A number of basic central themes served as the organizing criteria for our monographic series – the first volume on the theme of Nation (FF UK, Praha 2013) was followed by a volume on the theme of War (FF UK, Praha 2014). The theme of Revolution (FF UK, Praha 2015) was the focus of the third volume. The last theme was Everydayness (2016). All these themes introduce formative frames which make it possible to view the term ‘Totality'not only as historical and political phenomenon, but also as a philosophical and aesthetic modelexpanding certain generalideas and forming concrete foundations in a cultural and artistic context. In the first volume, the Nation was understood to a great extent as the normative society, whose members are connected by an array of phenomena such as language, culture, history and education. War, the central theme of the second volume, was perceived as an extreme situation, in which states modify the rules of the existing order, strongly restrict and regulate the lives of citizens, interfering with them. Especially the vast war conflicts of the 20th century had the character of total war with the potential to complete the epoch and prepare for the onset of a new one. Revolution – the theme of the third volume – is perceived as the historical turning point (or paradigmatic change) in the development of the society and artistic structures; it introduces the conflict of the old and the new, and like war it has a situational dimension. Central to our inquiry into everyday life are socio-cultural aspects, rigorously connected with analyses of the concrete artistic or historic -artistic relations. Themes of everyday life and banality became topicalin light of contemporary debates about religious, war, political or private conflicts. The common denominators of the chapters in this book are the reflections on the paradox arising from the clash between the disparate manifestations of everyday life (banality, ‘everyday life'as the manifestation of the true course of life or conversely of the ideal vision, dream or desire about everyday life in an extraordinary, extreme situation) and their destruction/ reconstruction/fulfilment/displacement of impulses and realities arising from various conflict situations (e.g. of socio-political, artistic etc. character). It is the conflicting nature of the clashes of the everyday manifestations with an extreme form of the totalitarian principle (in the way of artistically expressed demands and positions as well as in the sphere of political and cultural practices) on which the direction of individual contributions is based. We endeavoured to present the theme ‘everydayness'so that it would not appear as a non-historical and decontextualized study dealing with various forms and images of everyday life, tearing these relations from their specific historical context and viewing them in the spirit of benign apolitical (or conversely excessively politically motivated) ‘retrospective'which (o˜ en deliberately) displaces awareness of causes and consequences, and without which historical context cannot be fully perceived and comprehended. The time and topic distribution of themes mapped in the chapters of this book cover a broad time scale (mainly but not only) of the native cultural environment of the 19th and 20th centuries, i.e. in the perspective of the so-called ‘long modernism', and specifically in the fi elds of historical, literary-historical, philological, theatrological, musicological, cinematographic and other disciplines. This publication is – similarly as with the previous cases – divided into two sections. The first one, called Prolegomena, consists of three studies, each of which in its own way indicates more general goals and processes, characteristic of the other chapters contained in this book. The analysis of everydayness and its literary reflection in Jedličkaʼs novella Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life – in