Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream (Emilie Přichází ke Mně ve Snu in the original Czech) was the extreme highlight of the interwar publishing trend of Czech avant-garde sexual exploration in print and graphic art, consisting of a semi-autobiographical narrative by Jindřich Štyrský accompanied by ten of his own erotic photo-montages, and an extended afterword on the nature and purpose of sexuality by fellow surrealist Bohuslav Brouk. It was published by Štyrský’s Edice 69 publishing house in a symbolic quantity of just 69 copies, and given the number that quickly disappeared without trace original copies are now rather like gold dust.

Here is the beginning of Štyrský’s text:

Emilie is fading from my days, my evenings and my dreams. Even her white dress has darkened in my memory. I no longer blush as I recall the mysterious marks of teeth I glimpsed one night below her little belly. The last traces of dissimulation impeding the emotion I was ready to feel have disappeared. That troupe of girls is lost forever, smiling uncertainly and with indifference as they remember how their hearts were torn by passion and by half-treacherous humility. Even her face has been exorcised at last, the face I modelled in snow as a child, the face of a woman whose compliant cunt had consumed her utterly.
     I think of Emilie as a bronze statue. Marble bodies, too, are not bothered by fleas. Her heart-shaped upper lip recalls an old world coronation; the lower lip demanding to be sucked arouses visions of harlotry. I was moving slowly beneath her, my head in the hem of her skirt. I had a close-up view of the hairs on her calves flattened in all directions under her lace stockings, and I tried to imagine what kind of a comb would be needed to smooth them back into place. I fell in love with the fragrance of her crotch, a wash-house smell mingled with that of a nest of mice, a pine needle lying forgotten in a bed of lilies of the valley.
     I began to suffer from optical illusions. When I looked at Clara her body merged into the outline of Emilie’s with the tiny heel. When Emilie felt like sinning, her cunt gave off the aroma of spice in a hayrick. Clara’s fragrance was herbal. My hands are wandering under her skirt, touching the top of a stocking, garter knobs, her inner thigh – hot, damp and beguiling. Emilie brings me a cup of tea wearing blue mules. I can never again be completely happy, tormented as I am by women’s sighs, by their eyes rolling in the convulsions of orgasm.
     Emilie never tried to penetrate the world of my poetry. She looked at my garden from over the fence, so that everyday fruit and ordinary berries seemed the awesome apples of some prehistoric paradise. I moved foolishly along the paths, like a half-wit, like a useless dog with its nose in the grass tracking down death and fleeing its own destiny. I was crazy, seeking to find again that moment when shadows fell across a paved square somewhere in the south. Leaning on the fence, Emilie sped on through life. I can see her so clearly: getting up in the morning with her long hair loose, going to the lavatory to piss, sometimes to shit, and then washing with tar soap. Her crotch made fragrant, she hurried to mingle with the living, to rid herself of the feeling that she was at a fork in the road.
     Emilie’s smile was a wonderful thing to watch! Her mouth seemed a dried-out hollow, but as you drew near to this upper lode of pleasure, you could hear something trembling down inside her. As she parted her lips for you, a knob of red flesh burst from between her teeth. Age fondles time lovingly. Morality is only safe at home in the arms of abandonment. Her eyes – which never closed at the height of her pleasure – would take on a gleam of heavenly delight and looked ashamed of what her lips were doing.

In 2017 Morel Books produced a limited edition English-language version of Emilie, in the same format as the original 1933 Czech publication and in a numbered printing of 300 copies. The translation of Štyrský’s text, by Iris Irwin, comes from this version.

Coloured versions are known of some of the photo-montages, and where we know of their existence we have added them at the end of the ten original images.