Biography of French Kafka. Biography and amazing work of Franz Kafka Franz Kafka writing language
KAFKA Franz (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.), mainly German-speaking Jews.
Although during Kafka’s lifetime, only a few of his stories were published in magazines and were published in separate editions (“Observation”, 1913; “The Verdict” and “Stoker”, 1913; “Metamorphosis”, 1916; “The Country Doctor”, 1919; “The Hunger”, 1924 ), already in 1915 he received one of the significant literary prizes in Germany - named after T. Fontane. Dying, Kafka bequeathed to burn his manuscripts and not to republish his published works. However, M. Brod, Kafka’s friend and executor, understanding the outstanding significance of his work, published it in 1925–26. novels “The Trial”, “Castle”, “America” (the last two were not finished), in 1931 - a collection of unpublished stories “On the Construction of the Chinese Wall”, in 1935 - a collection of works (including diaries), in 1958 - letters.
Kafka's main theme is the boundless loneliness and defenselessness of man in the face of hostile and powerful forces incomprehensible to him. Kafka's narrative style is characterized by the verisimilitude of details, episodes, thoughts and behavior of individuals appearing in extraordinary, absurd circumstances and encounters. The somewhat archaic language, the strict style of “businesslike” prose, which is at the same time striking in its melody, serves to depict nightmarish, fantastic situations. A calm, restrained description of incredible events creates a special internal feeling of narrative tension. The images and collisions of Kafka’s works embody the tragic doom of a “little” man in a collision with the nightmarish illogicality of life. Kafka's characters are devoid of individuality and act as the embodiment of certain abstract ideas. They operate in an environment that, despite the details of family life of the middle class of imperial Austria-Hungary accurately noted by the author, as well as the general features of its state system, is free from specificity and acquires the properties of an ahistorical artistic time parable. Kafka's peculiar philosophical prose, 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 conventionality of the situation, the techniques of novelization of the novel and sometimes the expansion of the parable (parabola) to its scale, significantly enriched the poetics of the 20th century.
Written under the influence of Charles Dickens, Kafka's first novel about a young emigrant in a world alien to him - "The Missing" (1912; named by M. Brod when publishing "America") - is distinguished by a detailed description of the external flavor of the American way of life, familiar to the author only from stories from friends and books. However, already in this novel, narrative everyday life is mixed with a somnambulistic, fantastic beginning, which, as elsewhere in Kafka, takes on the features of everyday life. Artistically more mature and more intense in mood, the novel “The Trial” (1914) is a story about a bank employee Josef K., who suddenly learns that he is subject to trial and must await a verdict. His attempts to find out his guilt, defend himself, or at least find out who his judges are are fruitless - he is convicted and executed. In The Castle (1914–22), the atmosphere of the story is even darker. The action boils down to the futile efforts of an alien, a certain land surveyor K., to get into the castle, personifying a higher power.
Some researchers explain Kafka's complicated, largely encrypted work by 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 his oppressive father, Kafka’s difficult position in a family from which he did not find understanding and support. Kafka himself, in his unpublished “Letter to his Father” (1919), stated: “In my writings it was about you, I expressed there my complaints that I could not pour out on your chest.” This letter, a brilliant example of psychoanalysis in which Kafka defended his right to follow his calling, became a significant phenomenon in world literature. Considering literary creativity to be the only possible way of existence for himself, Kafka was also burdened by his 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 inability for Kafka to combine absorption in creativity with a high idea of the duty of a family man, self-doubt, fear of responsibility, failure, and ridicule of his father were the main reasons for the dissolution of his engagements to Felicia Bauer and Julia Woritzek. His great love for Milena Jesenská-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 view his works only as a “novelized 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 Kafka’s boundless loneliness in family. The famous parable “At the Gates of Law” (included in “The Trial”) is interpreted as a reflection of Kafka’s childhood memories, expelled at night by his father and standing in front of a locked door; The “trial” supposedly reflects the feeling of guilt that forced Kafka to dissolve his marriage, or is a punishment for lovelessness as a violation of the moral law; “The Verdict” and “Metamorphosis” are a response to Kafka’s clash with his father, the admission of his guilt in alienation from his family, etc. However, this approach leaves aside even such moments as Kafka’s interest in social problems (he drafted a “commune” " - communities of free workers); his 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 its 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 symbolization of the tragic loneliness of man in an unsettled world. Some see Kafka as a seer who, as it were, predicted (especially in the story “In the Penal Colony”; written in 1914, published in 1919) the fascist nightmare, which was noted already in the 1930s. B. Brecht (all Kafka’s sisters, like M. Jesenskaya, died in Nazi concentration camps). In this regard, Kafka’s assessment of mass revolutionary movements (he was talking about the revolution in Russia), the results of which, in his opinion, will be negated by “the dominance of the new bureaucracy and the emergence of a new Napoleon Bonaparte,” is also interesting.
