Blecher didn’t outlive his unfettered genius. In 1928, while still in medical school in Paris, he was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis. He was treated at sanatoriums in Berck-sur-Mer in France, Leysin in Switzerland, and Techirghiol in Romania. For the last ten years of his life, he was confined to bed, immobilized by the disease. Despite his condition, he wrote and published his first piece in 1930, a short story called “Herrant” in Tudor Arghezi’s literary magazine Bilete de papagal, contributed to André Breton’s literary review Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution and corresponded with Breton, André Gide, Martin Heidegger, Ilarie Voronca, Geo Bogza, and Mihail Sebastian. In 1934, he published Corp transparent, a volume of poetry. In 1935, he was moved to a house on the outskirts of Roman where he wrote and published his major works, Întâmplări în irealitate imediată (Adventures in Immediate Irreality) and Inimi cicatrizate (Scarred Hearts), as well as short prose pieces, articles, and translations. In 1938 he died, at the age of twenty-eight.

Blecher’s genius is also the genius of his disease, and the timing of his death: “I envied the people around me who are hermetically sealed inside their secrets and isolated from the tyranny of objects. They may live out their lives as prisoners of their overcoats, but nothing external can terrorize or overcome them, nothing can penetrate their marvelous prisons. I had nothing to separate me from the world: everything around me invaded from head to toe; my skin might as well have been a sieve. The attention I paid to my surroundings, nebulous though it was, was not simply an act of will: the world, as is its nature, sank its tentacles into me; I was penetrated by the hydra’s myriad arms. Exasperating as it was, I was forced to admit that I lived in the world I saw around me; there was nothing for it.” Those “hermetically sealed” people, in their healthy bodies and apparently fortunate longevity, were going to go on living in the coming decade. Max Blecher, whom nothing separated from the world, had the good luck to die in 1938, freed into the “outside” before the 1940s.

Vizuina luminată: Jurnal de sanatoriu (The Lit-Up Burrow: Sanatorium Journal) was published posthumously in part in 1947 and in full in 1971. Beginning in the mid-1970s his books were translated into French, German, Spanish, Czech, Hungarian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Polish, and English. The twenty-first century is even more wildly receptive to Max Blecher.

“For a moment I had the feeling of existing only in the photograph.” Max Blecher wrote this sentence while Roman Vishniac was capturing a multitude whose members ceased to exist soon after he photographed them. Those images of people, whose provincialism was nearly absolute, later toured the world. This sentence by Blecher resonated for Walter Benjamin, himself in the grip of reproductive extinction—what the twentieth century already had inscribed in its DNA. It is a fountain-sentence, a boca de leone from which reality spews the bile of immediate irreality. The magnificent paragraph that opens with that sentence, rests on another photograph, a Victorian portrait taken at a fair, of the photographer’s dead child, and concludes with the century’s epitaph: “At fairs, therefore, even death took on sham, nostalgic-ridden backdrops, as if the fair were a world of its own, its purpose being to illustrate the boundless melancholy of artificial ornamentation from the beginning of a life to its end as exemplified by the pallid lives lived in the waxworks’ sifted light or in the otherworldly beauty of the photographer’s infinite panoramas. Thus for me the fair was a desert island awash in sad haloes similar to the nebulous yet limpid world into which my childhood crises plunged me.”

Blecher foresaw the irreality of the “real” world and the substance of “irreality,” now main quandaries of our time as we struggle between the “real” and the “virtual.”

“One day the cinema caught fire. The film tore and immediately went up in flames, which for several seconds raged on the screen like a filmed warning that the place was on fire as well as a logical continuation of the medium’s mission to give the news, which mission it was now carrying out to perfection by reporting the latest and most exciting event in town: its own combustion. Cries of ‘Fire! Fire!’ broke out all over the room like revolver shots. In no time there was such a racket that the audience, until then seated quietly in the dark, seemed to have been storing up great wailing and ululation, like batteries, silent and inoffensive unless suddenly overcharged and then explosive.”

When hyper-realist ultra-hearing is so acutely accurate it becomes a timeless metaphor: “And suddenly a clicking noise rang out. It was neither the grate of sheet metal nor the far-off jangle of a bunch of keys nor the rasp of a motor; it was the click—easily discernable amidst the myriad everyday sounds—of the wheel of fortune.”

Like the fair, Blecher’s world is still a world in good order, loosely tethered to the nineteenth century’s long fin-de-siecle with its tendencies to dematerialize, slip away, and turn illegible. The educated classes of his time, who thought that “being illegible” was the greatest threat facing the human race, had no idea what a colossal loss of order was around the corner: the world and its humans would soon become illegible, unintelligible, irreparable. But Blecher’s senses saw far. He grasped the incoming scrambled text of matter, tuned to the disintegration of his body. The “adventures” of his evanescence are suspenseful, like those in a novel, beautiful like passages from a European, pessimistic Whitman, a Whitman à rebours, who is not Baudelaire, and these adventures are also news, our news.

There is no trace of God.