home › Test Drives › Kafka years. University years

Kafka years. University years

So they joked Soviet era intellectuals, paraphrasing the beginning of a famous song about aviators. Kafka entered our lives as a writer who created a stunningly deep image of the bureaucratic machine that governs society.

The son of Thomas Mann - Klaus - tried on Kafkaesque clothes on Nazi Germany. For some time we believed that this "ammunition" was especially good for the countries of victorious socialism. But as this system transforms into a market one, it becomes clear that the Kafkaesque world is all-encompassing, that it traces connections that largely determine the parameters of the entire 20th century.

Image this world- this is the history of construction Chinese wall, and the memoirs of a certain Russian about the road to Kalda, built by Kafka on the materials of two eastern despotisms. But first of all - this is the novel "The Castle", which Kafka wrote, but abandoned a couple of years before his death. The novel grew, of course, not from Soviet reality, but from the bureaucratic world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which until 1918 included the Czech lands.

The "Castle" is dry, stretched out, hard to digest, just as bureaucratic relations themselves are dry, stretched out and hard to digest. The earlier novel "The Trial" is built in a different way - dynamic, disturbing, lively. "Process" is a person in a new world, "Castle" is the world itself, in which a person is just a grain of sand.

Kafka saw the nature of the connections between people, completely unexpected for the beginning of the century, a completely unexpected mechanism for motivating their activities. Moreover, he saw it with his special vision, since even from the bureaucratic experience that he personally had, it was impossible to draw such deep conclusions: the world simply had not yet provided enough material for this.

Just as The Trial was being written, Walther Rathenau began to build a military-industrial complex in Germany with its new system of communications. Just as "The Castle" was being written, Rathenau was killed. New world was just under construction, but Kafka had already seen it.

Rathenau was from a rare breed of pragmatists, while the "advanced thinkers" who then talked about the struggle of classes or races found almost no place for bureaucracy in their intellectual constructions. Kafka, on the other hand, showed it as a form of the entire life of society, permeating the entire vertical of power and subordination with new relationships: from the castle to the village.

The reasons for the discovery made by Kafka can be explained by the fact that he was a genius. Nobody usually argues with this. But it seems that such an explanation is still not enough.

It would be more accurate to say that Kafka accomplished a feat. In the truest sense of the word, without any exaggeration. It was a meditation on the contrary, an ascent not to eternal bliss, but to eternal torment. Physically feeling the horror of the world, he was able to understand it.

"Only write furiously at night - that's what I want. And die from it or go crazy ..." (from a letter to Felitsa).

Over the years, he brought himself to such a state in which the world visible to him was closed to him. ordinary person and something completely different was revealed. He killed himself, but before his death he saw something that, perhaps, justified the sacrifice.

Pig dance

"I am a completely awkward bird. I am Kavka, a jackdaw (in Czech - D.T.) ... my wings have died. And now for me there is neither height nor distance. Confusedly, I jump among people ... I am gray like ashes. A jackdaw eager to hide among the stones." This is how Kafka described himself in a conversation with a young writer.

However, it was more of a joke. But not because in reality he saw the world in bright colors. On the contrary, everything was much worse. A bird, even with dead wings, Kafka did not feel himself. Rather, a slimy insect, a rodent shaking with fear, or even an unclean pig for any Jew.

Here is from an early diary - soft, almost gentle: "At times I heard myself from the side, as if a kitten was whining." Here is from later letters - nervous, desperate: "I, a forest animal, was lying somewhere in a dirty lair."

And here is a completely different image. Having once made a terrible page-sized sketch in his diary, Kafka immediately wrote: "Go on, pigs, your dance. What do I care about this?" And below: "But it's truer than anything I've written in the last year."

His narratives were simply conducted sometimes on behalf of animals. And if in the "Study of a Dog" there is a lot of external, rational (although how not to compare it with a diary entry: "I could hide in a doghouse, getting out only when they bring food"), then in the story about the mouse singer Josephine the world real and fictional begin to intersect in an incredible way. The dying Kafka loses his voice under the influence of tuberculous laryngitis and begins to squeak like a mouse himself.

But it becomes really scary when, in his most famous story, "The Metamorphosis", Kafka displays a character very similar to the author, who turned into a disgusting insect one "beautiful" morning.

Knowing that the writer did not compose his best images, but simply took them from that world into which only his vision penetrated, it is not difficult to imagine the sensations of Kafka describing his own hard-shelled back, his own brown, bulging belly divided by arched scales, his own their own numerous wretchedly thin paws, on the pads of which there was some kind of sticky substance.

The hero of the "Transformation" dies, hunted down by his loved ones. The end is spectacular, but too outrageous, too reeking of a showdown with one's own family. In the story "Nora", written at the end of his life, everything is simpler and more natural.

His hero - either a man or an animal - burrows into the ground all his life, moving away from the world around him, which is so terrible and cruel. To hide, to disappear, to pull on a layer of soil like a protective suit - this is the goal of his life from birth. But even in the hole there is no salvation. He hears the rumble of a certain monster, breaking through to him through the thickness of the earth, he feels his own skin thinning, making him miserable and defenseless.

"Nora" is horror without end, horror generated solely by one's own worldview, and not by external circumstances. Only death can save him: "Doctor, give me death, otherwise..."

Franz Kafka and Joseph K.

For many years Kafka purposefully left the world of people. Animal world, born of his pen, is only an external, most simplified representation of what he felt. Where he actually lived at the time when he struggled with insomnia in his Prague apartment or sat out his pants in the office, no one can probably understand.

To some extent, Kafka's personal world emerges from the diaries that he began to keep from the age of 27. This world is a continuous nightmare. The author of the diaries is in a continuous hostile environment and, we must give him his due, responds to the world in the same way.

All troubles began with a bad upbringing. Father and mother, relatives, teachers, the cook who took little Franz to school, dozens of other people, close and not close, distorted the personality of the child, spoiled his good part. As an adult, Kafka was unhappy.

He was unhappy because of the hateful work. After graduating from the University of Prague, having become a lawyer, Kafka was forced to turn into an insurance official in order to earn a living. The service distracted from creativity, taking away the best hours of the day - those hours in which masterpieces could be born.

He was unhappy because of his fragile health. With a height of 1.82, he weighed 55 kg. The body did not take food well, the stomach constantly hurt. Gradually insomnia increased, shaking the already weak nervous system.

Beautiful verbal portrait Kafka was told by an acquaintance who saw from the bridge across the Vltava how Franz, exhausted from rowing, lies at the bottom of the boat: "As before the Last Judgment - the coffins have already opened, but the dead have not risen yet."

He was unhappy in his personal life. Fell in love several times, but never could connect with any of his chosen ones. Having lived a life as a bachelor, Kafka dreamed of a terrible public woman whose body was covered with large wax-red circles with fading edges and red splashes scattered between them, sticking to the fingers of the man caressing her.

He hated and feared even his own body. "How alien to me, for example, the muscles of the arm," Kafka wrote in his diary. Since childhood, he stooped and twisted his entire long, awkward body due to uncomfortable clothes. He was afraid of food because of an unhealthy stomach, and when he calmed down, this crazy eater was ready to rush to the other extreme, imagining how he pushes into his mouth, without biting off, long costal cartilages, and then pulls them out from below, breaking through the stomach and intestines.

