Second, expanded edition of an extraordinary book!
"Miloslav Topinka, who years ago (as a twenty-two-year-old student) went on a nine-month expedition to Africa to see for himself the places where Rimbaud spent the second half of his life, has in this work uniquely assessed his double disposition. On the one hand, there is an aesthetic sensibility at play, which never loses sight of Rimbaud's poetic texts and sensitively reveals and makes present their existential foundation (Rimbaud wrote a kind of 'symbolic autobiography'). This also ensures Topinka's book a superior 'readability'. On the other hand, the author has fully exercised his talent as an essayist, which is always based on a minute reading of the texts and on an acrobatic knowledge of documents (in a wide register from personal records to diverse testimonies to official materials). This in turn guarantees the professional seriousness of the work, which in this way provides the most detailed and accurate reconstruction of Rimbaud's life to date." (Jiří Pelán)
"One thing is absolutely clear. There are not two Rimbauds, Rimbaud the brilliant poet until 1875 and Rimbaud the man of action, the businessman, the brilliant caravan leader, the loser or traitor to poetry in the next sixteen years. However blurred the traces and all the testimonies and memories of him from his time in Africa, it is certain what his biographer Pierre Petitfils had already noticed: Rimbaud in Ethiopia was the same as Rimbaud once was." (Miloslav Topinka)
Czech edition