Letters to Milena - (Schocken Kafka Library) by Franz Kafka (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published in German in a different form as Briefe an Milena by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt, in 1952. This edition is based on the enlarged and revised German edition, edited by Jeurgen Born and Michael Meuller, published by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt and Main.

Book Synopsis

The passionate but doomed epistolary love affair between a Czech translator and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial.

"Extraordinary...touching, horrifying, brilliant, sickly, [and] heartbreaking.... The most significant key we have for a reading of the author's novels and short stories." --The New York Times

In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into an epistolary love affair. Kafka's Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, was a gifted and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka's complex genius and his even more complex character. For thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was "a living fire, such as I have never seen." It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping.

Review Quotes

"The voice of Kafka in Letters to Milena is more personal, more pure, and more painful than in his fiction: a testimony to human existence and to our eternal wait for the impossible. [This is] a marvelous new edition of a classic text." --Jan Kott

"An extraordinary document--touching, horrifying, brilliant, sickly, heartbreaking, and infinitely convoluted . . . It reveals him most clearly (which is relative, and Kafka remains mystifying enough), and it is--aside from the beauty of the letters themselves--the most significant key we have for a reading of the author's novels and short stories." --The New York Times

About the Author

FRANZ KAFKA was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924. After earning a law degree in 1906, he worked for most of his adult life at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. Only a small portion of Kafka's writings were published during his lifetime. He left instructions for his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his unpublished work after his death, instructions Brod famously ignored.