Franz Kafka, whose works are known all over the world, was a German-speaking author of Jewish origin. Oddly enough, the writer, who is now known to the whole world, was not popular during his lifetime and published only a few short stories. Kafka ordered all his literary heritage to be burned, but his friend Max Brod disobeyed, and only thanks to this world was it possible to find out who this mysterious writer was and get acquainted with his works.
Kafka Franz - famous Jewish origin. He was born on July 3, 1883 in one of the Prague ghettos, which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The writer's father - Herman Kafka - was a Czech-speaking Jew, worked as a salesman in a haberdashery shop, and his mother - Julia Kafka - spoke more German, just like Franz, who, nevertheless, knew Czech and French well. In the family, besides him, there were several other children. The two younger brothers of the future writer died in childhood, but he still had three more sisters. Little Franz went to school until 1893, and then moved to the gymnasium, which he graduated in 1901, having received a matriculation certificate.
After graduating from the University of Prague, Kafka received a doctorate in law. After that, he worked in the insurance department as a simple official. In 1922, Kafka retired prematurely due to illness. However, during his service in public office, Kafka remained devoted to his main occupation - literature, to which he devoted a lot of time. Due to prolonged tuberculosis, which began after a pulmonary hemorrhage, the writer died on June 3, 1924. Before his death, Kafka asked his friend to burn all unpublished manuscripts, but he did not listen to him, and therefore many works of the talented author were published posthumously.
It is always difficult to talk about the feelings of a person, especially if he leads a secluded lifestyle. Nevertheless, there is documented evidence about the life of the famous German writer of Jewish origin, concerning not only his biography, but also his views on life. What was Franz Kafka really like? "Letter to Father", one of the writer's works, is, for example, an excellent reflection of the author's relationship with his father and a number of childhood memories.
In many ways, the writer's life was influenced by his state of health, with which he constantly had problems. It is debatable whether his problems were of a psychosomatic nature, but the fact that the author was plagued by illnesses is undoubted. and regular gymnastics - that's how Kafka tried to cope with his condition. Franz drank a lot of unpasteurized cow's milk, which could cause chronic tuberculosis.
It is believed that Kafka's failure on the love front is to some extent due to his relationship with a despotic father, because of which he never managed to become a family man. Nevertheless, women were present in the life of the writer. From 1912 to 1917 he was in a romantic relationship with Felicia Bauer, who lived in Berlin. During this period, they were engaged twice, but both times it did not lead to anything. Kafka and Felicia communicated mainly through correspondence, as a result of which a wrong idea arose in the writer's imagination about the girl, which did not correspond much to reality. From the surviving correspondence it is clear that they were different people who could not find a common language. After that, Kafka was in a relationship with Yulia Vokhrytsek, but was also soon terminated. In the early 1920s, the writer began an affair with a journalist and translator of his novels, Milena Yesenskaya, who was also married. In 1923, Kafka, along with his muse Dora Dimant, went to Berlin for several months to retire from his family and devote himself entirely to literature.
After visiting Berlin, Kafka returned to Prague again. Gradually, his tuberculosis progressed more and more, giving the writer new problems. This eventually led to the death of Franz in one of the sanatoriums near Vienna, which was probably caused by exhaustion. Persistent sore throat prevented him from eating, and at that time intravenous therapy was in the early stages of development and could not compensate for artificial nutrition. The body of the great German author was transported to Prague, where he was buried in the New Jewish Cemetery.
The fate of the works of this writer is very unusual. During Kafka's lifetime, his talent remained unrecognized, and only a few of his short stories appeared in print, which were not marked by much success. The author became popular after his death and only because his close friend - Max Brod - disobeyed his will and published novels that Kafka wanted to burn so that no one would ever read them.
Otherwise, the world would not know who Kafka is. The novels Brod published soon began to attract worldwide attention. All published works of the author, except for some letters to Milena Yesenskaya, were written in German. To date, they have already been translated into many languages and are known all over the world.
Franz Kafka in this work fully reflected his views on human relationships in his characteristic depressing, oppressive manner. The protagonist of the story is a man who wakes up one morning and realizes that he has turned into a hideous giant insect. Typical for the author are the circumstances of the transformation. Kafka does not give reasons, does not talk about the events that happened before, the main character simply faces the fact that now he is an insect. Surrounding Gregor Samza perceive his new look critically. His father closes him in a room, and his sister, who at first treats him rather warmly compared to others, periodically comes to feed him. Despite his external changes, Gregor remains the same person, his consciousness and his feelings do not change in any way.
Since he was the breadwinner of the family and virtually all of the relatives were dependent on Gregor, who was unable to work after his transformation, the family decided to take on boarders. The new tenants of the house behave shamelessly, and the relatives of the protagonist are increasingly critical of him, because now he cannot support them. The sister begins to visit less and less often, and gradually the family forgets about the insect, which was once their relative. The story ends with the death of the protagonist, which in reality caused almost no emotions among his family members. To further emphasize the indifference of the people around him, at the end of the work, the author describes how Gregor Samsa's relatives stroll carelessly.
