![]() The most well-known are The Judgement (1913), The Stoker (1913), The Metamorphosis (1915) and In the Penal Colony (1919).īrod became Kafka’s literary executor. The small number of stories he published during his lifetime amounted to no more than 300 or so pages. In 1917, Kafka was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him just before his 41st birthday. In his diaries, describing the “tribunal” where his engagement to Felice was broken for the first time, Kafka noted: “Her father grasps it correctly from all sides.” Kafka’s literary legacy It was more than an activity undertaken to build the kind of literary legacy that his friend and fellow writer Max Brod (1884-1968) desired for him.įelice and her father each recognised this paradoxical relation to life in Kafka. It was so much more than a mode of expression. It was a force to which he could only submit, an existence that joined up with and tore away from his own. His existence was entirely directed towards what was, for him, both the necessary and the uncanny nature of writing.įor Kafka, writing was a strange way of thinking and being in the world. Kafka’s sensibility was aslant to the conventions of bourgeois life, but it chimed with a certain European modernity that was, around that time, expressing its disenchantment with the world. He had friends, admirers, colleagues and lovers aplenty. Yet this hardworking, clever, funny and eventually chronically ill young man was not a hermit. Each of these things he saw as challenges, counter forces, to his writing. He was deeply conflicted by the necessity to undertake the paid work that sapped his energy. He despaired of the obligations of family life, the noisiness and nosiness of his parents and siblings. He was often in pain, fatigued, or simply distressed by his body’s puniness. As his dairies repeatedly show, Kafka’s life, his existence, was literature, and that existence was not shareable as a “lived experience”. What Kafka expresses in the letter is a commitment to something other than a life to be lived and shared with Felice, something other than what today would be called a lifestyle. Notably, Franz did not declare to Herr Bauer: “I am a lawyer working for a workers’ insurance company, but my real passion is fiction writing.” Nor did he say: “I have a responsible and reasonably well-paying day job, but spend my nights writing stories in my parents’ apartment in Prague where I live.” Missing was the schmoozing of: “Literature is my primary interest – along with your daughter, of course.”Įach of these statements would have been true, although none would have struck the same kind of truth as his actual declaration – to himself as much as to his addressee – that he was, as he wrote in his diary, “nothing but literature”. They saw each other infrequently during their four years together. The decision to put his thoughts in a letter was entirely consistent with the epistolary nature of his relationship with Felice. It was the first of three engagements: twice to Felice and later, quite briefly, to Julie Wohryzek. ![]() The Diaries – Franz Kafka, translated by Ross Benjamin (Shocken)įranz Kafka (1884-1924) was nearly 30 years old and engaged to Felice Bauer when he made this exorbitant claim. But in response to the imagined and real interrogation, both of which generate feelings of guilt and shame about his intentions, the young man instead declares to his prospective father-in-law, by way of a letter: “All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.” The convention of the day would require him to lay out his credentials and his family’s pedigree for the match to proceed agreeably. ![]() A young man with sound prospects is to meet his fiancée’s father for the first time. ![]() It is the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before the Great War changed such scenes forever. ![]()
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