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The present study examines Saudek’s novel Diplomats (1921) from three perspectives: first, with regard to the (biographical) circumstances of its creation and publication; second, in the gradual development of its concrete form and fields of meaning; third, with an emphasis on the ways in which it was realized. The middle part of the study is the most dominant, evoking (in excerpts and comments) specific elements and constraints of Saudek’s novel structure — centred on the feminist intermingling of the story of Pygmalion with Christ’s (or apostolic) gestation, in accordance with a tendency of the period to bring together the national and universal horizons of salvation, and to confront the temporal connections and confrontations with stimuli from the outside world. To understand their present and future, the main protagonists of the novel are constructed as initiates in the art of graphology, able to identify the handwriting of famous writers. They believe, moreover, that they can recognize the ‘handwriting of history’: that is, the contours of what is to come. At the same time, they do not want to remain mere contemplative readers of this historical nature, and they go in search of someone who can change the course of the world to meet their ideal, namely that of a peaceful world. They find this in the figure of T. G. Masaryk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]