The manner of writing, habitual for the writer, was fully reflected in the story "Transformation". Franz Kafka plays the role of an exclusively narrator, he does not seek to reflect his attitude to the events described. In fact, the story is a dry description of events. Characteristic of the writer's style is also the main character, who faces an unfair, sometimes absurd fate. a person who is faced with events that he is not able to deal with. Despite the fantasy of the plot, the story contains quite realistic details that actually turn the work into a grotesque.
Like many other remarkable works of the author, this work was published after the death of the writer. This is a typical Kafka novel, which reflects not only elements of the absurd, but also fantasy with realism. Harmoniously intertwined, all this gives rise to a philosophical story, which became a reflection of the author's creative search.
It is not known exactly what principle the writer was guided by when creating the "Process", however, the manuscript was not formed into a full-fledged work, it consisted of many disparate chapters. Later they were arranged according to the chronology of events, and in this form the world saw the work that Kafka created.
"The Trial" tells about the life of a man named Josef K., who works as a simple employee in a bank. One morning he was arrested by unknown people without giving a reason. He is being watched for a long time, but no one takes measures to detain him.
The most surprising thing here is that Josef K. has no idea what he is suspected of and what he is accused of, since nothing was presented to him. Throughout the work, he is forced to try to understand the reason for the arrest. However, he does not succeed even when the accused is sentenced to death and immediately killed with a blow to the heart, "like a dog." The protagonist, alone in his struggle, fails to get the truth.
This is another novel by the writer with many plot elements of the absurd, which Franz Kafka used very often. "The Castle" is a work that tells about the life of a certain K., who came to the Village to work as a surveyor. When he arrives, he learns that everything here is controlled by the Castle, and in order to start work, or at least get there, he must obtain permission.
K. tries in every possible way to get permission, but he can't do anything. As a result, it turns out that the Village does not need a surveyor, and K. is offered a position as a watchman. The protagonist agrees as he has no choice. The novel breaks off at the visit of K. the charioteer. According to the writer's plan, K. was supposed to stay here forever, and before his death, he would have received a message that his residence in the Village was illegal, but now the Castle allows him to live and work here. But he told his friend that he was stopping work on the novel and did not intend to return to it.
In addition to the above works, the author has many less popular ones. For example, there are several collections of short stories that Franz Kafka started with. "Letters to Milena" is one of the examples of the writer's epistolary lyrics. This is a collection that contains letters addressed to one of his lovers - Milena Yesinskaya, who was originally just a translator of his works into Czech. As a result, a correspondence romance began between the writer and Milena, which greatly influenced Kafka, but made him even more unhappy than he was before him, after it turned out that their characters were incompatible.
This is not the only collection authored by Kafka. Franz published only his stories during his lifetime, which did not bring him such popularity as the novels recognized posthumously, but they are no less remarkable and valuable from a literary point of view. Therefore, they should also be mentioned. What else remarkable did Franz Kafka create? "Labyrinth" is a collection of short stories, which includes a work of the same name and a number of others, the most famous of which is considered to be "Studies of a Dog".
Absurdity and realism, reality and fantasy... It would seem that these are all incompatible concepts, but the author manages to organically connect elements of different styles and genres. A master of words, a genius who was not recognized during his lifetime, and after his death became popular all over the world - all this is Kafka. Franz became a kind of symbol of the era, the voice of humanity, preaching loneliness.
His characters are similar: they face problems that cannot be solved and find themselves face to face with fate.
Tragic and comic take on the forms of the grotesque in Kafka's fantastic stories. He does not seek to show a hero or an outstanding person, the writer tells about a person's fear of something higher, of the outside world, which depends only on circumstances. The main characters of Kafka are people who find themselves in difficult life circumstances that are beyond their control and can hardly be resolved. All this gives rise to their uncertainty, loneliness and fear - all that constantly surrounds people, driving them into a state of anxiety.
FRANZ KAFKA
(1883-1924)
In order to better understand the essence of Kafka's work "Reincarnation", you need to know perfectly the current path of the creator himself. Only a detailed understanding of the biography of Franz Kafka will make it possible to better understand the revelation of the fate of the "little man" in society through the work "Reincarnation". Often the fantastic nature of the work distracts inexperienced readers from the essence of the work, but for those who really revere the philosophical depths of Kafka's work, this work will be quite fascinating and mentoring. But before looking at the work itself, its features, it is necessary to turn to the biography of F. Kafka.
Kafka is an Austrian writer from Prague. The house where he was born in 1883 is located in one of the narrow lanes leading to the hulk of St. Vitus Cathedral. The writer's connection to the city is magical and full of contradictions. Love-hate is comparable only to that which he experienced for his bourgeois father, then got out of poverty and did not realize his own excellent offspring.
Somewhere between the simple wisdom of Yaroslav Hasek, who gave birth to Schweik, and the catastrophic fantasy of Franz Kafka, the creator of Gregor, the hero of the short story "Reincarnation", lies the mentality of the people of Prague, who survived centuries under Germany and Austria, and years of fascist occupation, and decades in hugs of big brother.
In today's free, booming, vigilant Prague, which attracts tourists from all over the world, Franz Kafka has become one of the cult figures. It is also found on bookstores, in the works of institute scientists, and on souvenir T-shirts, which are briskly traded on Wenceslas Square. Here he competes with President Havel and the brave fighter Schweik.