He was lonely and cut off from society, because he could not talk about anything other than literature (“I have no inclinations towards literature, I just consist of literature”), and this topic was deeply indifferent to both the family and colleagues.

Finally, anti-Semitism, which made the life of a Jewish family dangerous and unpredictable, must be added to the whole complex of reasons that rejected Kafka from the world.

It is not surprising that the theme of suicide constantly appears in Kafka's diary: "run to the window and through the broken frames and glass, weakened from the exertion of strength, step over the window parapet." True, it did not come to this, but with the prediction of his own death - "I will not live to be 40 years old" - Kafka was almost not mistaken.

So, a truly terrible face emerges from the pages of the diary. But was it really Kafka? I would venture to suggest that we have, rather, a portrait of the inner world of a certain Josef K. - the literary double of the writer, who pops up now in The Trial, now in The Castle.

As for F. Kafka, who lived in Prague, he was born into a decent and well-to-do Jewish family. Kafka's biographers fail to find any traces of a particularly difficult childhood, no traces of deprivation or repression on the part of parents. In any case, for an era in which the child, in fact, was not yet recognized as a person (for more details, see the article about M. Montessori - "Case", October 14, 2002), Franz's childhood can be considered prosperous.

By the way, he did not have any congenital dangerous diseases. Sometimes he even went in for sports. Kafka had his first sexual experience at the age of 20 - not too late in those days. The saleswoman from the ready-made dress shop was quite pretty, and "whining flesh found peace." And in the future, a timid but charming young man was not an outcast in women's society.

And with friends he was just lucky. In Prague, a small literary circle was formed, where young people could find grateful listeners in each other. Among them was Max Brod - a man who admired Kafka, considered him a genius, constantly stimulated his work and helped to publish. Any writer can only dream of such a friend.

Part-time work for Kafka was not dusty, took a minimum of time and effort. The intelligent chief doted on him and for many months paid him sick leave even when Kafka himself was ready to retire early.

To all this we can add that it is difficult to speak seriously about anti-Semitism in Prague against the background of what was then happening in Russia, in Romania, in Vienna under Mayor Luger, and even in France during the time of the Dreyfus affair. The Jews had difficulties in getting a job, but connections and money easily made it possible to overcome them.

So, there is a completely different world. And the most interesting thing is that in his notes, one way or another, Kafka recognizes the natural kindness of his father (by the way, as an adult, Franz voluntarily lived in his parental family), and the friendliness of the boss, and the value of relations with Max. But this is all - briefly. Suffering, on the other hand, is bulging out.

Tombstone to myself

So did the diary - the most intimate document for any person - lie? To some extent, Kafka himself in the notes of recent years gives reason to think that he exaggerated in his youth. And yet I venture to suggest: there were two Kafkas, both true.

One is a real citizen of Prague (this image is reflected in the first biography of Kafka, written by Brod). The other is an equally real inhabitant of the world of monsters, generated by his consciousness and reflected by his work (even Brod saw this world only after reading the diaries, which happened after the publication of his biography). These two worlds fought among themselves, and the decisive circumstance that determined the life, work and early death of Kafka was that he gave full rein to the world of monsters, which gradually swallowed up his master entirely.

Critics and ideologues have repeatedly tried to retroactively attribute to Kafka an active life position. In Brod, the unfortunate sufferer, who has absorbed, perhaps, only a feeling of enduring pain from the centuries-old culture of his people, appears as a humanist, a lover of life and a deeply religious Jew. Another author interprets a random episode from Kafka's life as a passion for anarchism. Finally, in the USSR, in order to publish a writer alien to socialism, critics emphasized his sympathy for the working people, whom he insured against injury and disability.

All these estimates seem to be stretched. Is it possible to speculate about Judaism, especially since it is impossible to ignore the opinion of Brod.

Kafka did not like decadents and, unlike Nietzsche, did not consider God to be dead. And yet his view of God was no less paradoxical, no less pessimistic: "We are just one of his bad moods. He had a bad day." Where can the Jewish idea of being chosen by God fit in here?

Kafka lived in a Jewish environment, was interested in the culture and history of the Jews, the problem of emigration to Palestine. And yet his soul, so poorly kept in the body, was torn not to the top of Zion, but to the world of German, Scandinavian and Russian intellectualism. His real entourage was not neighboring Jews and not Brod, shocked by the discovery of Kafka's diaries, which opened a corner of the soul that remained closed to contemporaries. The real environment was the literature of thought and suffering - Goethe, T. Mann, Hesse, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Strindberg, Hamsun.

For a long time, Kafka was convinced (most likely rightly) that he could write only by driving himself into a corner and killing everything human in himself. And therefore he really drove and killed, erecting instead of a living person, as he himself put it, " tombstone yourself."

Freud he read, but did not appreciate. According to T. Adorno's apt remark, "instead of healing neuroses, he is looking for a healing power in them - the power of knowledge."

However, how fair is it to say that Kafka made a conscious decision to leave? There is an amazing entry in the diary, at first glance about nothing: "Why don't the Chukchi leave their terrible land? .. They can't; everything that is possible happens; only what happens is possible."

Kafka lived as best he could, and it was not in his power to make a choice. To be precise, he was trying to escape from the world of horror. But the wall separating him from the human world proved to be insurmountable.

Sleeping beauty can't be a prince

Kafka tried to pull himself out of the swamp by the hair, as Baron Munchausen had once done. The first attempt was made on the threshold of the thirtieth birthday, when the internal crisis recorded in the diary was already in full swing.

Visiting Brod, he found a visitor from Berlin, Felitsa Bauer, a Jewish woman of 25 with a bony, empty face, as Kafka himself wrote in his diary a week later. Not a bad characterization for a future lover?

However, a month later, he strikes up a long, long romance with her in letters. The beginning of this novel is marked by a creative surge. In one night, he writes the story "The Sentence", giving all his best, to the point of pain in his heart, and imbued with a feeling of satisfaction with what he has achieved, so rare for him.

Then the creative energy is completely translated into the epistolary genre. Sometimes Kafka writes Felice several letters a day. But at the same time, he does not make any attempt to see each other, although the distance from Prague to Berlin is, in general, ridiculous. Even her visit to her sister in Dresden (this is very close) he does not use.

Finally, more than six months after the beginning of the novel, Kafka deigns to pay a voluntary-compulsory and very short visit to his "beloved" in his letters. After another three months, the "young lover", so plainly and not having seen enough of the empty bony face of his passion, makes her an offer.

In the verbal stream that was previously brought down on Felitsa, Kafka's self-deprecating characteristics attract attention, clearly demonstrating to the girl those monsters that grew in his soul. It would seem that everything was done in order to get a refusal. But, paradoxically, Felitsa agrees, apparently considering that she is already at the age when she doesn’t have to be picky. For Kafka, this is a complete disaster.

Two weeks later, the moment of truth arrives. With the pedantry of an official, Kafka writes out in his diary seven points of analysis: for and against marriage. Now everything is clear. He longs to escape from his loneliness, but at the same time he is aware that he cannot entrust the monsters carefully cherished in his soul to anyone. Only a sheet of paper. After all, the melting down of monsters in fiction is, in fact, the meaning of his life.

