Moravagine, the sole authentic descendant of the last King of Hungary, is not so much a character as a force — a principle of violent engagement with objects, people, history and, ultimately, the universe. Cendrars’ anonymous narrator meets him in an insane asylum and, after organising his escape, travels with him to Russia, where they foment uprisings and blow up the Moscow Polytechnic building. They escape via London to the Americas, where Moravagine assumes the role of a god among the Blue Indians of the Orinoco River, receiving human sacrifices from his devotees. Back in Paris, Moravagine is about to set off on a round-the-world flight when World War I breaks out. He dies in an another asylum and the manuscript eventually finds its way into the hands of one of the novel’s minor characters, Blaise Cendrars.


Part farcical adventure, part extrapolated autobiography (Cendrars was a widely-traveled adventurer), Moravagine also serves as an essay on knowledge. The narrator, who arbitrarily adopts the tag ‘Raymond La Science’, notes in his journal the futility of any attempt to explain the universe rationally and declares that all that we can admit or affirm, the only synthesis, is the absurdity of being. Moravagine embodies this affirmation, asserting in his madness the chaotic disorder of life. Just as the Blue Indians take him for a god, the narrator also suspects that the dramatis personae of the Russian uprising are nothing but pale entities thrown off by his brain, hysterical mediums shaken into action by his will. It’s ironic but appropriate that this god of chaos should die when his creations surpass him in destructiveness, at a period when the whole world was doing a ‘Moravagine’.

‘You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it’s just that you’re scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral and animal, all disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions and systems. It’s always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There’s no truth. There’s only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction. Life.’ p203