It is worth seeing that not only the Bolsheviks, right behind Mayakovsky, embodied the names of their own people's commissars, artists, writers in steamboats and lines. If not a liner, then the express is named after the angora "Reincarnation". By the way, in the capital of Bavaria there is Kafka Street.
Creativity and the name of Franz Kafka are quite popular in the West. In almost all the works of foreign writers, it is easy to identify motives and images that are inspired specifically by Kafka's work - it influenced not only the painters who belonged to the literary avant-garde. Kafka is one of those writers who are not so easy to understand and explain.
Franz Kafka was born into the family of a Prague Jew, a haberdashery wholesaler, in Prague (1883). The improvement of the family grew evenly, but the affairs from the inside of the family remained with all this in the world of dark philistinism, where all interests were concentrated on the “business”, where the mother wordless, and the father boasts of the humiliation and hardships that he underwent in order to break out into the people. And in this black and musty world, a writer was born and grew up not only fragile and weak on a physical level, but also sensitive to any manifestation of injustice, disrespect, rudeness and self-interest. In 1901, the writer entered the Prague Institute, at first studying chemistry and German studies, then jurisprudence. After graduating from the institute, he works in court, an insurance bureau, where he works almost until the end of his life.
Kafka's works are quite figurative, metaphorical. His small essay "Reincarnation", the novels "The Trial", "The Castle" - this is all the surrounding reality, the society of that time, refracted in the eyes of the poet.
During the life of F. Kafka, such books saw the light: "Contemplation" (1913), "Stoker" (1913), "Reincarnation" (1915), "Sentence" (1916), "Country Doctor" (1919), "Holodar" ( 1924).
The main works were published after the death of the writer. Among them are The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), America (1927).
Kafka's works have been reincarnated as intellectual bestsellers. There are various prerequisites for such popularity: the visibility of confirmations of the old maxim that is being imposed: "We were born to make Kafka past" - yet it is unlikely to explain everything to the end. No matter how they tried to imagine Kafka as the creator of the delirium that reigned in the world, such reading is only one of the facets of his creative features: significant, but not decisive. From the diaries it can be seen right off the bat.
In general, diaries correct a lot of things in the prevailing ideas, which, by their own persistence, turned Kafka, if not a sign, then into an important name with a certain set of notations. Feeling that the notes that Kafka made only for himself, the time does not really meet the judgment about him, that they have become unconditional for the mass consciousness, the executor and the first biographer of the writer Max Brod was in no hurry to publish them. The 1st build didn't come until 10 years after two big-name novels were written, and right after that, America.
Kafka in life seemed insecure within himself, tormented by doubts about his own literary and human viability. How would Kafka feel if he lived to see the days of belated glory? Most likely a nightmare - the diaries in which he is frank, like nowhere else, make such an assumption almost indisputable. After all, Kafka is always thought of as a phenomenon, and not even so much a literary one as a social one, therefore the word “Kafkaesque” becomes widespread - a definition that interprets absurdity, immediately to knowledge, since someone understands this from their own sad experience, - and books of this Prague outcast are beginning to be perceived as a kind of fictionalized manual for someone who studies the mechanics of the complete or bureaucratic omnipotence of catastrophic alogism, everyday life.
But he didn't want to be a "phenomenon". Least of all, he understood himself as a representative figure, since he never felt a real involvement in what others lived, what others aspired to. Divergence with them, painful invisible barriers - this is the subject of more painful reflections that fill the diaries for 13 years that Kafka kept them, turning the last page in June 1923, less than a month before his death.
These arguments almost always take the form of bitter self-reproaches. “I am separated from all things by an empty place, through the boundaries of which I do not even strive to break through,” something in this spirit is repeated again and again. It is clear how hard Kafka experienced his own heart paralysis, as he in most cases calls this indifference, which leaves "not even a crack for doubt or faith, for love disgust or for courage or horror before something definite."
The last clarification is highly fundamental: indifference was not insensitivity. It was only a consequence of a special mental state that did not allow Kafka to feel as something harsh and fundamental for him everything that was not sufficiently definite and significant in the eyes of the environment. Whether we are talking about a career, about marriage prospects (“if I live to be forty years old, then, for sure, I will marry an old heifer in advance, not covered by her upper lip with her teeth”), even about the world war that has begun - he thinks in his own way, knowing very well that this personality of thought and feeling only increases his endless loneliness and that nothing can be corrected here. “What a mind-blowing world is crammed into my head! But how can I free myself from it and release it without tearing it apart?”
Many attempts have been made to explain Kafka's work specifically as such a liberation, since in the same account of 1913 it is said that it is very necessary to get rid of the chimeras that have possessed consciousness, "for this I live in the world." But if, in fact, prose was for Kafka an attempt at such a “repression”, the result was trouble, because the readers of the diaries can see this very correctly - no sublimation came out: complexes, irritation, horrors only intensified in Kafka with each passing year, and the tonality of the notes was only made more dramatic. Although there was no capitulation. It's just that every year Kafka became more and more convinced that with all his own human essence, he is different against the background of the environment, that he seems to exist in a different dimension, in a different system of concepts. And that this, in fact, is the main plot of his life - means his prose too.
