Little Castles of Bohemia: Prose and Poetry

Translated, with an introduction, by Napoleon Jeffries / Illustrations by Alfred Prunaire / October 2025 / 5.375 x 8, 144 pp. / 978-1-962728-08-9

We were young, always gay, often wealthy . . . But I’ve just struck a gloomy chord: our palace is razed to the ground. I trampled through its debris this past autumn.

Although Gérard de Nerval had originally intended it to be a small anthology of his early poetry, his 1853 Little Castles of Bohemia ended up as something more. As could be said of all his last works, the book was an effort at stability: worn out from his travels and spells of mental turmoil, and financially impoverished, Nerval gathered his past writing in an attempt at assembling some sort of posterity, at creating a home for the vagabond pieces.

The melancholic, wandering castles presented here house pieces gathered from the range of Nerval’s literary life, from his autobiographic reminiscences of the bohemian neighborhood of Le Doyenné (destroyed by Baron Hausmann the year before this book’s initial publication), the lyrical “odelettes” that established Nerval as a poet early on, the one-act theatrical “proverb” Corilla, and the mystical sonnets of madness and existential despair that concluded his career.

In assembling together the shards of Nerval’s life, these castles depict both the birth and the decline of the Bohemian, as well as the struggle between romantic idealism and realism that would formulate the tragic conclusions to the specific life of Nerval and the lives in general of the Bohemians of his time. The collapse of the boundary between art and life here leads to ruins.

Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855) was a writer, poet, and translator who wedded French and German romanticism and transformed his research into mystic thought and his bouts of mental illness into such visionary works as the posthumously published Aurélia, or Dream and Life. After his suicide, his work would grow in stature and go on to influence everyone from Marcel Proust and André Breton to Antonin Artaud and Michel Leiris.