Biography written in a readable literary form with humour and subtlety. Awarded the Miloslav Švandrlík award for the best humoristic book of the year and shortlisted for the F. X. Šalda Award as the most serious one at the same time.

Ladislav Čumba’s literary text explores the story of Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. The son of a Kladno steelmaker, one of the richest people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose mother Poldi is still remembered by residents of Kladno, he turned his back on that enormous wealth. He became a gardener and, after a colourful journey, a philosophy teacher at Cambridge. This story of the Czech traces in the family and life of the philosopher Wittgenstein is a testimony to the tenacity of both capitalists and writers, to intransigence and tolerance, to arts patronage and the power of the spoken and written word. It also takes in eminent artists of the period, in many cases family friends, like Rilke, Trakl, Klimt, Brahms, Hindemith and Ravel.