He is really different in everything, right down to the smallest detail, in other words, if you look closely, nothing brings him closer and does not make him at least with those who really played a huge role in his fate, like the same Brod, Felice Bauer, Czech journalist Milena Esenska, with whom there were two engagements, both broken off. A languid situation that constantly causes Kafka's bouts of disgust for himself or an overwhelming feeling of complete hopelessness. He tries to fight with himself, tries to pull himself together, but such moods take possession of him so much that there is no defense against them. Then there are records that speak for themselves, like this one, regarding October 1921: “Everything is an illusion: family, service, friends, street; everything is a fantasy, more or less close, and the spouse is a fantasy; the nearest truth is only that you are banging your head against the wall of the cell, in which there are no windows or doors.
They write about Kafka as an analyst of alienation, which affected the whole character of human relations in that life, as a writer endowed with a special gift for depicting various social deformations, as a “pessimistic conformist”, who for some reason was opposed to terrible phantoms, which became more real than a visible possibility, as a prose writer who has always felt the line between the mind-blowing and what is known. Everything is fair, and, however, the feeling that the individual, albeit very significant, is taken for essence does not disappear. Until the key word is uttered, interpretations, even the most inventive ones based on proven facts, will still look missing. Or, at the very least, they are missing something fundamental.
The word was uttered by Kafka himself, and many times: this word is loneliness, and what is absolute, “that only a Russian can call it” what kind of communication, about mastering one's own doom to misfortune, about the fact that everywhere and always he feels like a stranger. But, in fact, the same invisible chamber without windows and doors is described, the same “head against the wall”, which becomes no longer relevant, but a metaphysical reality. She remembers about for herself and in thunderstorms, in circumstances, and her diary records her with unprecedented fullness of evidence.
There were years when Kafka made only fragmentary notes, and 1918 was absent in general (how typical! After all, it was the year of the end of the war, the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the German revolution - so many events, but they did not seem to touch Kafka. He has his own counting time, which by itself is not capable of either weakening or strengthening, for a long time before all historical upheavals, the familiar feeling to him that life, at least for him in fact, is a tragedy - a feeling of "complete failure"). He could forever remove his notebooks from the table, but he still knew that he would not leave a diary: “I must keep myself here, because only here I succeed.”
But, it seems, exclusively in diaries, in free collages of sketches, fragments, in the hot pursuit of recorded dreams, literary and theatrical memories, interspersed with bitter reflections on one's own real and future - exclusively in a book that was never destined to become a book, so completed and authentically embodied the image of Kafka. That is why, knowing how much novels and short stories meant for literature, nevertheless, the most significant text of Kafka, for sure, should really be called diaries, where any page is filled with something necessary and delights to complement the story of a writer whose life was also a work, constituted such an important narrative in modern history.
A fairly widely known literary work of F. Kafka is his diaries, which should not fall into the hands of third-party readers. But fate decreed that they remained after the death of the writer.
Of all the pile of diaries, he is not sufficiently readable. But the less you delve into Kafka's diary, the better you understand that this is specifically his diary. The alarmed idea sets off in Austria-Hungary, whose subject was the Jew Franz Kafka. This mixture itself can be alarming! Kafka, despite the fact that the Czechs considered him to be a German, since he wrote specifically in this language, the Germans for the Czech, was in conflict with his people. This is the biggest disaster. A man with inborn state traits, with dignity, but without a homeland shelter. Already the second reason for the "terrible" Kafkaesque diaries is the family. The father, who is an influential manufacturer from an artisan family, forced his offspring to follow him. Here, in the diary, there is a split in the use of the word "labor". Kafka considered his writing to be the most basic. But love for dad, the horror of hurting him (like mom, like the beloved girl), causes even greater tragedy. In the first case, with dad, he cannot but obey the cry of blood, in the other, he has no right to betray his own talent, and later to hurt Milena. All his life was based on terrible breaks: with lovers, with relatives, with loved ones. And in this sense, Kafka's diary is specifically a diary, since it is intimate and incomprehensible. Here one can read directly the conversation with the invisible one that gives him mysterious dreams. He does not waver in their depravity. But this viciousness is projected only on him, locked up in Kafka himself. He painfully feels the vacuum around him, the emptiness of life. He resorts to a gigantic trial to build his workshop, which ends in defeat. And he himself recognizes it in his wills, stipulating that all his works will be destroyed upon death. Kafka realized that he was only an instrument in the hands of the Lord God. But stubbornly, like that beetle, he tried to get out, to get out of human habits: on the pages he lists boring plays by other people's creators, other people's stories, everyday scenes, mixed up together with his new works. From the diary, from its pages often-densely breathes emptiness, boring monologues of one's own sores.
