The Ruin of Kasch

Description

A brilliant new translation of a classic work on violence and revolution as seen through mythology and art The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects- "the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else," wrote Italo Calvino when the book first appeared in 1983. Hailed as one of those rare books that persuade us to see our entire civilization in a new light, its guide is the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who knew the secrets of the ancien regime and all that came after, and was able to adapt the notion of "legitimacy" to the modern age. Roberto Calasso follows him through a vast gallery of scenes set immediately before and after the French Revolution, making occasional forays backward and forward in time, from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot, with appearances by Goethe and Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and Marx, Walter Benjamin and Chateaubriand. At the centre stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary kingdom based on the ritual killing of the king and emblematic of the ruin of ancient and modern regimes.

Roberto Calasso (1941-2021) was the director of the renowned Italian publishing house Adelphi Edizioni and the author of numerous books, including the international bestseller The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a touchstone in his wide-ranging series of works that map the emergence of mind from myth to modernity. The series began with The Ruin of Kasch and also includes Ka, K., Tiepolo Pink, La Folie Baudelaire, Ardor, The Celestial Hunter and The Unnamable Present.