husbands, small town life, the radio, pigs (and how none of us can deny being one), jealousy, Van Gogh and marriage proposals are some of Walser’s subjects.  These texts take strength from Walser’s motto: “To be small and to stay small.”

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, German Literature, Literature, Poetry, Classics, Art

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Robert Walser, a German-Swiss prose writer and novelist, enjoyed high repute among a select group of authors and critics in Berlin early in his career, only to become nearly forgotten by the time he committed himself to the Waldau mental clinic in Bern in January 1929. Since his death in 1956, however, Walser has been recognized as German Switzerland’s leading author of the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps Switzerland’s single significant modernist. In his homeland he has served as an emboldening exemplar and a national classic during the unparalleled expansion of German-Swiss literature of the last two generations.

Walser’s writing is characterized by its linguistic sophistication and animation. His work exhibits several sets of tensions or contrasts: between a classic modernist devotion to art and a ceaseless questioning of the moral legitimacy and practical utility of art; between a spirited exuberance in style and texture and recurrent reflective melancholy; between the disparate claims of nature and culture; and between democratic respect for divergence in individuals and elitist reaction to the values of the mass culture and standardization of the industrial age.

Reviews

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Les v noci je obtížně schůdný, protože není vidět na kmeny stromů, s jejichž domnělou existencí je člověk nucen počítat a přesvědčí se o ní, pokud kolem sebe hmatá do všech stran. Ale jak nezapomenutelně mi během jednoho Donizettiho koncertu, který jsem si mohl vyslechnout a v nitru při tom ze srdce plesat, zachutnaly dva tři sýrové dortíky! Takže co se houževnatého a vytrvalého přitakání psaní rukou týká, nenechal jsem se odradit. Jistá věrnost v mé povaze mě zdá se opravňuje k tomu, abych uvěřil, že mi tu a tam někdo věří, což upřímně řečeno nepokládám zas až tak za nutné. A během celého nedělního výletu jsem jedinkrát nezamířil do hostince. Považoval jsem to za docela pěkný výkon." (s. 91)

Je to rozverný šprýmař.