Franz Kafka was a sociable person. Brief biography of Franz Kafka. Beginning of literary activity

Franz Kafka: How the Chinese Wall was Built At the very beginning I put a small story taken from the work indicated in the title, and designed to show two things: the greatness of this writer and the incredible difficulty of witnessing this greatness. Kafka as it were

Max Brod: Franz Kafka Biography. Prague, 1937 The book is marked by a fundamental contradiction gaping between the author's main thesis, on the one hand, and his personal attitude towards Kafka, on the other. Moreover, the latter is to some extent capable of discrediting the former, not to mention

Franz Kafka This essay - Benjamin's largest, main work on Kafka - was written in its main part in May-June 1934, then expanded and revised over the course of several months. During his lifetime, the author was unable to publish it in full, in two issues.

Franz Kafka: How the Chinese Wall was Built This work by Benjamin was written around June 1931 for a radio broadcast that preceded the publication of a volume of Kafka's legacy (Franz Kaf a. Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer. Ungedruckte Erzahlungen und Prosa aus dem Nachla?, hrsg. von Max Brod und Hans-Joachim Schoeps. Berlin, 1931) and was read by the author

Max Brod: Franz Kafka. Biography. Prague, 1937Written in June 1938. In one of his letters to Gershom Scholem, in response to an invitation to speak out about Max Brod’s book about Kafka, published in Prague in 1937 (Max Brod Franz Kaf a. Eine Biographie. Erinnerungen und Dokumente. Prag, 1937), Benjamin sends his friend this

FRANZ KAFKA You know that you have become a great writer when epithets begin to form from your last name. Would we be able to use the word “Kafkaesque” today if it weren’t for Kafka? True, the brilliant son of a haberdasher from Prague himself most likely didn’t even talk about it.

3. Franz Spring rains are more pleasant than autumn ones, but under both of them you get wet, and there is nowhere to dry. True, raincoats and umbrellas save you, but still walking in the rain is joyless. Even the Weimar people themselves leave their homes only when absolutely necessary, and their gait is measured and

Corporal Franz Front. A farm in the Don steppe. A hut abandoned by its owners. An angry January snowstorm howls outside the window. The snow flakes on the windows glisten with the bluish glow of the fading day. Corporal Franz sits on a low stool with his head down. He, this SS corporal from

Franz Kafka (German Franz Kafka, July 3, 1883, Prague, Austria-Hungary - June 3, 1924, Klosterneuburg, First Republic of Austria) is one of the outstanding German-language writers of the 20th century, most of whose works were published posthumously. His works, permeated with absurdity and fear of the outside world and higher authority, capable of awakening corresponding anxious feelings in the reader, are a unique phenomenon in world literature. Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, into a Jewish family living in the Josefov district, the former Jewish ghetto of Prague (now the Czech Republic, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). His father, Hermann (Genich) Kafka (1852-1931), came from the Czech-speaking Jewish community in Southern Bohemia, and since 1882 he was a wholesale merchant of haberdashery goods. The surname "Kafka" is of Czech origin (kavka literally means "daw"). On Hermann Kafka's signature envelopes, which Franz often used for letters, this bird with a quivering tail is depicted as an emblem. The writer's mother, Julia Kafka (née Etl Levi) (1856-1934), the daughter of a wealthy brewer, preferred German. Kafka himself wrote in German, although he knew Czech just as well. He also spoke French quite well, and among the five people whom the writer, “without pretending to compare with them in strength and intelligence,” felt as “his blood brothers,” was the French writer Gustave Flaubert. The other four are Franz Grillparzer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Heinrich von Kleist and Nikolai Gogol. Being a Jew, Kafka nevertheless practically did not speak Yiddish and began to show interest in the traditional culture of Eastern European Jews only at the age of twenty under the influence of Jewish theater troupes touring in Prague; interest in learning Hebrew arose only towards the end of his life. In 1923, Kafka, together with nineteen-year-old Dora Dimant, moved to Berlin for several months in the hope of moving away from the influence of his family and concentrating on writing; then he returned to Prague. His health was deteriorating at this time: due to worsening tuberculosis of the larynx, he experienced severe pain and could not eat. On June 3, 1924, Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna. The cause of death was probably exhaustion. The body was transported to Prague, where it was buried on June 11, 1924 at the New Jewish Cemetery in the Strasnice district, in a common family grave.