He used the girl, comforting himself with the illusion of the possibility of entering the world of people, but at the same time not wanting it. He tormented her, but at the same time he tormented himself. He was writing a novel that was doomed to fail. If there is a sadder story in the world than the story of Romeo and Juliet, then this is undoubtedly the novel of Franz and Felitsa.

Again from the diary: "A prince can marry a sleeping beauty and even worse, but a sleeping beauty cannot be a prince." Kafka cannot stay awake, because then he will not see his nightmares.

But there is no way back. He flies into the abyss and must certainly grab onto someone, without incurring, however, any obligations. As soon as the correspondence with Felitsa fades, a new stage of epistolary creativity begins. The verbal flow of Kafka now falls on the friend of the failed bride - Greta Bloch, who later assured that she had a son from Kafka.

But Kafka is not an adventurer, easily able to turn his attention to a new object. He suffers deeply and... gets engaged to Felicia. However, the hopelessness of the development of these relations is obvious. Soon the engagement is broken off. And three years later, they suddenly find themselves engaged again. You can remember Marx: "History repeats itself twice, once as a tragedy, another time as a farce."

Housing problem

However, a month after the second engagement took place, the farce again turns into a tragedy. Kafka has a pulmonary hemorrhage. Doctors might call it psychosomatics. Kafka drove himself into a corner, and the stress degenerated into a quite physically tangible illness.

Tuberculosis became the excuse for breaking off the second engagement. Now Felitsa is gone forever. Four years before his death, the seriously ill Kafka had another attempt to connect his fate with a woman - Yulia Vokhrytsek, but as soon as the future spouses found out that they could not count on the apartment they looked after, they immediately backed down.

However, this was not the end. Last years Kafka lit up "a living fire like I've never seen before" (from a letter to Brod). This fire was called Milena Jesenska. Czech, 23 years old, married, mentally unbalanced, cocaine addict, winder... Journalist and writer, translator of Kafka into Czech, man of frenzied energy, future communist, future resistance fighter, future victim of Ravensbrück...

Perhaps someday the name of Milena will be on a par with the names of Laura, Beatrice, Dulcinea. In her love with Franz, reality interfered with myth, but literature needs such myths. Slowly dying Kafka finally got a source from which he could draw energy.

It was impossible to connect with Milena (she was satisfied with her existing husband), and it was not necessary. She lived in Vienna, he lived in Prague. Correspondence gave the illusion of life. But illusions cannot last forever. When Milena directed her "living fire" to warm other objects, Kafka had no choice but to die. But before his death, he still had the "Castle" built.

He died in the arms of a young girl, Dora Dimant, a Polish Jewess, to whom he also managed to offer his hand and heart. Franz was already behaving like a child, Dora was now a child, now like a mother taking care of her sick son. But nothing could be changed.

And Kafka was born in Prague in 1883. Then everything was just beginning, everything was possible. There were still 41 years left before his death.

"We are not given to comprehend other people's shrines."

We got to 1901, Kafka was eighteen years old. He passed the matriculation exam he was so afraid of without any difficulty; now he says that he achieved this only by cheating. Finally, it was time for him to choose a path further education and, therefore, partly lay the foundations for their future. In "Letter to his father" he does not accuse him of having influenced his choice, but his father's upbringing has made him so indifferent in this regard that he spontaneously chooses an easy path leading him to law. Having reached the age of eighteen, Kafka does not feel any vocation in himself: “There was no real freedom in choosing professions for me, I knew: in comparison with the main thing, everything would be as indifferent to me as all the subjects of the gymnasium course, therefore, we are talking about to find a profession that would most easily allow me, without too much infringing on vanity, to show the same indifference. Therefore, the most suitable is jurisprudence. At the gymnasium, he announced that he was going to enroll in the Faculty of Philosophy, probably in order to continue studying German studies there. But first, quite unexpectedly, he decides to take up chemistry: two of his classmates, Oskar Pollak and Hugo Bergmann - for some unknown reason - also chose this orientation at first. Perhaps there was something of a challenge in this choice of Kafka; in any case, he interprets it in his "Letter to his father" as a "test" caused by vanity, a moment of insane hope. But this rebellion, if it was a rebellion, did not last long; two weeks later Kafka was back on the straight road again. The same thing would happen again in the second semester, when he, fed up with jurisprudence, began attending courses in German studies. He will have the feeling that he was unsettled and this was destined for him by fate. But he quickly becomes disillusioned: the "ordinary professor" August Sauer is a serious scholar (even now you can use his edition of Grillparzer), but most importantly, he is a German nationalist who treats Jews badly, which Kafka can hardly endure. One of his letters to Oskar Pollack was scathingly critical of Sauer; Max Brod, making a copy of the letter, withdrew this passage, probably because Sauer was still alive. The original will disappear in the course of historical cataclysms, and there is no more opportunity full publication this letter. Consequently, we will never know exactly about the claims that Kafka had against August Sauer.

The most preferable solution for Kafka would have been to completely interrupt his university studies, in which he had so little interest. Once, when his uncle from Madrid was passing through Prague, he turned to him with a request to find him somewhere to work, so that, as he said, he could "get straight to work." He was given to understand that it was wiser to be a little more diligent in his studies.

So for a while he continues to follow his bumpy road, in the words of Franz, like "an old mail coach." His comrade Paul Kisch leaves for Munich; Kafka follows him with the intention of continuing his studies there, but quickly returns from there. What happened? Was he disappointed by what he saw? Or maybe his father denied him the funds he needed to study abroad? We don't know. We only know that because of this failed trip, he will talk about the claws of mother Prague, who does not let go of her victim. We also know that a year later, in 1903, he returned to Munich for a short time for unknown purpose. When he talks about Munich, it is only to mention the "sorrowful memories of youth."

So, he again takes up the habitual and disgusting study of jurisprudence.

He is forced, at least during the months leading up to the exams, "to eat, as he says, wood flour, moreover, chewed up before me by thousands of mouths." But in the end, he almost got a taste for it, so it seemed appropriate to his position. From study and profession, he did not expect salvation: "In this sense, I have long given up on everything."

It makes no sense to talk about his law faculty, as they had very little influence on him. Why tell that he trembled in front of a terrible teacher civil law Krasnopolsky? He was trembling, no doubt, but in order to immediately forget him. The only name that deserves to be mentioned is that of Alfred Weber. But the eminent political economist was invited to the University of Prague just as Kafka was completing his studies. He was appointed a "trustee", that is, an assistant or chairman of Kafka's doctoral examination, and only in this purely administrative field did they communicate.

Doctoral examinations were held from November 1905 to June 1906. Kafka passed them without much brilliance, with a "satisfactory" rating. Thus ended one of the most colorless episodes of his life.

In passing, we note that, probably, it was during his university years that Kafka began to take English lessons. He knew Czech and French very well and planned to learn Italian a little later. This is the basis of one of the facets of his talent and his knowledge, which is sometimes forgotten.

* * *

Some of his biographers continue to attribute Kafka Political Views and even passion. We readily admit that in the gymnasium he expressed his sympathy for the Boers: the whole world, except England, was on their side. But what is this Altstadter Kollegentag - "Collegiate Association of the Old City", where Kafka, while still a lyceum student, allegedly refused to stand up when others sang "Watch on the Rhine"?

