Many authors drew a careful line between their civilian life, often tied to an unsatisfactory profession, and their artistic life, which reflected their personal self-fashioning. The pseudonym marked this division from the onset, confirming the authenticity of the creative path and functioning as a kind of new baptism. Yet the two worlds collided more than once, and these collisions were experienced as destructive: they constrained the creator’s freedom and threatened their livelihood. We can see this tension in the court protocols filled out by Karel Šebesta, known by his literary name Miloš Marten, during his legal practice. The documents reveal it through a telling alternation of scripts: the stylized handwriting characteristic of his diaries, manuscripts, and correspondence break into ordinary and shorthand writing, as though the artistic self could not help asserting itself even here.