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

Thomas Mann's son, Klaus, tried on Kafkaesque clothes for Hitler's 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 Kafka's world is comprehensive, that it traces connections that largely determine the parameters of the entire twentieth 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, naturally, 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, difficult to digest, just as bureaucratic relations themselves are dry, drawn-out and difficult to digest. The earlier novel "The Trial" was constructed differently - dynamic, alarming, lively. “The Process” is a person in a new world, “The Castle” is the world itself, in which a person is just a grain of sand.

Kafka saw a completely unexpected nature of connections between people at 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, Walter 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 one of 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 showed it as the form of the entire life of society, permeated the entire vertical of power and subordination with new relationships: from the castle to the village.

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The reasons for the discovery made by Kafka can be explained by the fact that he was a genius. Usually no one argues with this. But, I think, such an explanation is still not enough.

It would be more accurate to say that Kafka accomplished a feat. In the literal sense of the word, without any exaggeration. It was a reverse meditation, an ascent not to eternal bliss, but to eternal torment. Having physically felt the horror of the world, he was able to understand it.

“Just 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 a state in which the world visible to an ordinary person was closed to him, and something completely different was revealed. He killed himself, but before his death he saw something that may have 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. Confused, I jump among people... I am gray , like ashes. A jackdaw passionately wanting to hide among the stones." This is how Kafka characterized 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. Kafka did not feel like a bird, even with dead wings. More likely, slimy insects, a rodent shaking with fear, or even a pig, unclean for any Jew.

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 one from later letters - nervous, desperate: “I, a forest animal, was lying somewhere in a dirty den.”

And here is a completely different image. Having once made a creepy page-sized sketch in his diary, Kafka immediately wrote: “Continue your dance, you pigs. Why should I care?” And below: “But this is truer than anything I have written in the last year.”

His stories were simply told at times from the point of view of animals. And if in “The Study of One Dog” there is a lot of external, rational (although how can one not compare it with the diary entry: “I could hide in a dog’s kennel, coming out only when food is brought”), then in the story about the mouse singer Josephine the world the real and the fictional begin to intersect in incredible ways. The dying Kafka loses his voice under the influence of tuberculous laryngitis and begins to squeak like a mouse.

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

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

The hero of "The Metamorphosis" dies, hunted down by his loved ones. The ending is spectacular, but too shocking, too reminiscent of a showdown with one’s own family. In the story "Nora", written towards the end of his life, everything is simpler and more natural.

His hero - either a man or an animal - buries himself in the ground all his life, moving away from the world around him, which is so terrible and cruel. To hide, to disappear, to pull a layer of soil over himself like a protective spacesuit - this has been the goal of his life since birth. But there is no salvation in the hole either. He hears the roar of a certain monster breaking through the thickness of the earth towards him, he feels his own skin thinning, making him pitiful 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. The animal world born of his pen is only an external, most simplified idea of ​​what he felt. Where he actually lived at the time when he was struggling with insomnia in his Prague apartment or sitting in his office, no one will probably be able to understand.

To some extent, Kafka's personal world emerges from the diaries he began keeping at the age of 27. This world is a continuous nightmare. The author of the diaries is in a completely hostile environment and, to his credit, responds to the world in kind.

All troubles began with 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 child’s personality, ruined a good part of him. As an adult, Kafka was unhappy.

He was unhappy because of his hateful job. After graduating from the University of Prague, becoming a lawyer, Kafka was forced to become 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 due to his fragile health. With a height of 1.82, he weighed 55 kg. The body did not take food well, the stomach constantly hurt. Insomnia gradually intensified, weakening the already weak nervous system.