There is more carnage ahead. 1st large-scale meat grinder. Ahead of the Dreyfus case. Jewry begins to enter the world arena more confidently, Jews occupy the highest bureaucratic positions, but the problem of the “ghetto” remains unresolved: if you live in a Christian state, you should at least be aware of the principles by which society develops. The Jew Franz Kafka tried to dissect, to understand a society with a culture alien to him. He was not an outcast in Jewish families, like Sholem Aleichem. Kafka, in order to escape the curse, enters dreams, lives in dreams. Silver huge mirrors, where from time to time the writer contemplates the face of Satan with fear. His fluctuations between faith in God and purely applied faith in art. For Kafka, the night is a time of sweet horror in which he can retire; then a nightmare of horrors: before the writer there are empty sheets of paper, flour, pain. But this is not the pain of creativity. It is faster than the agony of visionary. His prophetic visions are too petty to qualify for the noose of a prophet. Kafka's "prediction" is that he concentrated only on himself. It is surprising that his foggy kingdoms, castles in a few 10 years will be overgrown with the stinking rags of totalitarian regimes. His doubts and hesitations are reminiscent of a priest's walk before a service. Cleaning. Ablution. Sermon. But often Kafka is afraid to preach - this is his advantage, and not a mistake, as many of his researchers believe. His writings are the contemplation of the Mass by a small Jewish boy who is trying to realize what is happening in that other, Christian, world.
The great Austrian writer died in 1924. Buried in Prague. His work to this day remains burning, fascinating and not fully open. Each reader finds something of his own in his works. Fundamental, unique…
The Jewish roots of Franz Kafka did not prevent him from mastering the German language perfectly and even writing his works in it. During his lifetime, the writer published little, but after his death, Kafka's relatives published his works, despite the direct prohibition of the writer. How did Franz Kafka, the master of word formation, live and work?
The author was born in the summer: July 3, 1883 in Prague. His family lived in a former ghetto for Jews. Father Herman had his own small business and was a wholesaler. And mother Julia was the heiress of a wealthy brewer and spoke German very well.
Kafka's two brothers and three sisters made up his entire family. The brothers died at an early age, and the sisters died in later years in concentration camps. In addition to the German language taught by his mother, Kafka knew Czech and French.
In 1901, Franz graduated from the gymnasium, then received a matriculation certificate. Five years later, he received a diploma from Charles University. So he became a doctor of law. Weber himself supervised the writing of his dissertation.
In the future, Kafka worked all his life in one insurance department. He retired early due to health problems. Kafka did not like to work in his specialty. He kept diaries where he described his hatred for his boss, colleagues and all his activities in general.
During the period of his ability to work, Kafka significantly improved working conditions in factories throughout the Czech Republic. At work, he was highly valued and respected. In 1917, doctors diagnosed Kafka with tuberculosis. After the diagnosis, he was not allowed to retire for another 5 years, as he was a valuable employee.
The writer had a difficult character. He broke up with his parents early. He lived in poverty and asceticism. He wandered a lot in removable closets. He suffered not only from tuberculosis, but also from migraines, and also suffered from insomnia and impotence. Kafka himself led a healthy lifestyle. In his youth, he went in for sports, tried to stick to a vegetarian diet, but could not recover from his ailments.
Kafka often engaged in self-flagellation. He was dissatisfied with himself and the world around him. I wrote a lot about it in my diaries. Even at school, Franz helped organize performances and promoted the literary circle. On those around him he gave the impression of a neat young man with a great sense of humor.
Franz has been friends with Max Brod since school days. This friendship continued until the writer's sudden death. Kafka's personal life did not develop. Some researchers believe that this state of affairs was rooted in his relationship with his despot father.
Franz was engaged to Felicia Bauer twice. But he never married the girl. After all, her image, which the writer came up with, did not correspond to the character of a living person.
Then Kafka had an affair with Yulia Vokhrytsek. But here, too, family life did not work out. After Franz met with married journalist Elena Yesenskaya. During that period, she helped him edit his works.
After 1923, Kafka's health deteriorated greatly. Tuberculosis of the larynx developed rapidly. The writer could not eat and breathe normally, he was exhausted. In 1924, his relatives took him to a sanatorium. But this measure did not help. So on June 3, Franz Kafka passed away. He was buried at the New Cemetery for Jews in Olshany.
Collections and novels were selected by Franz for publication in his own hand. Before his death, Kafka expressed a desire that his loved ones destroy the rest of the manuscripts and diaries. Some of his works really went to the fire, but many remained and were published after the death of the author.
The novels "America", "The Castle" and "The Trial" were never completed by the author, but the existing chapters were published anyway. Eight workbooks of the author have also been preserved. They contain sketches and sketches of works that he never wrote.
What did Kafka, who lived a difficult life, write about? Fear of the world and the judgment of the Higher Powers pervades all the works of the author. His father wanted his son to become the heir to his business, and the boy did not meet the expectations of the head of the family, so he was subject to his father's tyranny. This left a serious imprint on Franz's worldview.
Written in the style of realism, the novels convey everyday life without unnecessary embellishments. The author's style may seem dry and clerical, but the plot twists in the stories and novels are quite non-trivial.
There is much left unsaid in his work. The writer leaves the reader the right to independently interpret some situations in the works. In general, Kafka's works are filled with tragedy and oppressive atmosphere. The author wrote some of his works together with his friend Max Brod.
