Ladislav Klíma was born August 22, 1878, in the western Bohemian town of Domažlice to the family of a well-to-do lawyer. Adamantly refusing to engage in any sort of “normal” life or career, he lived alternately in the Tyrol, the Šumava Mountains, Zurich, and Prague, never seeking permanent employment, burning through any money he had inherited, and living off the occasional royalty or the sporadic largesse of his friends. He settled in Prague’s Smíchov district where he wrote his first work in 1904, The World as Consciousness and Nothing (a volume of philosophy published anonymously and at his own expense), in which he makes the case that “the world” is nothing but a fiction. As such, Klíma’s philosophy has been called radical subjective idealism, which he developed into the metaphysical systems of egosolism and deoessence, and a few of his major inspirations were Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. These themes are also explored in his fictions, chief among which are The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch and Glorious Nemesis. While only part of Klíma’s oeuvre was published during his lifetime, numerous manuscripts were edited and collected posthumously. And though his writing was marginalized and suppressed by the Communist regime for many years, it still managed to inspire a generation of underground artists and dissident intellectuals with its vision of one’s innate ability to achieve inner freedom through the pursuit of spiritual sovereignty. Klíma died of tuberculosis on April 19, 1928, and is buried in Prague.