Most interpreters see in Kafka's works a symbolic depiction 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, for example, of the so-called mythological school 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 is formed by “travesties of Judaic myth” (in the sense of biblical and talmudic / see Talmud / tales) . 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. Kafka’s heroes are Galut Jews with their philosophy of fear, hopelessness and disorder, a premonition of impending cataclysms, and his work expresses the attitude of a representative of a religious and social ghetto, aggravated by the feeling of a German-Jewish outcast in Slavic Prague. M. Brod believes that Kafka is talking mainly not about man and society, but about man and God, and “Process” and “Law” are two hypostases of God in Judaism: Justice (middat X a-din) and Mercy (middat X Ha-Rachamim). M. Brod also believed that the controversies (internal confrontation) of Kafka’s heroes were influenced by Jewish religious literature (primarily the Talmud). According to the concept of researchers who consider Kafka’s work in the light of his Jewishness, he sees the path to salvation for himself and his heroes in the constant pursuit of improvement, which brings him closer to Truth, Law, and God. Kafka expressed his awareness of the greatness of the Jewish tradition and despair at the impossibility of finding a foothold in it in the story “The Study of One Dog” (Russian translation - Menorah magazine, No. 5, 1974, Jer.): “Formidable visions of our forefathers arose 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.” Having found the Truth, his hero will find a way to the community of people. Kafka wrote about the “happiness of being with people.”
Kafka's heroes fail in their attempts to break through loneliness: the land surveyor K. remains a stranger in the village where he found a fragile shelter. However, the castle is some 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 dying he sees a light flickering in the distance. In the parable “How the Wall of China was Built,” more and more generations are building the wall, but in the very desire to build there is hope: “until they stop climbing, the steps do not end.” In Kafka’s last short story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People” (the prototype of Josephine’s image was the Eretz-Israel native Pua Ben-Tuvim-Mitchel, who taught Kafka Hebrew), where the Jewish people are easily discerned in the hardworking, 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: “A person cannot live without faith in something indestructible in himself.” This indestructible is his inner world. Kafka is a poet of empathy 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 always worried Kafka. His father's formal, dry approach to religion, soulless, automatic rituals observed only on holidays, pushed Kafka away from traditional Judaism. Like most 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 Jewry by M. Buber (who influenced him and other Prague Expressionists) at the Bar Kochba student club in Prague, but the impetus for awakening interest in the life of Jewry, especially Eastern European, was the tour of a Jewish troupe from Galicia (1911 ) and friendship with the actor Itzhak Loewy, who introduced Kafka to the problems of Jewish literary life in Warsaw of those years. Kafka enthusiastically read the history of literature in Yiddish, gave a report 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 his friend in the last year of his life, Dora Dimant, but considers himself insufficiently purified spiritually and prepared for such a step. It is characteristic that Kafka published his early works in the assimilationist magazine Bohemia, and his latest 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 were familiar with his work. But with the rise of Nazism to power in Germany, during the Second World War and especially after it, Kafka's work gained international fame. T. Mann experienced the influence of Kafka’s creative method, characteristic of modernist literature of the 20th century, to varying degrees
The epithet “Kafkaesque” has entered many languages of the world to denote the situations and feelings of a person caught in the labyrinth of grotesque nightmares of life.
Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924) is a famous German writer, a classic of twentieth-century literature. During his lifetime he was not deservedly appreciated. Almost all of the writer's famous works were published after his premature death.
Childhood
The future writer was born in Prague. He was the first of six children in a fairly wealthy Jewish family. Two of his brothers died in early childhood, leaving only his sisters. Kafka the elder was a successful merchant. He made a good fortune selling haberdashery. Mother came from wealthy brewers. Thus, despite the lack of titles and belonging to high society, the family was never in need.
As soon as Franz was six years old, he began attending primary school. In those years, no one doubted the need for education. The boy’s parents, using the example of their own lives, perfectly understood its importance.
Franz studied well. He was a modest and well-mannered child, always neatly dressed and courteous, so adults always treated him favorably. At the same time, his lively mind, knowledge, and sense of humor attracted peers to the boy.
Of all the subjects, Franz was initially most fascinated by literature. To be able to discuss what he read and share his thoughts, he initiated the organization of literary meetings. They were popular. Inspired by this, Kafka decided to go further and create his own theater group. Most of all, his friends were surprised by this. They knew very well how shy their friend was and not entirely confident in himself. Therefore, his desire to play on stage raised eyebrows. However, Franz could always count on support.
Study, work
In 1901, Kafka graduated from high school and received a matriculation certificate. He had to decide on his future activities. After doubting for some time, the young man chose law and went to understand its complexities at Charles University. This is not to say that it was only his decision. More like a compromise with his father, who was going to involve him in trading.
The young man's relationship with his oppressive father was bad. In the end, Franz left his home and lived for many years in rented apartments and rooms, living from penny to penny. After graduating from university, Kafka was forced to take a job as an official in the insurance department. It was a nice place, but not for him.
The young man was not cut out for such work. In his dreams, he saw himself as a writer, and devoted all his free time to the study of literature and his own creativity. In the latter, he saw exclusively an outlet for himself, not for a moment recognizing the artistic value of his works. He was so embarrassed by them that he even bequeathed to his friend to destroy all his literary experiments in the event of his death.
Kafka was a very sick person. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In addition, the writer was tormented by frequent migraines and insomnia. Most experts agree that these problems had psychological roots, going back to childhood, family and relationships with the father. Be that as it may, Kafka spent most of his life in endless depression. This is very clearly visible in his work.
Relationships with women
Kafka never married. However, there were women in his life. For a long time, the writer had a relationship with Felicia Bauer. She clearly wanted to marry him, because the girl was not embarrassed by the broken engagement and the fact that he soon proposed to her again. However, the wedding did not end this time either. Kafka changed his mind again.
These events can also be explained by the fact that the young people communicated mainly by correspondence. Based on the letters, Kafka created in his imagination the image of a girl who in reality turned out to be completely different.
The writer's greatest love was Milena Jesenskaya. For the 20s of the last century, she was an incredibly free and self-sufficient person. A translator and journalist, Milena saw a talented writer in her lover. She was one of the few with whom he shared his creativity. It seemed that their romance could develop into something more. However, Milena was married.
At the very end of his life, Kafka began an affair with nineteen-year-old Dora Diamant.
Creation
During his lifetime, Kafka published only a small number of stories. He would not have done this either if it were not for his close friend Max Brod, who always tried to support the writer and believed in his talent. It was to him that Kafka bequeathed to destroy all written works. However, Brod did not do this. On the contrary, he sent all the manuscripts to the printing house.
Soon Kafka's name became famous. Readers and critics highly appreciated everything that was saved from the fire. Unfortunately, Dora Diamant still managed to destroy some of the books that she received.
Death
In his diaries, Kafka often talks about fatigue from constant illness. He directly expresses his confidence that he will not live more than forty years. And he turned out to be right. In 1924 he died.
Franz Kafka was one of the most important German writers of the twentieth century. He spent his entire life in his hometown of Prague, the capital of Bohemia. Kafka is famous for his grotesque stories and novels, many of which were published only posthumously, under the editorship of his close friend Max Brod. Kafka's works, spanning various literary periods, are consistently unique and popular with a wide range of readers.
Childhood
Franz Kafka was born on June 3, 1883 into a family of German-speaking Ashkenazi Jews living in a ghetto in the area of present-day Prague. He was the first child of Hermann and his wife Julia, née Löwy.
His father, strong and loud-voiced, was the fourth child of Jacob Kafka, a butcher who came to Prague from Oseka, a Jewish village located in southern Bohemia. After working for some time as a sales representative, he established himself as an independent retailer of men's and women's haberdashery and accessories. About 15 people were involved in the business, and the office used the “tick” sign as its logo, representing the meaning of the surname in Czech. Kafka's mother was the daughter of Jacob Löwy, a prosperous brewer from Poděbrady, and was an educated woman.
Franz was the eldest of six children. He had two younger brothers who died in infancy, and three younger sisters: Gabrielle, Valerie and Ottla. During the week, during working hours, both parents were absent from the house. His mother helped manage her husband's business and worked 12 hours a day. The children were largely raised by a succession of governesses and servants. The warm-hearted mother was a great outlet for the children, but Franz's tendency to be lonely and withdrawn remained for many years. It was from his mother that he inherited his sensitivity and dreaminess. In his literary works, Kafka transformed the complete lack of communication and understanding in the relationship between authority figures and the little person.
He grew up in a German-speaking Jewish community, rarely interacting with Czech-speaking citizens of Prague. Despite this, throughout his life he acquired a deep knowledge of the Czech language and an understanding of literature. The guy had a serious character and was a little talkative. He spoke in a calm and quiet voice and wore mostly dark suits and sometimes a black round hat. He tried not to show his emotions publicly. Moreover, the non-believer Kafka was an outsider even within the Jewish community. Jewish identity was marked by attending a bar mitzvah at age 13 and attending synagogue with his father four times a year.
The passion for writing began in childhood. For his parents' birthdays, he composed small plays that were performed at home by his younger sisters, while he himself acted as director of home performances. He was an avid reader.
Kafka and his father
Father Herman wanted to raise his children in accordance with his ideals. He left them little room for personal development, and all social contacts of adolescents were strictly controlled. The father especially controlled Franz and his younger sister Ottla. Despite the friendly and peacemaking nature of the mother, conflicts periodically arose between Herman and the children.
In his letters, diaries and prose, the writer repeatedly addressed the topic of relationships with his father. Herman, a physically strong, energetic, strong-willed, self-satisfied choleric, served as a kind of catalyst for his children. The shy Franz became increasingly anxious, which in turn made him a target for his father's ridicule. He never managed to break this vicious circle until the end of his days.
In 1919, Kafka wrote “A Letter to My Father,” which describes his conflictual relationship with Hermann over more than a hundred pages. He strives for reconciliation with all his heart, but believes that this is impossible. There remains only hope for peaceful coexistence. His works Metamorphosis and Judgment are characterized by powerful father figures.
Years of education
From 1889, Kafka attended the boys' primary school on Masna Street. His secondary education was received at the German State Gymnasium on Old Town Square, where he studied from 1893 to 1901. It was an eight-year academic secondary school, where teaching was conducted in German, located in the Kin Palace in the Old Town. Among his first friends were the future art critic Oscar Pollak and the poet, translator and journalist Rudolf Illovi. The family lived at that time on Celetna Street. As a teenager, he told a school friend that he would become a writer. From this time his first literary attempts began.
Having passed his school final exams, Franz was admitted to the University of Prague, founded by Charles Ferdinand in 1348. The training took place from 1901 to 1906. He started studying chemistry, switched to German literature and philosophy after a couple of weeks, but switched departments to study law in the second semester. This was a kind of compromise between the father's wishes for his son to acquire a profession in order to build a successful career and a longer period of study, which gave Kafka additional time to engage in research and study art history. During his studies, he was an active participant in student life, within the framework of which many public literary readings and other events were organized. At the end of his first year of study he met Max Brod, who became his close friend throughout his life, and the journalist Felix Welch, who was also studying law. The students were brought together by a boundless love of reading and a common sense of the world. This period included a deep study of the works of Plato, Goethe, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Grillparzer and Kleist. Czech literature was of particular interest.
In June 1906, he received a full higher education, becoming a doctor of jurisprudence at the age of 23. In October, he began his working career with a mandatory unpaid legal practicum for graduates and spent a year working as a civil servant. For a total of 14 years he worked as a lawyer at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Kingdom.
Beginning of literary activity
Franz was frustrated by the 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. work schedule, as it was extremely difficult to combine the routine processing and investigation of injured workers' compensation claims with the required focus of his work. At the same time, Kafka worked on his stories. Together with their friends Max Brod and Felix Welch, they called themselves the "close circle of Prague". Being at the same time a hardworking and diligent worker, Kafka sometimes left work early to indulge in writing. At 24, Kafka published his first works in a magazine, after which the stories were published in book form called Reflections.
The most productive years for the writer were the years after graduating from university. His works were written in the evenings after work or at night. This is how the novel “Wedding Preparations in the Countryside” was born.
Kafka spent his holiday in northern Italy on Lake Garda with Max and Otto Brod. On September 29, the Prague daily Bohemia published a short story, “Airplanes in Brescia.” In 1910, he began to write in a diary and intensively study Judaism, Zionism, Jewish literature and his own Jewish roots, and mastered Hebrew.
Two years later, he began working on the novel The Missing and wrote its first chapters. The work became famous with the light hand of Max Brod, under the name “America”. That same year, he was writing a novel and a collection of 18 short stories. His first big story, “The Verdict,” was written in one night in 1912. The story contains all the elements associated with the author's inner world, in which a bedridden, authoritarian, overbearing father condemns his principled son. His next work, completed in May 1913, was the short story "The Stoker", later included in his novel The Missing in Action and awarded the Theodore Fontane Literary Prize in 1915, his first public recognition in his lifetime.
If it were not for the efforts of his friend Brod, the world would not have known Kafka's best novels. While editing them after the author's death, Max ignored his friend's request to destroy all his unpublished works after his death.
Thus, thanks to Brod, the following works saw the light of day:
- "America";
- "Process";
- "Lock".
Mature years
Kafka never married. According to his friend's memoirs, he was overcome by sexual desire, but fear of intimate failure prevented personal relationships. He actively visited brothels and was interested in pornography. He had close relationships with several women in his life.
On August 13, 1912, Kafka met with Felice Bauer, a distant relative of Brod, who was passing through Prague. Their relationship lasted five years, interspersed with active correspondence; twice during this period they approached the point of marriage. The marriage was not destined to happen, and they separated in 1917.
That same year, Kafka showed the first symptoms of tuberculosis. During his relapses, his family supported him. He moved in with his sister Ottla in northwestern Bohemia and devoted time to studying Kierkegaard's work. He was afraid of possible physical limitations caused by the disease; he impressed others with his neat and strict appearance, quiet and calm reactions, intelligence and specific humor. He begins to write down aphorisms. They were later published in the book “Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Path.”
In October 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell and Czechoslovakia was proclaimed. The official language in the capital became Czech. The year also brought personal turmoil to the author. Kafka fell ill with the Spanish flu. The subsequent physical weakness negatively affects the writer’s psyche. Kafka did not trust doctors. He was a supporter of naturopathy. He attributed non-specific symptoms such as insomnia, headaches, heart problems or weight loss that he suffered to psychosomatics.
At this time, a new relationship emerges with Juliek Vochrycek, who came from a modest merchant family. This connection greatly upset his father, which prompted Franz to write the appeal “Letter to My Father.” The young people were unable to rent housing. Kafka saw this as a sign and left. In the spring of 1922 he wrote The Hungry Artist and in the summer The Study of a Dog. The next passionate relationship with the translator and journalist Milena Jesenskaya did not work out. Despite her lover’s unhappy marriage, she was not ready to leave her husband. In 1923 he broke up with her. Between 1920 and 1922, Franz's health deteriorated and he was forced to quit his job.
In 1923, Kafka, while recovering on the Baltic Sea, met kindergarten teacher Dora Diamant, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Polish Jews. Dora, who spoke Yiddish and Hebrew, charmed the writer. I was struck by the natural and modest manner of her behavior with quite mature views. Kafka left Prague at the end of July 1923 and moved to Berlin-Steglitz, where he wrote his last, relatively happy story, “Little Woman.” Dora cared for her lover in such a way that at the end of his life he finally managed to free himself from the influence of his family. It was in tandem with her that he developed an interest in the Talmud. Kafka wrote his last work, “Josephine, or the Folk of Mouse,” which was included in the collection “The Hunger Man.” However, his health is rapidly deteriorating. He returned to Prague three months before his death on June 3, 1924. In April he goes to a sanatorium, where the diagnosis is confirmed. For treatment he goes to the University Clinic of Vienna, then to the sanatorium of Dr. Hugo Hoffmann in Klosterneuburg. Dora Diamant takes care of and supports Kafka in every possible way, who is rapidly losing weight, has difficulty swallowing food and cannot speak. On June 3 around noon, Kafka died. The writer was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Prague.
(1883-1924) Austrian writer
This is probably the strangest figure in European literature of the 20th century. A Jew by origin, a Prague resident by birth and residence, a German writer by language and an Austrian by cultural tradition, Franz Kafka experienced indifference to his work during his lifetime and no longer saw the time when his canonization took place. True, both are somewhat exaggerated. He was noticed and appreciated by such famous writers as G. Hesse, T. Mann, B. Brecht and others.
Three unfinished novels by Franz Kafka became available to readers after his death. The Trial was published in 1925, The Castle in 1926, and America in 1927. Nowadays his legacy consists of ten voluminous volumes.
The biography of this man is surprisingly sparse in events, at least in external events. Franz Kafka was born into the family of a Prague wholesale haberdashery merchant, a Jew by nationality. Welfare gradually grew, but the concepts and relationships within the family remained the same, bourgeois. All interests were focused on their business. The mother was speechless, and the father constantly boasted about the humiliations and troubles that he endured before he became a people, not like the children who received everything undeservedly, for nothing. The nature of relationships in the family can be judged at least by this fact. When Franz wrote “Letter to Father” in 1919, he himself did not dare give it to the addressee and asked his mother about it. But she was afraid to do this and returned the letter to her son with a few comforting words.
The bourgeois family for every future artist, who even in his youth feels like a stranger in this environment, is the first barrier that he must overcome. Kafka couldn't do this. He never learned to resist an environment alien to him.
Franz graduated from a German gymnasium in Prague. Then, in 1901-1905, he studied jurisprudence at the university and attended lectures on art history and German studies. In 1906-1907, Kafka completed an internship at a law office and the Prague City Court. From October 1907 he served in a private insurance company, and in 1908 he improved his specialty at the Prague Commercial Academy. Although Franz Kafka had a doctorate, he held modest and low-paid positions, and since 1917 he could not work at all at full capacity because he fell ill with tuberculosis.
Kafka decided to break off his second engagement to Felicia Bauer, quit his job and move to the village to live with his sister Ottla. In one of his letters from this period, he conveys his restless state as follows:
« Secretly, I believe that my illness is not tuberculosis at all, but my general bankruptcy. I thought it would be possible to hold on, but I can’t hold on any longer. The blood comes not from the lungs, but from a wound inflicted by a regular or decisive blow from one of the fighters. This fighter has now received support - tuberculosis, support as enormous as, say, a child finds in the folds of his mother's skirt. What does the other one want now? Hasn't the fight reached a brilliant end? This is tuberculosis and this is the end».
Franz Kafka was very sensitive to what he constantly had to face in life - injustice, humiliation of a person. He was devoted to genuine creativity and admired Goethe, Tolstoy, considered himself a student of Kleist, an admirer of Strindberg, and was an enthusiastic admirer of Russian classics, not only Tolstoy, but also Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, which he wrote about in his diaries.
But at the same time, Kafka, as if with a “second sight,” saw himself from the outside and felt his dissimilarity from everyone as ugliness, perceived his “foreignness” as a sin and a curse.
Franz Kafka was tormented by problems that were characteristic of Europe at the beginning of the century; his work is directly related to only one, albeit very influential, direction of literature of the 20th century - modernist.
Everything that Kafka wrote - his literary ideas, fragments, unfinished stories, dreams, which were often not much different from his short stories, and drafts of short stories that were similar to dreams, reflections on life, on literature and art, on books read and performances seen, thoughts about writers, artists, actors - all this represents a complete picture of his “fantastic inner life.” Franz Kafka felt boundless loneliness, so painful and at the same time desirable. He was constantly tormented by fears - of life, of lack of freedom, but also of freedom too. Franz Kafka was afraid to change anything in his life and at the same time was burdened by its usual way of life. The writer so poignantly revealed the constant struggle with himself and with the surrounding reality that much in his novels and short stories, which, at first glance, seems to be the fruit of a bizarre, sometimes sick fantasy, receives an explanation, reveals its realistic background, and is revealed as purely autobiographical .
“He doesn’t have the slightest shelter or shelter. Therefore, he is left to the mercy of everything from which we are protected. “He’s like naked among the clothed,” wrote Kafka’s friend, Czech journalist Milena Jesenskaya.
Kafka idolized the work of Balzac. He once wrote about him: “Balzac’s cane was inscribed: “I break all barriers.” On mine: “All barriers break me.” What we have in common is the word “everything”.
Currently, more has been written about Kafka's work than about the work of any other writer of the 20th century. This is most often explained by the fact that Kafka is considered a prophetic writer. In some incomprehensible way, he managed to guess and at the beginning of the century he wrote about what would happen in the next decades. At that time, the plots of his works seemed purely abstract and fictitious, but some time later much of what he wrote came true, and even in a more tragic form. Thus, the ovens of Auschwitz surpassed the most sophisticated tortures described by him in the short story “In the Penal Colony” (1914).
Exactly the same seemingly abstract and unthinkable in its absurdity trial that Franz Kafka depicted in his novel “The Trial,” when an innocent man was sentenced to death, was repeated many times and is still being repeated in all countries of the world.
In another of his novels, “America,” Franz Kafka quite accurately predicted the further development of technical civilization with all its pros and cons, in which man remains alone in a mechanized world. And Kafka’s last novel, “The Castle,” also gives a fairly accurate - despite the grotesqueness of the image - picture of the omnipotence of the bureaucratic apparatus, which in fact replaces any democracy.
In 1922, Kafka was forced to retire. In 1923, he carried out his long-planned “escape” to Berlin, where he intended to live as a free writer. But his health deteriorated sharply again, and he was forced to return to Prague. He died on the outskirts of Vienna in 1924. The writer was buried in the center of Prague at the Jewish cemetery.
Expressing his last will to his friend and executor Max Brod, Kafka repeatedly repeated that, except for five published books and a new novel prepared for publication, “everything without exception” should be burned. Now it is pointless to discuss whether M. Brod acted well or badly, who nevertheless violated the will of his friend and published his entire handwritten legacy. The job is done: everything that was written by Franz Kafka has been published, and readers have the opportunity to judge for themselves the work of this extraordinary writer by reading and re-reading his works.
Kafka was born on July 3, 1883 in the Czech Republic. The first education in the biography of Franz Kafka was received in elementary school (from 1889 to 1893). The next step in education was the gymnasium, from which Franz graduated in 1901. He then entered Charles University in Prague, after which he became a Doctor of Law.
Having started working in the insurance department, Kafka spent his entire career working in small bureaucratic positions. Despite his passion for literature, most of Kafka's works were published after his death, and he disliked his official work. Kafka fell in love several times. But things never went beyond novels; the writer was not married.
Most of Kafka's works are written in German. His prose reflects the writer's fear of the outside world, anxiety and uncertainty. Thus, in “Letter to Father,” the relationship between Franz and his father, which had to be broken early, was expressed.
Kafka was a sick man, but he tried to resist all his illnesses. In 1917, Kafka's biography suffered from a serious illness (pulmonary hemorrhage), as a result of which the writer began to develop tuberculosis. It was for this reason that Franz Kafka died in June 1924 while undergoing treatment.
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