For example, "The first long trip by rail" or "Richard and Samuel" is a small prose of two friends who have supported each other all their lives.
Franz Kafka did not receive much recognition as a writer during his lifetime. But his works, published after his death, were appreciated. The novel The Trial received the highest critical acclaim from around the world. He also fell in love with readers. Who knows how many beautiful works burned in the fire on the orders of the author himself. But what has reached the public is considered a magnificent addition to the postmodern style in art and literature.
Kafka was born on July 3, 1883 into a Jewish family living in the Josefov district, the former Jewish ghetto of Prague (Czech Republic, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). His father, Herman (Genykh) Kafka (-), came from a Czech-speaking Jewish community in South Bohemia, from the city he was a haberdashery wholesaler. The surname "Kafka" is of Czech origin (kavka literally means "jackdaw"). Herman Kafka's trademark envelopes, which Franz often used for letters, feature this bird with a trembling tail as an emblem. The writer's mother - Julia Kafka (née Etl Levy) (-), the daughter of a wealthy brewer - preferred the German language. Kafka himself wrote in German, although he also knew Czech very well. He also spoke French well, and among the four people whom the writer, “not pretending to be compared with them in strength and reason,” felt “his blood brothers,” was the French writer Gustave Flaubert. The other three are Franz Grillparzer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Heinrich von Kleist. Although a Jew, Kafka knew almost no Yiddish and began to show interest in the traditional culture of Eastern European Jews only at the age of twenty under the influence of Jewish theater troupes touring in Prague; interest in the study of Hebrew arose only towards the end of his life.
Kafka had two younger brothers and three younger sisters. Both brothers, before reaching the age of two, died before Kafka was 6 years old. The sisters were named Elli, Valli and Ottla (all three died during World War II in Nazi concentration camps in Poland). In the period from to Kafka attended elementary school (Deutsche Knabenschule), and then gymnasium, which he graduated in 1901 with a matriculation exam. After graduating from the Prague Charles University, he received a doctorate in law (Professor Alfred Weber was Kafka's supervisor of the dissertation), and then he entered the service of an official in the insurance department, where he worked in modest positions until prematurely - due to illness - retirement in the city of Work for the writer was a secondary and burdensome occupation: in diaries and letters, he confesses his hatred for his boss, colleagues and clients. Literature has always been in the foreground, "justifying its entire existence." After a pulmonary hemorrhage, a long tuberculosis ensued, from which the writer died on June 3, 1924 in a sanatorium near Vienna.
Franz Kafka Museum in Prague
The idea of the story "The Metamorphosis" has been used in cinema many times:
Kafka himself published four collections - "Contemplation", "Country Doctor", "Kara" and "Hunger", as well as "Fireman"- the first chapter of the novel "America" ("Missing") and several other short essays. However, his main creations are novels. "America" (1911-1916), "Process"(1914-1918) and "Lock"(1921-1922) - remained incomplete to varying degrees and saw the light after the death of the author and against his last will: Kafka unequivocally bequeathed to destroy everything he wrote to his friend Max Brod.
8 workbooks of Franz Kafka (- gg.), Containing rough sketches, stories and versions of stories, reflections and observations.
The list contains more than a hundred statements by Kafka, selected by him based on the materials of the 3rd and 4th in-octavo notebooks.
| Franz Kafka | |
|---|---|
| Novels | Process | Castle | America |
| Novels and stories | Description of one struggle | Village wedding | Verdict | Transformation | In a penal colony | School teacher | Brumfeld, an old bachelor | Crypt watchman | Village doctor | Hunter Gracchus | How the Chinese wall was built | Golodar | Studies of one dog | Little woman | Nora | Singer Josephine, or mouse people |
| Related articles | Franz Kafka Museum | |
Franz Kafka (Anshel; Franz Kafka; 1883, Prague, - 1924, Kirling, near Vienna, buried in Prague), Austrian writer.
Born into a German-speaking Jewish family of a haberdasher merchant. In 1906 he graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Prague. In 1908–19 (formally until 1922) served in an insurance company. He appeared in print in 1908. Realizing himself as a professional writer, he became close to the so-called Prague Circle of Expressionist Writers (O. Baum, 1883–1941; M. Brod; F. Welch; F. Werfel; P. Leppin, 1878–1945; L. Perutz, 1884-1957; W. Haas, 1891-1973; F. Janowitz, 1892-1917, etc.), mostly German-speaking Jews.
Although during the life of Kafka, only a few of his stories were published in magazines and came out in separate editions (Observation, 1913; Sentence and Stoker, 1913; Metamorphosis, 1916; Country Doctor, 1919; Hunger, 1924 ), he already in 1915 received one of the significant literary prizes in Germany - named after T. Fontane. Dying, Kafka bequeathed to burn his manuscripts and not to republish published works. However, M. Brod, Kafka's friend and executor, realizing the outstanding significance of his work, published in 1925–26. novels "Trial", "Castle", "America" (the last two were not completed), in 1931 - a collection of unpublished stories "On the Construction of the Chinese Wall", in 1935 - collected works (including diaries), in 1958 - letters.