We cannot imagine Kafka participating in public demonstrations of this kind, and besides, the "Association" was not intended for lyceum students. It was one of the University's numerous German nationalist groups; it is impossible that Kafka could ever enter it. It is also said that he wore a red anarchist carnation in his buttonhole. Indeed, the question of red carnations comes up once in a letter to Oscar Pollak. Kafka writes: “Today is Sunday, the merchants go down to Wenzelsplatz, go to the Graben and shout loudly for Sunday rest. I think there is a sense in their red carnations, and in their stupid Jewish faces, and in the deafening noise that they create: it resembles the behavior of a child who wants to go up to heaven, cries and squeals because they don’t want to give him a ladder. But he has no desire to go up to heaven at all. Those who adorn themselves with red carnations are not anarchists, they are good German bourgeois (and Jewish) who do this to distinguish themselves from the Czechs, who have chosen the cornflower as their emblem. But mocking the festively dressed bourgeois does not mean becoming an anarchist.

Kafka is neither a socialist nor an anarchist, much less a "Brentanist". All university philosophy in the countries of the Austrian state is inspired by the thought of Franz Brentano. He himself, who threw off his Dominican monastic habit in order to marry, now lives in exile in Florence, deprived of his posts and almost blind. But his students continue to occupy all departments in the field of education, in particular in Prague. And "Brentanists" regularly gather in one of the city's cafes, the Louvre Cafe, to discuss ideas. In addition, the wife of an apothecary from the Old City, Berta Fanta, under the sign of "Unicorn" organizes literary or philosophical talks in her home, which are diligently attended by "brentanists" and in which Albert Einstein later several times will take part. We do not want to say that Kafka was an ordinary guest at meetings at the Louvre and Fanta evenings, we want to show that his thought was only a copy of those Brentano. And Max Brod is categorical on this score: Kafka was introduced to meetings in the Louvre cafe, no doubt by his friends Utz, Pollack or Bergmann, but he went there very rarely and reluctantly. He also had to be very much begged to agree to go to Fante - a letter from 1914 to Max Brod confirms this once again. When he happened to be there, he usually intervened very little in the discussions. On the other hand, if several orthodox Brentanists sometimes took part in Fanta evenings, this does not mean that the teachings of Franz Brentan were at the center of the debate. It was, says Max Brod, about Kant (disgraced by the Brentanists), about Fichte, or about Hegel. As for attempts to establish parallels between Kafka's aphorisms and Brentano's phrases, this is just an attempt to splurge. By a misfortune, the only university exam in which Kafka got a bad mark was an exam in "descriptive psychology" offered by Anton Marti, one of Brentano's close students. Kafka not only rejected philosophical reasoning, later he would, for example, listen to lectures by Christian von Ehrenfels, one of the founders of "gestaltism", by the way, firmly connected with the doctrine of Brentano. But very inopportunely, many false keys were made that do not open a single door.

So, at the moment, Kafka, with already submissive passivity, glides to wherever his environment, his father, his habit - everything but his own taste - take him.

At the university, of course, he finds a wide variety of student corporations, many of which were united in a community called "Germany", which included German nationalists and where rapier duels were practiced in order to win cheek scars. These were hotbeds of anti-Semitism, and there was nothing there to attract Kafka; Jews, moreover, were not accepted there at all. Since 1893 there was also a corporation of Zionist students, which at first was called "Maccabees", and then since 1899 was called "Bar Kochba", active participants in which, when Kafka came to the university, were Hugo Bergmann, Robert Welch and also many other. Max Brod at that time still kept aloof, he joined the "Bar Kokhba" only a few years later. Kafka was not interested in this either, he was spontaneously drawn to the association with the "liberal" trend - the "Gallery of Lectures and Readings of German Students", in which the largest number of Jewish students of the university consisted. The relations of this "Gallery" with "Bar Kokhba" were sometimes strained, since the tendency of conscious "assimilation" dominated in it. The Association was managed by a Committee that managed the funds, where the main role belonged to Bruno Kafka, the converted cousin of the future celebrity of the city, towards whom Max Brod harbored some enmity. "Gallery" wore black, red and gold colors, as well as the number 1848 - the date of its creation, which appeared on its emblems. "Gallery" and "Germany" competed with each other. In the "Gallery", however, they were mainly engaged in supporting the library, one of the best in the city, and organizing lecture evenings. This was the concern of the "section of art and literature", which acquired a certain autonomy in the "Gallery", in which Kafka would later for some time perform modest administrative functions (responsible for art). Sometimes important people were invited - for example, the poet Detlev von Lilienkron, whose fame was already beginning to decline, was invited for large sums of money, sometimes they provided a platform for students. On October 23, 1902, one of them gave a lecture on "the fate and future of Schopenhauer's philosophy." Kafka came to listen to her, and this day became, perhaps, the most important in his life. The lecturer was Max Brod, who was a year younger than him, so they met. Kafka, who had read Nietzsche a little in the past, found the lecturer to be unduly harsh on the philosopher (some scholars, by attaching too much importance to this meager information, wanted to make of Kafka, and quite in vain, a Nietzschean). Brod and Kafka walked through the streets of the city, arguing with each other, and this was the beginning of a friendship that was not destined to be interrupted again.

In his letters to Oscar Pollak - the earliest surviving ones - Kafka at first lamented the difficulties of communication between them: "When we talk together, the words are sharp, it's like walking on bad pavement. subtle questions are suddenly likened to the most difficult steps, and there is nothing we can do about it /.../. When we talk, we are constrained by things that we want to say, but cannot express them, then we say them in such a way that we have a false idea. We do not understand each other and even mock each other /.../. And then there is a joke, an excellent joke, which makes the Lord God weep bitterly and causes crazy, truly hellish laughter in hell: we can never have a foreign God - only ours /.../". And another time again: "When you standing in front of me and looking at me, what do you know about my pain and what do I know about yours?" And, as if moving from one extreme to another, he asks in 1903 in another letter to Pollak to be for him "a window to the street" In spite of his tall stature, he does not, according to his expression, reach the windowsill, and this image seems so true to him that he made it the subject of a short story, undoubtedly the earliest of those that we have, and which he called "The Window on street". To live, he needs someone stronger, more courageous than he is. In essence, he is preparing to live by proxy. Kafka has already settled down on the sidelines, away from life or, as he will say later, in the desert, which borders on Canaan.

