Product Description
A new translation of Kafka's letters to his Czech translator, Milena Jesenska, includes materials previously unpublished as well as some of her letters and essays
Review
"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 He left instructions for his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his unpublished work after his death, instructions Brod famously ignored.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
[April 1920]Meran-­Untermais, Pension Ottoburg

Dear Frau Milena

The rain which has been going on for two days and one night has just now stopped, of course probably only temporarily, but nonetheless an event worth celebrating, which I am doing by writing to you. Incidentally the rain itself was bearable; after all, it is a foreign country here, admittedly only slightly foreign, but it does the heart good. If my impression was correct (evidently the memory of one single meeting, brief and half-­silent, is not to be exhausted), you were also enjoying Vienna as a foreign city, although later circumstances/05/have diminished this enjoyment, but do you also enjoy foreignness for its own sake? (Which might be a bad sign by the way, a sign that such enjoyment should not exist.)

I’m living quite well here, the mortal body could hardly stand more care, the balcony outside my room is sunk into a garden, overgrown and covered with blooming bushes (the vegetation here is strange; in weather cold enough to make the puddles freeze in Prague, blossoms are slowly unfolding before my balcony), moreover this garden receives full sun (or full cloud, as it has for al- most a week)—­lizards and birds, unlikely couples, come visit me: I would very much like to share Meran with you, recently you wrote about not being able to breathe, that image and its meaning are very close to one another and here both would find a little relief.

With cordial greetings,
F Kafka

***

[April 1920]Meran-­Untermais, Pension Ottoburg

Dear Frau Milena

I wrote you a note from Prague and then from Meran. I have not received any answer. It so happens the notes did not require a particularly prompt reply and if your silence is nothing more than a sign of relative well-­being, which often expresses itself in an aversion to writing, then I am completely satisfied. However, it is also possible—­and this is why I am writing—­that in my notes I somehow hurt you (what a clumsy hand I must have had, if that should have happened against all my intentions) or else, which would of course be much worse, the moment of quiet relaxation you described has again passed and bad times have again descended upon you. In case the first is true I don’t know what to say, that’s so far from my thoughts and everything else is so close, and for the second possibility I have no advice—­how could I?—­but just a simple question: Why don’t you leave Vienna for a little while? After all, you aren’t homeless like other people. Wouldn’t some time in Bohemia give you new strength? And if, for reasons unknown to me, you might not want to