The prose of Arno Schmidt (1914-1979) amazes from the first line with the uncompromising human and literary attitudes of its author and his unique poetic talent, the combination of a logically verified narrative structure and the visible clarity of always unexpected metaphors. And also because Schmidt seems to abolish the barrier between the book and the reader, forcing the latter to enter into complex relationships with both the text itself and its author: make exorbitant efforts to read the book, be indignant at the rudeness or straightforwardness of some statements, only to become suspicious after a few pages , that it was just another provocation... Delve into the endless game labyrinths (Schmidt’s books? literature in general?) and learn to look for that intimate, personally important for him - the reader - truth that hides behind these labyrinths and masked heroes wandering in them .

Schmidt, a man who grew up in a bourgeois environment and did not receive a higher education, who went through the front and a prisoner of war camp, who more than experienced all the difficulties of the poor post-war period, traumatized by the division of Germany into western and eastern zones, self-taught, he acquired enormous, almost encyclopedic knowledge in the field of literature and culture, became one of the best German prose writers of the 20th century and never adjusted to the tastes of the public, preferring to make a living through daily long hours of translation work... He experimented with genres, style, form , even spelling and punctuation, each of his books was the perfect embodiment of one or another author’s intention, a discovery, a scandal. The above applies to his first published stories (the collection “Leviathan”, 1949), and to the novels “Black Mirrors” (1951), “From the Life of a Faun” (1953), “Lake Landscape with Pocahontas” (1955), “Heart of Stone” "(1956), "Republic of Scientists" (1957), "The Sea of Crises is also a Backwater" (1960), and to such late "hypertexts" as yet not truly understood (even in Germany itself), such as "The Dream of the Foundation" ( 1970), “School of Atheists” (1972), “Evening with a Golden Border” (1975), “Julia, or Pictures” (unfinished text, published in 1983).

Schmidt’s recent works become the subject of literary analysis, comments on his books are published (in German!), and painstaking systematic work is being carried out - in parallel in the USA and in France - to translate his works into English and French. And it gradually becomes obvious that a real, that is, a dialogue on equal terms, meeting with Schmidt, an experimenter and poet who was in many ways ahead of his time, is yet to come for all of us - his readers.