Laura (Colette Peignot, 1903-1938) is one of the most striking nonconformists of French literature of the 20th century. She was the sex slave of a Berlin sadist, the mistress of the French communist leader Boris Souvarine and the writer Boris Pilnyak, whom she met while going to study communism in the USSR. Having become close to the philosopher Georges Bataille, Laura became an accomplice in an extraordinary religious-sensual mystery, comparable to the “divine comedy” that was played out between Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, but different from it in that holiness was achieved not by mortification of the flesh, but by a desperate casting into the abyss voluptuousness. “Saint of the Abyss” - that’s what Michel Leiris, Bataille’s closest friend and Colette’s faithful confidant, called Laura.

All of Laura’s works published in this book can be classified as the “last word”. The threshold of death, on which this woman lived her short and stormy life, was the pillar of the authenticity of her existential experience and literary creativity.