The Other Side

The Other Side is Kubin's only literary work. Like Peake's Gormenghast, it tells of a dream kingdom which becomes a nightmare, of a journey to Pearl, a mysterious city created deep in Asia, which is also a journey to the depths of the subconcious; a sort of Baedeker for those lands which are half-known to us, as Kubin himself called it. Written in 1908, and more or less half-way between Meyrink and Kafka, it was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the artists and writers of the Expressionist generation. Franz Marc called it a magnificent reckoning with the 19th century and Kandinsky said it was almost a vision of evil.