But Pollak leaves Prague, first he goes to a provincial castle, where he works as an educator, then to Rome, where he will study the art of the Baroque. And for more than twenty years, it is Max Brod who will become the "window to the street" that Kafka needs. There are few similarities between them. Broad, journalist, novelist, theater-goer (he will end his life as artistic director of the Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv), philosopher, orchestra leader, composer. He is as extroverted as Kafka is withdrawn, as active as Kafka is melancholic and slow, as prolific in his writing as Kafka is demanding and not abundant in his work. Having been ill with kyphosis in his early youth, Brod was slightly twisted, but compensated for his lack of exceptional liveliness. Noble, enthusiastic, easily ignited, he must constantly be busy with some business, and during his life he will have many different things to do. He rightly titled his autobiography " Fast paced life", fighting life. During this period of his life - he was eighteen years old - he was a fanatical follower of Schopenhauer and followed a philosophy that he called "indifferentism", - from the necessity of everything that happened, he derived a kind of universal apology, which made it possible not to reckon with morality. He will soon regard this doctrine as a delusion of youth, but he professed it at the time he first met Kafka, and the argument that started that evening will never end again, because as different as they were, so close friends they will become; they perfectly complement each other.If it would not occur to anyone to rank Max Brod among the great people, one must admit that he had an extraordinary literary instinct: from Kafka's first writing experiments, still uncertain and awkward, he was able to recognize his genius. Max Brod's friendship was an unending fortune Without Max Brod, Kafka's name might have remained unknown, who can say that without him Kafka would have continued to write?

* * *

At the beginning of his friendship with Max Brod, a period of entertainment falls for Kafka, or, as we would say, parties. To know how he behaved, it is enough to read the beginning of the "Description of a Struggle", since in these literary debuts the distance is maintained that separates the experienced and the fiction. How not to recognize a self-portrait or a self-caricature in this "swinging pole", on which is awkwardly impaled "a skull covered with yellow skin with black hair"? It is he who remains alone in front of a glass of Benedictine and a plate of cakes, while others, more courageous, enjoy the favor of women and boast of their conquests. After the holidays of 1903, he could tell Oscar Pollack that he had mustered up his courage. His health improved (in 1912 he would write to Felice Bauer that he had been feeling unwell for ten years), he became stronger, he went out into the world, he learned to talk to women. And most importantly, he writes, he gave up the life of a hermit. "Lay your eggs honestly before the whole world, the sun will hatch them; bite life better than your tongue; you can respect the mole and his features, but you don’t need to make him your saint. ”True, he immediately adds, a voice from behind asks:“ Is it so after all? ”He claims that girls are the only creatures capable of preventing us from sinking to the bottom, but a little earlier he writes to Pollack: “I am wonderfully happy that you are dating this girl. It's your business, I don't care about her. But you often talk to her, and not just for the pleasure of talking. It may happen that you go with her to or fro, to Rostock or somewhere else, while I am sitting at my desk. You are talking to her, and in the middle of the phrase, someone appears who greets you. This is me with my poorly chosen words and sour expression. It lasts only a moment, and you resume the conversation /.../".

Ten years later, recalling these first years of youth, he writes to Felice Bauer: "If I had known you for eight or ten years (after all, the past is as certain as it is lost), we could be happy today without all these pitiful evasions, sighs and without safe reticences. Instead, I went with girls - now this is a distant past - with whom I easily fell in love, with whom it was fun, and whom I left even more easily than they left me, without causing me the slightest suffering. Plural does not speak of their large number, it is used here only because I do not name names, because everything has long passed).

After his matriculation exam, Kafka left alone on a short trip to the North Sea, the North Frisian Islands and the island of Heligoland, he spends his holidays with his family, often in Libosze on the Elbe. We find in the "Description of a Struggle" a brief echo of that sojourn. In order not to look too unfriendly in front of his interlocutor, an enthusiastic lover, the narrator, in turn, tries to come up with gallant adventures: a fiddle someone was playing in a seaside inn, trains scurrying up and down both banks with glittering smoke.

So I spoke, frantically trying to imagine behind the words some love stories with amusing positions; a little rudeness, decisiveness, violence would not hurt.

In these love stories, real and fictional are strangely mixed, by the way, both in life and in fiction, and all this love past seems to be unconvincing. When he mentions this in his first letters to Max Brod, he does so with an indifference that sounds unnatural: “The next day,” he writes, for example, “a girl changed into White dress then fell in love with me. She was very unhappy, and I could not console her, these things are so complicated" (the same episode is again mentioned in the "Description of a Struggle"). The letter to Max Brod continues: "Then there was a week that dissipated into the void, or two, or even more, Then I fell in love with one woman. Then one day there was dancing in a restaurant, but I didn't go there. Then I was melancholic and very stupid, to the point that I was ready to stumble on dirt roads. "It can be said that the foggy veil deliberately hides a certain area in semi-fantastic fiction, which they do not dare to look at openly.

Meanwhile, Kafka did have his first sensory experience with a woman. Seventeen years later, after their meeting in Vienna, he tells Milena in detail about this, trying to explain to her how strach and touha, fear and longing coexist in him. The case takes place in 1903, four years after his ill-fated conversation with his father about the problems of sex. He is twenty years old and busy preparing for his first law exam. He notices a saleswoman from a ready-made dress store on the sidewalk opposite. They make signs to each other, and one evening he follows her to the Kleinzeite Hotel. Just before the entrance, he is seized with fear: "Everything was charming, exciting and disgusting"; he continues to experience the same feeling in the hotel: “When we returned home along the Charles Bridge in the morning, I, of course, was happy, but this happiness consisted only in the fact that my eternally whining flesh finally found peace, and most great happiness was that everything did not turn out to be even more disgusting, even more dirty. He meets a young saleswoman for the second time, and everything happens just like the first time. But then (here it is necessary to trace this main experience in all its details, which so few writers have conveyed so carefully and with such sincerity) he leaves for the holidays, meets other girls, and from that moment he can no longer see this little saleswoman, although he knows well that she is naive and kind, he looks at her as his enemy. “I don’t want to say that the only reason for sure was not that in the hotel my girlfriend quite innocently allowed herself one little abomination (it’s not worth talking about it) and she also said one trifling smut (and it’s also not worth talking about it), but it stuck in my memory, I immediately realized that I could never forget it, and I also understood (or imagined) that this abomination or smut, if not necessarily externally, then internally, is very necessarily connected with everything that happened. He knows that it was precisely these "horrors" that attracted him to the hotel, this is what he wanted and at the same time hated. A long time later, he again experiences an indomitable desire, “the desire for a small, quite definite abomination, something slightly dirty, shameful, dirty, and even in the best that I got to share, there was a particle of it, a certain bad darling, a bit of sulfur, a bit of hell. In this craving there is something of the Wandering Jew, senselessly drawn through a senselessly dirty world.

Even the bombast of the language emphasizes the nature of the prohibition, which now hangs for him over everything that concerns sex. The splinter sank into flesh. For some time - in 1903, in 1904. - the wound remains tolerable; she still allowed the love affairs of her youth. But the pain will increase every year, little by little it paralyzes his whole life.

At the end of the Description of a Struggle, one of the characters in the story plunges the blade of a small penknife into his hand. Some commentators have interpreted this scene as symbolic suicide. But psychoanalysts are no doubt more willing to see it as an image of castration.