The main theme of Kafka is the boundless loneliness and defenselessness of a person in the face of hostile and incomprehensible powerful forces for him. Kafka's narrative style is characterized by the plausibility of details, episodes, thoughts and behavior of individuals appearing in extraordinary, absurd circumstances and collisions. A somewhat archaic language, a strict style of "business" prose, striking at the same time with melody, serves to depict nightmarish, fantastic situations. A calm, restrained description of incredible events creates a special inner sense of tension in the story. The images and collisions of Kafka's works embody the tragic doom of a "little" person in a collision with the nightmarish alogism of life. Kafka's heroes are devoid of individuality and act as the embodiment of some abstract ideas. They operate in an environment that, despite the details of the family life of the middle class of imperial Austria-Hungary, as well as the general features of its state system, accurately noted by the author, is free from concreteness and acquires the properties of a non-historical artistic time of the parable. The peculiar philosophical prose of Kafka, combining the symbolism of abstract images, fantasy and grotesque with the imaginary objectivity of a deliberately protocol narrative, and the deep subtext and internal monologues, reinforced by elements of psychoanalysis, with the conditionality of the situation, the novelization techniques of the novel and sometimes the expansion of the parable (parabola) to its scale, is essential enriched the poetics of the 20th century.
Written under the influence of Ch. Dickens, Kafka's first novel about a young emigrant in a world alien to him - "Missing" (1912; named by M. Brod when publishing "America") - is distinguished by a detailed description of the external coloring of the American way of life, familiar to the author only from stories of friends and books. However, already in this novel, narrative everyday life is mixed with a somnambulistic, fantastic beginning, which, like everywhere with Kafka, acquires the features of everyday life. Artistically more mature and more tense in mood, the novel The Trial (1914) is a story about a bank clerk Josef K., who suddenly finds out that he is subject to trial and must wait for the verdict. His attempts to find out his guilt, to defend himself, or at least to find out who his judges are, are fruitless - he is condemned and executed. In The Castle (1914–22), the narrative atmosphere is even darker. The action boils down to the futile efforts of a stranger, a certain land surveyor K., to get into the castle, personifying a higher power.
Complicated, largely encrypted works of Kafka, some researchers explain his biography, finding the key to understanding his personality and works in his diaries and letters. Representatives of this psychoanalytic school see in Kafka's works only a reflection of his personal fate, and most importantly, a lifelong conflict with a despotic father, Kafka's painful position in the family, from which he did not find understanding and support. Kafka himself, in his unpublished Letter to a Father (1919), stated: “My writings were about you, I set forth my complaints there, which I could not pour out on your chest.” This letter, which is a brilliant example of psychoanalysis, in which Kafka defended his right to follow his vocation, became a significant phenomenon in world literature. Considering literary creativity the only possible way of existence for himself, Kafka was also burdened by the service in the accident insurance office. For many years he suffered from insomnia and migraines, and in 1917 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis (Kafka spent the last years of his life in sanatoriums and boarding houses). The impossibility for Kafka to combine the preoccupation with creativity with a high idea of the duty of a family man, self-doubt, fear of responsibility, failure, ridicule of his father were the main reasons for the termination of his engagements with Felicia Bauer and Yulia Voritsek. His great love for Milena Esenskaya-Pollak, the first translator of his works into Czech, did not end in marriage either.
Based on the facts of Kafka's dim biography, psychoanalysts consider his works only as a "romanized autobiography." Thus, the fatal loneliness of his heroes, due, for example, to the tragic metamorphosis of a man into a huge insect in The Metamorphosis or the position of the accused in The Trial, the stranger in The Castle, the restless emigrant in America, reflected only the boundless loneliness of Kafka in family. The famous parable "At the gates of the law" (included in the "Trial") is interpreted as a reflection of Kafka's childhood memories, expelled by his father at night and standing in front of a locked door; The "trial" allegedly reflects the feeling of guilt that forced Kafka to terminate the marriage obligations, or is a punishment for lovelessness as a violation of the moral law; “Sentence” and “Transformation” are a response to Kafka’s clash with his father, the recognition of his guilt in estrangement from the family, etc. However, even such moments as Kafka’s interest in social problems are left aside with this approach (he drafted a “commune » - communities of free workers); its successive connection with E. T. A. Hoffmann, N. Gogol, F. Dostoevsky, S. Kierkegaard (who anticipated Kafka's idea of the absolute helplessness of man), with the centuries-old tradition of the Jewish parable, with a place in the current literary process, etc. Representatives of the sociological school pointed out the incompleteness of the biographical-Freudian approach to the interpretation of Kafka's work, noting that Kafka's symbolic world is strikingly reminiscent of modernity. They interpret Kafka's work as a reflection in a fantastic form of real social contradictions, as a symbol of the tragic loneliness of a person in an unsettled world. Some see Kafka as a visionary, as if predicting (especially in the story "In the penal colony"; written in 1914, published in 1919) a fascist nightmare, which he noted already in the 1930s. B. Brecht (all Kafka's sisters, like M. Yesenskaya, died in Nazi concentration camps). In this regard, Kafka's assessment of mass revolutionary movements (he was talking about the revolution in Russia) is also interesting, the results of which, in his opinion, will be nullified "by the domination of the new bureaucracy and the emergence of a new Napoleon Bonaparte."
