George Saiko's two novels and short stories contain a complex literary world in which examination of recent history is combined with exploration of the unconscious. Like Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Heimito von Doderer, Saiko deals with historic change in central Europe, especially the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. Saiko's attempts to depict the totality of society can be compared to Musil's similar attempt in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930-1933, 1943; translated as The Man without Qualities, 1953-1960) or Doderer's in Die Dämonen (1956; translated as The Demons, 1961). Along with such modernist writers as Musil, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Broch, and William Faulkner, Saiko tries to expand the boundaries of the "sayable" far beyond the limits of the traditional novel. Saiko's works are Austrian in content but international in their experimental nature.

Georg Emmanuel Saiko was born on 5 February 1892 in Seestadtl, Bohemia (now Czechoslovakia...