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

He was unhappy in his personal life. He fell in love several times, but was never able to connect with any of his chosen ones. Having lived his whole life as a bachelor, Kafka had dreams 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, for example, are the muscles of my arm,” Kafka wrote in his diary. Since childhood, he had been stooping and his entire long, awkward body was hunched over because of his uncomfortable clothes. He was afraid of food because of his unhealthy stomach, and when it calmed down, this crazy eater was ready to rush to the other extreme, imagining how he was pushing long rib cartilages into his mouth without biting off, and then pulling 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 inclination towards literature, I’m just made up of literature”), and this topic was deeply indifferent to both his family and his colleagues.

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

It is not surprising that the theme of suicide constantly appears in Kafka’s diary: “to run 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 right.

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 Joseph K. - the writer’s literary double, who appears either in “The Trial” or 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 cannot find any traces of a particularly difficult childhood, no traces of deprivation or repression from 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 - “Delo”, October 14, 2002), Franz’s childhood can be considered prosperous.

By the way, he did not have any congenital dangerous diseases. Sometimes he even played 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 store was quite pretty, and “the whining flesh found peace.” And in the future, the timid but charming young man was not an outcast in female society.

And he was simply lucky with his friends. A small literary circle formed in Prague, 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 creativity and helped him get published. Any writer can only dream of such a friend.

Kafka's part-time work was dust-free and took a minimum of time and effort. The intelligent boss doted on him and paid him sick leave for many months even when Kafka himself was ready to retire early.

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

So, this is a completely different world. And the most interesting thing is that in his notes, one way or another, Kafka recognizes both the natural kindness of his father (by the way, already as an adult, Franz voluntarily lived in his parents’ family), and the friendliness of his boss, and the value of his relationship with Max. But this is all in passing. Suffering, on the contrary, sticks out.

Tombstone for yourself

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

One is a real Prague resident (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 the biography). These two worlds fought among themselves, and the decisive circumstance that determined Kafka’s life, work and early death was that he gave full rein to the world of monsters, which gradually swallowed up its owner entirely.

Critics and ideologists have repeatedly tried to retroactively attribute Kafka to an active life position. In Brod, the unfortunate sufferer, who has absorbed from the centuries-old culture of his people, perhaps, only a feeling of enduring pain, 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 far-fetched. Unless one can speculate about Judaism, especially since it is impossible to ignore Brod’s opinion.

Kafka did not like decadents and, unlike Nietzsche, did not consider God dead. And yet his view of God was no less paradoxical, no less pessimistic: "We are just one of his bad moods. He was having a bad day." Where does the Jewish idea of ​​God's chosenness fit in?

Kafka lived in a Jewish environment, was interested in the culture and history of Jews, and the problem of emigration to Palestine. And yet his soul, so poorly contained in his body, was eager not to reach the heights of Zion, but to the world of German, Scandinavian and Russian intellectualism. His real surroundings were not the neighboring Jews and not Brod, who was shocked by the discovery of Kafka’s diaries, which revealed a corner of his soul that remained closed to his contemporaries. The real environment was the literature of thought and suffering - Goethe, T. Mann, Hesse, Gogol, Dostoevsky, 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, “a tombstone for himself.”

He read Freud, but did not appreciate him. As T. Adorno aptly noted, “instead of healing neuroses, he seeks in them themselves a healing power - 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 a world of horror. But the wall separating him from the human world turned out to be insurmountable.

Sleeping beauty cannot be a prince

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

While visiting Brod, he found a guest from Berlin, Felitza Bauer, a 25-year-old Jewish woman with a bony, blank face, as Kafka himself wrote in his diary a week later. Not a bad characteristic for a future lover?

However, a month later he begins a long, long affair with her in letters. The beginning of this novel is marked by a burst of creativity. In one night he writes the story “The Verdict,” giving it his all, to the point of pain in his heart, and imbued with a feeling of satisfaction with what has been achieved, so rare for him.

