Abstract
The "Editorial Note" is a scholarly bibliographical aid that comments on the source base for a selection of the poetry and prose poems of Geo Milev (1895-1925), the most important representative of expressionism in Bulgarian literature. The selection is called "The Cruel Ring of the Soul" after the author's first collection "Zhestokiyat prasten" (i.e. "The Cruel Ring") from 1920.
Milev's expressionist work is an essential effort to awaken something natural and long forgotten. It focuses on erotic wildness, archetypal primitiveness, natural spontaneity and passionate instinctivity, which reflects the author's conflict with ideas about chastity, sobriety and rationality. This creates a world in which nothing is at rest, nothing is permanent, nothing is definitive.
The book "The Cruel Ring of the Soul" is so far the most extensive Czech compilation of the works of the globally recognized Bulgarian expressionist, whose poem "September" became an emblematic work of the so-called September poets (writers).