Moravagine

Moravagine is a 1926 novel by Blaise Cendrars, originally published by Grasset. It is a complex opus with a central figure, the eponymous Moravagine, who emerges as a doppelganger of the author whom the author is ridding himself of through the act of writing. It took Cendrars a decade to write the book (Cendrars makes reference to it as early as 1917), and he never stopped working on it. In 1956, the author partially rewrote the text and added a postface, as well as a section titled "Pro domo: How I wrote Moravagine". In his final revision, Cendrars says the book is definitely incomplete, as it was meant to be a preface to a "complete works of Moravagine" that do not exist.

==Synopsis== The narrator, Raymond la Science, is presented as an acquaintance of Blaise Cendrars, who himself appears in the novel. The narrator is a physician, and he recounts his meeting with Moravagine, a deranged murderer detained in an asylum. Moravagine is the last, degenerate heir to a long line of Eastern European noblemen. Fascinated by this man, the physician helps him escape, then recounts his picaresque journey around the world, encountering everyone from Russian terrorists to American natives and leaving behind a trail of crimes. In the end, they return to Europe just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine."