Zagubić się w palimpseście
To Get Lost in a Palimpsest

Summary/Abstract: Reflections pursued in this article are based on the so-called Prague trilogy by the Czech writer and philosopher Michal Ajvaz: Murder in the Intercontinental Hotel (poems, 1989), Return of the Old Komodo Dragon (stories, 1991) and The Other City (a novel, 1993). The common denominator of these books is a private and extremely evocative myth maintaining that the underpinning of present-day Prague and its environs is composed of an ancient phantasmagoric civilisation whose secrets can be penetrated either by chance or quite intentionally. The actual topography of the city, its edifices and homes, is delineated by secret passages, which together with the props of the “other town” mark a route of the narrator’s constant wanderings, and from time to time, and then ultimately, guide him “to the other side”. The narrator, in pursuit of the “other town”, becomes slowly ensnared in a centre-less labyrinth, a metaphysics of impassable peripheries.

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