"Golem" is Meyrink's first novel, and as the 1914 release came, the publication gained popularity and sold large sales, and the action was evolving in the Jewish ghetto of Prague, biting and reality intermingling with dreams and hallucinations, and readers must decide on their own which of the happening events are real. Gustav Meyrink is an Austrian writer, playwright and translator, born in Vienna in 1868. He is an illegitimate son of an actress and a minister of state. He was raised by his mother, and because of her profession the two of them travel a lot. In 1883, the family settled in Prague, where Meyrink spent the next twenty years of his life. The city occupies a central place in his work - it is believed that Meyrink's Prague is one of the best-described cities in the literature. At the age of 24, he decides to commit suicide, but at this very moment someone puts an occult brochure under his door. The writer accepts this as a sign of fate and decides to continue his life. He began to study the occult, Kabbalah and Eastern mysticism. His books include a number of occult traditions. It is no coincidence that he is considered the most significant German-language author of supernatural prose. Characteristic of his work are psychology and Expressionism. Myrinck himself translated a number of occult books, including the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The writer has his own banking company in Prague. In 1902, a fraud was brought against him. Meyrink was arrested and spent two months in prison. Subsequently, he was acquitted and released, but bitter leaving the city. From 1911 to the end of his days he lived in the small Bavarian town of Starnberg. His home is known as the Last Lantern House. A house with the same name is also present in his novel Golem. In a ski incident, the son of the author remains disabled. The young man committed suicide at the age of 24 - the age his father had wanted to end his life years ago. Gustav Meyrink died six months after his successor on December 4, 1932, in Starnberg.
In order to read Gustav Meyrink , special qualities of the spirit are necessary. In the literature and in society, the Austrian writer is known as an author who does not fit into any particular category. Personality and personal interests channel his sense of the world into a very unusual work. Meyrink does not read superficially, nor is it a readable book for tired people looking for a break in the book. "Golem" requires particularly deepness and great attention, to some extent even the ability to self-analyze and the propensity for complete immersion in our own psychological world. In this sense, the readers of Meyrink are a defending society, a kind of intellectual elite. At the same time, however, everything in Golem is too natural for metaphysical in man and his nature. Considering the life of Meyrink himself, it is not surprising that this novel is essentially a chronicle of self-centeredness in an overseas world that exists due to the continuous interactions between man, the surrounding material environment and his invisible but real non-physical alter ego.
The narrative in Golem is like a dream. Such is his structure - alternation of light and darkness, of consciousness and unconsciousness, of substance and immateriality. The reader falls into this constantly moving spiral with the main character, Atanasios Pernat. He never manages to get out of the labyrinths in which he moves all the time - to his own mind, to the Prague ghetto, to the deeds and crimes of the surrounding people and their motives.
The book is composed of different essays that form a complete entity, surrounded by mystery and supernatural events. Short, but frequent miniatures of mental eclipse and emotional paralysis interrupt the narrative, making it even more exciting.
The action takes place in the Prague Ghetto in the Jewish Quarter. The atmosphere is gloomy, poisonous, and the poverty of the ghetto has sank into its inhabitants, including murderers, thieves and prostitutes. Buildings have their own lives, here they are not just decor, but a living player in the game, what is happening. All this is the big but still the paranormal and the supernatural, the part of the people that lies outside their bodies, but inside their minds, rather that dark, not necessarily, but probably bad part of them that stalking by and causes epileptic seizures and minutes of suffocating horror.
Indeed, the general mood in the novel is frightened, but it alternates with episodes of joke, calmness and a sense of complete safety associated with some of the main actors. The Perennial himself is sometimes extremely stable and in his conscious moments is a patron and protector. As for the other characters in the novel, they represent truly amazing psychological portraits. In building up his characters, Meyrink has surpassed himself. Each of them is in absolute contrast to the others, conceived masterfully, in minute detail.
No matter how abstract the novel is, at the same time it is no different from a really good classical work in the purely ordinary sense. As in the history itself, which is criminal. Murder, theft, imprisonment, mystery, love - all this is present. But it is precisely the abstract that is characteristic of Meyrink , and it is precisely that which makes Golem unique. The writer's love for the occult has obviously evolved his imagination in a direction that is an invitation to all brave readers willing to take this strange journey with an unknown end. Moreover, the book is written in a great language, with very beautiful words and sentences used an impressive .. Beautiful is the notion of Meyrink for love, which in the end became the sole support of Athanasios feathered. He is in constant search of his Doppelgänger (double), from whom he was afraid but she was looking urgently because it wants thanks to his meeting with him to Provida truth about himself and for the universe.
"Golem" deserves its glory as one of the first bestsellers, although Meyrink himself is not as popular today as Kafka's contemporary. By the end of the 19th century, however, he was a known and recognizable figure, not only because of his eccentricity and lifestyle, but also because of his work, which still remains unsurpassed in originality.