* * *

"I'm going into the open brown and melancholy fields with the plows left, the fields, which, however, cast silver, when, in spite of everything, the belated sun appears and casts my big shadow /.../ on the furrows. Have you noticed how the shadows of the late autumn dance on the dark plowed land, dancing like real dancers? Have you noticed how the earth rises to meet a grazing cow and with what confidence it rises? Have you noticed how a heavy and fat clod of earth crumbles in too thin fingers and with what solemnity it crumble?" The inexperienced reader will doubtless find it difficult to recognize Kafka as the author of this passage. However, this is a fragment from a letter to Pollack. Similarly, a year later, a poem included in a letter to the same addressee describes a small snow-covered town, dimly lit houses in the New Year's way, and in the midst of this landscape a lone thoughtful man leaning on the railing of the bridge. Style overloaded diminutives and archaisms. This Mannerism has been attributed, not without reason, to the influence of the Kunstwarda, a journal of art and literature which Pollak and Kafka read assiduously and of which they appear to have been subscribers. Reading "Kunstward" ("Keeper of the Arts") in 1902 was no longer particularly original. The magazine was published for almost 15 years, at first it published good writers, but little by little it reoriented itself into the field of various currents of modernism, naturalism, as well as symbolism. He came to a type of poetry that depicts local color, an example of which is Kafka's letter.

Kafka continues to write. At this time, moreover, he keeps, if not a "Diary", then at least notebook. He began to write early ("You see," he writes to Pollack, "misfortune fell on my back too early") and stopped, he says, only in 1903, when he had created almost nothing more for six months. "God does not want it, but I have to write. Hence the constant tossing; in the end God takes over, and this brings more misfortune than you can imagine." All the texts of the period of youth were destroyed, and one should not guess what they could be. It can only be assumed that the strangely uneven poems, several examples of which he subsequently included in his letters, belong to this period. He also told Oscar Pollack that he was preparing a book to be called The Child and the City. Do we have the right to guess what this design could be? Was the city meant to suppress the immediacy of the child, which was consistent with Kafka's thoughts on pedagogy? Was there a connection between this missing book and the rough drafts that would be called "City World" or "Little Ruin Dweller"? We do not know anything about this and it is better not to invent anything about this.

On the other hand, two things are certain: first, Kafka will very soon abandon his disgusting mannerism; the second - even these delusions of youth were not without significance for him. "Return to the Earth" in its own way explains the stable elements of his nature, which appear in different forms: naturalism, a taste for exercise and gardening, gardening, a tendency to moderation in food, a hostile attitude towards medicine and medicines, a preference for "natural" medicines. (for example, the hero of "The Castle" will one day be called "bitter herb" for his inherent healing abilities). In the room that Kafka occupied with his parents, very simple, sparsely furnished, almost ascetic (like the one that will be presented in The Metamorphosis), the only decoration was an engraving by Hans Thoma called "The Plowman", cut from the "Kunstward" - such was his habitat.

An essential, truly fundamental part of Kafka's personality manifests itself first of all, however, precisely in the propensity for the "simple life", which emerges in his first literary experiments. By the way, Kafka, who will renew literature so profoundly, early work there is nothing that makes him related to the avant-garde.

Ten years later, when he travels to Weimar with Max Brod, he will visit Paul Ernst and Johannes Schlaff, two writers who, in their time following naturalistic fashion, have become symbols of conservative literature. True, Kafka slightly sneers at them, but at the same time showing them respect. When Max Brod, at the beginning of their friendship, gave him passages from Gustav Meyrink's Violet Death to read, which dealt with giant butterflies, poisoned gases, magical formulas that turn strangers into purple jelly, Kafka reacted with a grimace. He did not like, Max Brod tells us, neither violence nor perversion; he had an aversion - we keep quoting Max Brod - for Oscar Wilde or Heinrich Mann. Among his preferences, according to the same Max Brod, along with the great examples, Goethe, Flaubert or Tolstoy, there were names that were least expected, the names of representatives of moderate, sometimes even shy literature, such as Hermann Hesse, Hans Carossa, Wilhelm Schaefer, Emil Strauss. But he had other aspirations that would not be slow to manifest.

When we move from 1903 to 1904 and from Pollack to Max Brod, it's like suddenly discovering another writer. Soil mannerism disappeared, but it was replaced by another mannerism, perhaps even more disgusting. Let the reader judge: "It is very easy to be joyful at the beginning of summer. The heart beats easily, the step is light, and we look confidently into the future. We hope to meet the Eastern wonders and at the same time reject them with comic reverence and awkward words - this lively game sets us up for we throw off the sheets and continue to lie in bed, keeping our eyes on the clock. It shows the end of the morning. But we, we comb the evening with very faded colors and endless perspectives and rub our hands with joy until they turn red, until we see how our shadow lengthens and becomes so gracefully evening. We adorn ourselves in the secret hope that the adornment will become our nature /.../". Kafka has obviously not yet found his style; soon he won't write like that anymore. However, what he says here is simple and important at the same time. He means to say that it is not permissible in the light of day to say that night has come. Literature must tell the truth, otherwise it will become the most empty and at the same time the least permissible occupation. False romanticism, which mixes truth and falsehood for pleasure, and delights in contrived melancholy, is outrageous.

The coincidence between these reflections of Kafka and the ideas of Hugo von Hofmannsthal of the same time has long been noted. In particular, in one of his best and most famous works, entitled "Letter", and in general bearing the name "Letter of Lord Shandos", Hoffmansthal in the form of an English nobleman of the 17th century. expressed his feelings at the turning point of the century. It is oversaturated with the verbal excesses of those whose fate at one time he seemed to be able to share - d "Annunzio, Barres, Oscar Wilde and others. Literature reveled in words, it became a fruitless and irresponsible game. The young Lord Shandos lost in this school the meaning of values \u200b\u200b(meanings ) and at the same time a taste for writing.He dreams of a new language, "in which silent things would speak to him and with which he could possibly appear in the grave before an unknown judge."

It is this crisis of literature that Kafka is trying to convey with his undecided language. To explain the meaning of the expression "to tell the truth", he willingly quotes a fragment of a phrase from another Hofmannsthal text: "The smell of damp tiles in the lobby"; the true feeling is conveyed here with the greatest economy of means: everything is true and without exaggeration speaks of a receptive mind. Truthfulness, which at first glance is the closest, is in fact the most difficult to achieve, so much is it hidden by the abuse of language, haste, conventions. Hoffmannsthal, according to Kafka, managed, at least in this case, to achieve truthfulness. Kafka, in turn, comes up with a phrase of the same kind: a certain woman, when asked by another woman what she is doing, answers: "I have lunch in the fresh air" (literally: "I have lunch on the grass", but the French expression sounds flat and distorts the meaning, to Moreover, in translation it is impossible to convey the juiciness of Austrian jausen, which means: lightly snacking). It's about about finding the lost simplicity, rediscovering the "reality" that was forced to forget the symbolic flourishing and excesses of the end of the century.

“We adorn ourselves in the secret hope that the adornment will become our nature,” Kafka wrote to Max Brod. The new literature should just cease to be decorative. The arabesque should give way to a straight line. Kafka does not think at all that there is a power of imagination in language, Magic force capable of bringing to light a previously unknown reality. There is nothing romantic in him; of all writers, he is undoubtedly the most consistently far from lyricism, the most resolutely prosaic. In one of the texts of recent years, he repeats again that language remains a prisoner of its own metaphors, that it can only express itself in a figurative sense and never in a literal sense. What he bears in his mind until 1904 is much less ambitious: he wants to find, on this side of the new debauchery of literature, the right feeling, the right gesture. In essence, he is in search of Flaubert, whom he does not yet know, but whom he will follow as soon as he reads it. He knows in which direction he must go, he sees the goal towards which he is striving, being not yet able to achieve it: the language he uses remains immersed in the past - almost in contradiction to the goal set.