Most interpreters see in Kafka's works a symbolic representation of the religious situation of modern man. However, these interpretations range from attributing existentialist nihilism to Kafka to attributing to him a belief in Divine salvation. Representatives of the so-called mythological school, for example, believe that the mythologization of everyday prose, with its illogicality and inconsistency with common sense, is brought to extraordinary consistency in Kafka's work, where the background forms a "travesty of Jewish myth" (in the sense of biblical and Talmudic / see Talmud / legends) . There is a point of view according to which the alienation of Kafka's heroes from their environment, which in his eyes acquires the meaning of a universal law, symbolically reflects the isolation of the Jew in the world. The heroes of Kafka are the Jews of Galut with their philosophy of fear, hopelessness and disorder, a premonition of impending cataclysms, and his work expresses the attitude of a representative of the religious and social ghetto, aggravated by the feeling of a German-Jewish outcast in Slavic Prague. M. Brod believes that Kafka is mainly talking not about a person and society, but about a person and God, and “Process” and “Law” are two hypostases of God in Judaism: Justice (middat X a-din) and Mercy (middat X a-rahamim). M. Brod also believed that the influence of Jewish religious literature (primarily the Talmud) affected the controversy (internal confrontation) of Kafka's heroes. According to the concept of researchers who consider Kafka's work in the light of his Jewishness, he sees the way to salvation for himself and his heroes in the constant striving for improvement, which brings him closer to Truth, Law, God. Consciousness of the greatness of the Jewish tradition and despair at the impossibility of finding a foothold in it Kafka expressed in the story "Studies of a Dog" (Russian translation - the Menorah magazine, No. 5, 1974, Jer.): "Terrible visions of our forefathers rose before me. ... I bow to their knowledge, which they drew from sources already forgotten by us.
According to Kafka, "literary creativity is always only an expedition in search of Truth." Finding the Truth, his hero will find a way to the community of people. Kafka wrote about "happiness to be together with people".
Heroes of Kafka fail in their attempts to break through loneliness: land surveyor K. remains a stranger in the village, where he found an unstable shelter. However, the castle is a certain higher goal that still exists. The villager from the parable “At the gates of the Law” is condemned to die while waiting for permission to enter them, but before death he sees a light flickering in the distance. In the parable “How the Chinese Wall Was Built” more and more new generations are building a wall, but in the very desire to build there is hope: “until they stop rising, the steps do not end.” In Kafka's last short story "The Singer Josephine, or the Mouse People" (the prototype of Josephine's image was a native of Eretz-Israel, Pua Ben-Tuwim-Mitchell, who taught Kafka Hebrew), where the Jewish people are easily guessed in the industrious, persistent mouse people, the wise mouse says: " We do not capitulate unconditionally to anyone ... the people continue to go their own way. Thus, despite the acute sense of the tragedy of life, this hope looming before the heroes does not give the right to consider Kafka a hopeless pessimist. He wrote: "Man cannot live without faith in something indestructible in himself." This indestructible is his inner world. Kafka is a poet of sympathy and compassion. Condemning selfishness and sympathizing with the suffering person, he declared: "We must take upon ourselves all the suffering that surrounds us."
The fate of Jewry has always worried Kafka. His father's formal, dry approach to religion, the soulless, automatic rituals observed only on holidays, pushed Kafka away from traditional Judaism. Like most of the assimilated Prague Jews, Kafka was only vaguely aware of his Jewishness in his youth. Although his friends M. Brod and G. Bergman introduced him to the ideas of Zionism, and in 1909–11. he listened to lectures on Jewishness by M. Buber (who influenced him and other Prague expressionists) at the Bar-Kochba student club in Prague, but the tour of the Jewish troupe from Galicia (1911) served as an impetus for awakening interest in the life of Jews, especially Eastern European ) and friendship with the actor Itzhak Loewy, who introduced Kafka to the problems of Jewish literary life in Warsaw in those years. Kafka enthusiastically read the history of literature in Yiddish, made a presentation on the Yiddish language, studied Hebrew, and studied the Torah. I. M. Langer, who taught Kafka Hebrew, introduced him to Hasidism. At the end of his life, Kafka becomes close to the ideas of Zionism and takes part in the work of the Jewish People's House (Berlin), cherishes the dream of moving to Eretz-Israel with a friend of the last year of his life, Dora Dimant, however, he considers himself insufficiently cleansed spiritually and prepared for such a step. It is characteristic that Kafka published his early works in the assimilation journal Bohemia, and the last in the Berlin Zionist publishing house Di Schmide. During his lifetime and in the first decade after Kafka's death, only a narrow circle of connoisseurs was familiar with his work. But with the advent of Nazism to power in Germany, during the Second World War and especially after it, Kafka's work gained international fame. The influence of Kafka's creative method, characteristic of the modernist literature of the 20th century, was experienced to varying degrees by T. Mann
The epithet "Kafkaesque" has entered many languages of the world to denote the situations and feelings of a person who has fallen into the labyrinth of grotesque nightmares of life.