Then the creative energy is completely transferred to the epistolary genre. Sometimes Kafka writes Felice several letters a day. But at the same time he makes no attempt to see each other, although the distance from Prague to Berlin is generally ridiculous. He doesn’t even take advantage of her visit to his sister in Dresden (which is very close).

Finally, more than six months after the beginning of the novel in letters, Kafka deigns to pay a voluntary-compulsory and very short visit to his “beloved.” After another three months, the “young lover,” having not really looked at the empty, bony face of his passion, proposes to her.

In the stream of words that was previously unleashed on Felitsa, Kafka’s self-deprecating characteristics attract attention, clearly demonstrating to the girl the 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 that age when she doesn’t have to be particularly picky. For Kafka this is a complete disaster.

Two weeks later, the moment of truth arrives. With the pedantry of an official, Kafka writes down seven points of analysis in his diary: the pros and cons of marriage. Now everything is clear. He passionately wants 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. Just a piece of paper. After all, melting monsters into fiction is, in fact, the meaning of his life.

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

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

But there is no turning back now. He is flying into the abyss and must certainly grab onto someone, without, however, taking on any obligations. As soon as the correspondence with Felitsa fades away, a new stage of epistolary creativity begins. Kafka's verbal stream now falls on the friend of the failed bride, Greta Bloch, who later claimed that she had a son from Kafka.

But Kafka is not an adventurer, easily able to switch his attention to a new object. He suffers deeply and... gets engaged to Felitsa. However, the hopelessness of developing these relations is obvious. Soon the engagement is broken off. And three years later they suddenly find themselves engaged again. One may recall Marx: “History repeats itself twice, once as a tragedy, once as a farce.”

Housing issue

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

Tuberculosis became an excuse for breaking off the second engagement. Now Felitsa is gone forever. The seriously ill Kafka, four years before his death, made another attempt to connect his fate with a woman, Julia Vokhrytsek, but as soon as the future spouses learned that they could not count on the apartment they had eyed, they immediately backed down.

However, this was not the end. Kafka’s last years were illuminated by “a living fire such as I had never seen before” (from a letter to Brod). This fire's name was Milena Jesenská. Czech, 23 years old, married, mentally unstable, cocaine addict, spendthrift... Journalist and writer, translator of Kafka into Czech, man of frantic energy, future communist, future resistance fighter, future victim of Ravensbrück...

Perhaps someday the name Milena will stand on a par with the names of Laura, Beatrice, Dulcinea. In her love with Franz, reality mixed with myth, but literature needs such myths. The slowly dying Kafka finally had 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 also built the “Castle”.

He died in the arms of a young girl, Dora Dimant, a Polish Jew, to whom he also managed to propose his hand and heart. Franz was already acting like a child, Dora was either a child or a mother caring for 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 death.

One of the outstanding German-speaking writers of the 20th century, most of whose works were published posthumously.

German culture turned out to be closest to him: in 1789-1793. studied at a German elementary school, wrote all his essays in German, although he spoke excellent Czech. Franz also received his education at the gymnasium, which he graduated from in 1901, as well as at the Faculty of Law of Prague's Charles University, becoming a doctor of law as a result of his studies.

His father forced him to go to university, neglecting his son’s pronounced inclination towards literature. The influence of the oppressive father, who suppressed the will of Franz all his life, on Kafka’s psyche and life is difficult to overestimate. He broke up with his parents early, so he often moved from one apartment to another and was in financial need; everything connected with his father and family suppressed him and made him feel guilty.

In 1908, Kafka entered the service as an official in the insurance department, where he worked in modest positions until his premature retirement due to illness in 1922.

Work for the writer was a secondary and burdensome occupation: in his diaries and letters, he literally admits his hatred of his boss, colleagues and clients. In the foreground there was always literature, “justifying his entire existence.”

In 1917, after a pulmonary hemorrhage, long-term tuberculosis ensued, from which the writer died June 3, 1924 in a sanatorium near Vienna.