The same analysis applies to the work that was conceived and written during these years - "Description of a Struggle." It was thanks to Max Brod, to whom Kafka gave it to read and who kept it in his drawer. desk, it escaped the fire that destroyed all other works of this period. Its first version can be attributed with quasi-accuracy to the last university years (1904 - 1905). Later, between 1907 and 1909, the text would be revised. Max Brod believed that the work was completed, but there is no certainty that he is right: in the Diary, after 1909, we find fragments that seem to have been intended for inclusion in the Description of a Struggle. This small work very complicated: it even seems that it, with its deliberate incoherence, sudden changes in the depicted perspective, is intended to confuse the reader. This is a free rhapsody that, without caring about logic, mixes genres and themes. First there is the "struggle", the struggle between the timid and the brave, the thin and the fat, the dreamer and the doer.

We do not wonder for long which of the two will prevail, even if in the end the more cunning introvert compromises his partner, whose life force burdened with many stupidities, and will make him doubt himself. But along with this humorous "struggle" which forms the frame of the narrative and in which autobiographical moments abound, there are many wholly fictitious events, for example, a story, as if taken from the symbolic story of a "fat man", apparently an obese Chinese, who is carried in a palanquin and who drowns in the river. There is also a satire on bad literature scattered in different episodes, which began in a 1904 letter to Max Brod. A bad writer is one who calls "the Tower of Babel" or Noah when he was drunk poplar fields, believing that words are enough to change the world and that the role of writing is to replace reality with imagination. It is not enough to call the moon "an old paper lantern" and call the column of the Virgin Mary "moon" for the world to obey the author's fantasy. "Description of a Struggle" opposes frivolity, stupid coquetry, lies that have taken possession of literature. But at the same time it is the most bizarre, the most mannered work, most marked by the taste of the era against which it is directed. Such is the paradox of this composition of youth. Kafka will soon follow other paths.

The strange, but undoubtedly brilliant writer Franz Kafka left a deep mark on world literature, thanks to his unique style, permeated with fear and absurdity in front of external reality.

In honor of the birthday of the world famous Austrian writer Franz Kafka, life guide prepared interesting facts about his life and work.

1. Franz Kafka is an Austrian writer of Jewish origin, who was born in Prague, who wrote mainly in German.

2. Kafka was a vegetarian and the grandson of a kosher butcher.

3. As a child, he was called strange and crazy due to the fact that he behaved rejected and closed.

I hate everything not connected with literature, - he wrote down, - ... I'm bored of visiting, the sufferings and joys of my relatives make me immensely bored. Conversations deprive all my thoughts of importance, seriousness, authenticity.

4. Franz Kafka is one of the main mascots of Prague.

5. Young Franz suffered from indescribable loneliness and misunderstanding with his parents, in particular from his father's despotism.

Because of You, I lost faith in myself, in return I gained a boundless sense of guilt. he writes in a letter to his father.

6. A writer in secret, he was for some time a simple boring office worker in the accident insurance department, which led him to complete despair and even more pessimism.

7. Kafka was torn between feeling and duty - on the one hand, he considered himself "indebted" to his parents, who imposed jurisprudence on him, on the other, he was drawn to literature and writing.

For me, this is a terrible double life,” he wrote in his diary, “from which, perhaps, there is only one way out - madness.

8.In life, Kafka had many chronic diseases that undermined his life - tuberculosis, migraine, insomnia, constipation, boils and others.

9. Chief Creative artistic technique writer, metametaphor *, gave his works greater grandeur, absurdity, depth and tragedy.

10. During a serious illness, Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to destroy all of his manuscripts, including novels that were not previously known to anyone. However, he did not listen to him, but, on the contrary, contributed to their publication. Thanks to this man, Kafka became world famous.

11. Despite the posthumous fame of his novels, several unappreciated short stories were published by Kafka during his lifetime.

12. Kafka himself believed that he would not live to be 40 due to poor health.

13. The stories and reflections of the writer are a reflection of his own neuroses and experiences that helped him overcome his fears.

14. Three of his posthumous novels "America", "The Trial" and "The Castle" remained unfinished.

15. The writer was born and died on the same date - 3.

16. Despite Franz's melancholy, friends noted his unusual sense of humor, called him "the soul of the company", one of the German publications wrote about Kafka's similarity with Charlie Chaplin.

I know how to have fun, no doubt about it. I'm even known for my penchant for fun. , Kafka wrote to one of his friends.

17. Due to difficult family relationships, Kafka could not build his own family. He was often in love, repeatedly broke off engagements with his chosen ones.

* Metametaphor or “metaphorical realism” is a total, in-depth metaphor, where reality is comprehended in all its fullness and breadth. This is a kind of inversion of a litote with a hyperbole. "Meta-metaphor differs from metaphor like a metagalaxy from a galaxy."

Franz Kafka. Study of one death

On June 3, 1924, the German writer, Austrian official, Jewish sufferer and citizen of Czechoslovakia, Franz Kafka, finally achieved what he purposefully strived for all his life. He died. Shortly before his death, Kafka uttered words that, probably, only his lips could give rise to: "Doctor, give me death, otherwise you are a murderer."

This is how intellectuals joked in the Soviet era, paraphrasing the beginning of a famous song about aviators. Kafka entered our lives as a writer who created a stunningly deep image of the bureaucratic machine that governs society.

The son of Thomas Mann - Klaus - tried on Kafkaesque clothes for Nazi Germany. For some time we believed that this "ammunition" was especially good for the countries of victorious socialism. But as this system transforms into a market one, it becomes clear that the Kafkaesque world is all-encompassing, that it traces connections that largely determine the parameters of the entire 20th century.

The image of this world is both the history of the construction of the Chinese Wall, and the memories of a certain Russian about the road to Kalda, built by Kafka on the materials of two Eastern despotisms. But first of all, this is the novel The Castle, which Kafka wrote, but abandoned a couple of years before his death. The novel grew, of course, not from Soviet reality, but from the bureaucratic world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which until 1918 included the Czech lands.

The "Castle" is dry, drawn out, hard to digest, just as bureaucratic relations themselves are dry, stretched out and hard to digest. The earlier novel The Trial is built differently - dynamic, disturbing, lively. “Process” is a person in a new world, “Castle” is the world itself, in which a person is just a grain of sand.

Just as The Trial was being written, Walther Rathenau began to build a military-industrial complex in Germany with its new system of connections. Just as The Castle was being written, Rathenau was killed. The new world was just being built, but Kafka had already seen it.

Rathenau was from a rare breed of pragmatists, while the "advanced thinkers", who then talked about the struggle of classes or races, found almost no place for bureaucracy in their intellectual constructions. Kafka, on the other hand, showed it as a form of the entire life of society, permeating the entire vertical of power and subordination with new relationships: from the castle to the village.

The reasons for the discovery made by Kafka can be explained by the fact that he was a genius. Nobody usually argues with this. But it seems that such an explanation is still not enough.

“Only writing furiously at night is what I want. And die from it or go crazy…” (from a letter to Felitsa).

