"Moravagine" is a fascinatingly disturbing work that delves into the heart of 20th-century artistic modernity. However, "Moravagine" remains a rather obscure book, even 100 years after World War I. The war is not yet over when, in 1917, Cendrars announces his plan in a letter to Jean Cocteau: "I tell you, a monster..." What was contemporarily meant to be called "The End of the World" finally appears in 1926 as "Moravagine": it is the name of a rampager, a primal being, in whose name death (la mort) and the birthing (le vagin) ambiguously unite. Moravagine, more a phenomenon than a person, is a nomad of his desires, a figure of evil who lives out the excesses of madness, a desperate being in the face of meaninglessness. Moravagine is the name of the Hungarian nobleman who, with the support of a doctor, the narrator Raymond, does the...