Over the years, he brought himself to such a state in which the world visible to an ordinary person was closed for him, and something completely different opened up. He killed himself, but before his death he saw something that, perhaps, justified the sacrifice.

“I am a completely awkward bird. I am Kavka, a jackdaw (in Czech - D.T.) ... my wings have died. And now for me there is no height, no distance. Confused, I jump among people ... I am gray as ashes. A jackdaw eager to hide among the stones. This is how Kafka described himself in a conversation with a young writer.

Here is from an early diary - soft, almost tender: "At times I heard myself from the side, as if a kitten was whining." Here is from later letters - nervous, desperate: "I, the beast of the forest, was lying somewhere in a dirty lair."

And here is a completely different image. Having once made a terrible page-sized sketch in his diary, Kafka immediately wrote: “Go on, pigs, your dance. What do I care about this? And below: "But it's truer than anything I've written in the last year."

His narratives were simply conducted sometimes on behalf of animals. And if in the “Study of a Dog” there is a lot of external, rational (although how not to compare it with a diary entry: “I could hide in a dog kennel, getting out only when they bring food”), then in the story about the mouse singer Josephine the world real and fictional begin to intersect in an incredible way. The dying Kafka loses his voice under the influence of tuberculous laryngitis and begins to squeak like a mouse himself.

But it becomes truly scary when, in his most famous story, The Metamorphosis, Kafka displays a character very similar to the author, who turned into a disgusting insect one “beautiful” morning.

"Nora" is a horror without end, a horror generated solely by one's own worldview, and not by external circumstances. Only death can save him: "Doctor, give me death, otherwise..."

Franz Kafka and Joseph K.

For many years Kafka purposefully left the world of people. The animal world, born of his pen, is only an external, most simplified representation of what he felt. Where he actually lived at the time when he struggled with insomnia in his Prague apartment or sat out his pants in the office, no one can probably understand.

An excellent verbal portrait of Kafka was given by an acquaintance who saw from the bridge across the Vltava how Franz, exhausted from rowing, lies at the bottom of the boat: “As before the Last Judgment, the coffins have already opened, but the dead have not risen yet.”

He hated and feared even his own body. “How alien to me, for example, the muscles of the arm,” Kafka wrote in his diary. Since childhood, he stooped and twisted his entire long, awkward body due to uncomfortable clothes. He was afraid of food because of an unhealthy stomach, and when he calmed down, this crazy eater was ready to rush to the other extreme, imagining how he pushes into his mouth, without biting off, long costal cartilages, and then pulls them out from below, breaking through the stomach and intestines.

He was lonely and cut off from society, because he could not talk about anything other than literature (“I have no inclinations for literature, I just consist of literature”), and this topic was deeply indifferent to both the family and colleagues.

Finally, anti-Semitism, which made the life of a Jewish family dangerous and unpredictable, must be added to the whole complex of reasons that rejected Kafka from the world.

It is not surprising that the theme of suicide constantly appears in Kafka's diary: "to run up to the window and through the broken frames and glass, weakened from the exertion of strength, step over the window parapet." True, it didn’t come to this, but with the prediction of his own death - “I won’t live to see 40 years old” - Kafka was almost not mistaken.

By the way, he did not have any congenital dangerous diseases. Sometimes he even went in for sports. Kafka had his first sexual experience at the age of 20, not too late in those days. The saleswoman from the ready-made dress shop was quite pretty, and "whining flesh found peace." And in the future, a timid but charming young man was not an outcast in women's society.

So, there is a completely different world. And the most interesting thing is that in his notes, one way or another, Kafka recognizes the natural kindness of his father (by the way, as an adult, Franz voluntarily lived in his parental family), and the friendliness of the boss, and the value of relations with Max. But this is all just a glimpse. Suffering, on the other hand, is bulging out.

Critics and ideologues have repeatedly tried to retroactively attribute an active life position to Kafka. In Brod, the unfortunate sufferer, who has absorbed, perhaps, only a feeling of enduring pain from the centuries-old culture of his people, appears as a humanist, a lover of life and a deeply religious Jew. Another author interprets a random episode from Kafka's life as a passion for anarchism. Finally, in the USSR, in order to publish a writer alien to socialism, critics emphasized his sympathy for the working people, whom he insured against injury and disability.

All these estimates seem to be stretched. Is it possible to speculate about Judaism, especially since it is impossible to ignore the opinion of Brod.

Kafka did not like decadents and, unlike Nietzsche, did not consider God to be dead. And yet his view of God was no less paradoxical, no less pessimistic: “We are just one of his bad moods. He had a bad day." Where can the Jewish idea of being chosen by God fit in here?

For a long time, Kafka was convinced (most likely rightly) that he could write only by driving himself into a corner and killing everything human in himself. That is why he really drove and killed, erecting instead of a living person, as he himself put it, "a tomb monument to himself."

Freud he read, but did not appreciate. According to T. Adorno's apt remark, "instead of healing neuroses, he is looking for a healing power in them - the power of knowledge."

However, how fair is it to say that Kafka made a conscious decision to leave? There is an amazing entry in the diary, at first glance about nothing: “Why don’t the Chukchi leave their terrible land? .. They can’t; everything that is possible is happening; only what happens is possible.”

Finally, more than six months after the beginning of the novel, Kafka deigns to pay a voluntary-compulsory and very short visit to his “beloved” in his letters. After another three months, the "young lover", so plainly and not having seen enough of the empty bony face of his passion, makes her an offer.

Again from the diary: "A prince can marry a sleeping beauty and even worse, but a sleeping beauty cannot be a prince." Kafka cannot stay awake, because then he will not see his nightmares.

But Kafka is not an adventurer, easily able to turn his attention to a new object. He suffers deeply and ... becomes engaged to Felicia. However, the hopelessness of the development of these relations is obvious. Soon the engagement is broken off. And three years later, they suddenly find themselves engaged again. You can remember Marx: "History repeats itself twice, once as a tragedy, once as a farce."

However, this was not the end. Kafka's last years were illuminated by "a living fire such as I have never seen before" (from a letter to Brod). This fire was called Milena Jesenska. Czech, 23 years old, married, mentally unbalanced, cocaine addict, winder… Journalist and writer, translator of Kafka into Czech, man of frenzied energy, future communist, future resistance fighter, future victim of Ravensbrück…

And Kafka was born in Prague in 1883. Then everything was just beginning, everything was possible. There were still 41 years left before his death.

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.

Writer's childhood

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.

mature years

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.

The inner world of Kafka

It is always difficult to talk about the feelings of a person, especially if he leads a secluded lifestyle. However, about the life of the famous German writer Jewish origin, there is documented evidence regarding not only his biography, but also his outlook 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.

Health

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.

Personal life

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.

Death

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.

Franz Kafka. Creation

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 the 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.

The story "Transformation"

Franz Kafka in this work fully reflected his views on human relationships in his characteristic depressing, oppressive manner. Main character The story is about 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.

Analysis

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.

Novel "Process"

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.

"Lock"

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.

Other works

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".

Style

Absurdity and realism, reality and fantasy... It would seem that these are all incompatible concepts, but the author manages to organically connect the elements 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.

Conclusion

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 outstanding person, the writer tells about the fear of a person before something higher, before outside world which depends only on the 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.

Popular in category: