KAFKA’S CZECH READING IN CONTEXT

The aim of this chapter, which will consider Kafka’s awareness of Czech literature and culture and, indirectly, his passive knowledge of the Czech language, is not to create the impression that Kafka spent his spare time immersed in Czech literature or literature translated into Czech. His correspondence with Max Brod and a cursory look at his library show that this was certainly not the case. In his letters to Brod he mentions not only ‘classics’ and contemporary writers such as Goethe, Kleist, Thomas Mann, Stefan George, Robert Walser, Rudolf Kassner, Paul Ernst and Karl Kraus; he also refers to his reading in the ‘history of literature’,1 undertaken partly as preparation for the lectures by August Sauer he attended.²

The vast majority of the volumes in his library are German or printed in German. In addition to books written, translated or published by people he knew personally such as Oskar Baum, Max Brod, Rudolf Fuchs, Ernst Hardt, Gottfried Kölwel, Otto Pick, Melchior Vischer, Ernst Weiß and Franz Werfel, we also find such authors as Peter Altenberg, Karl Brand, Adelbert von Chamisso, Theodor Däubler, Stefan George, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gottfried Keller, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Eduard Mörike, Arthur Schnitzler, Carl Sternheim, Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Storm, Karl Hans Strobl, Frank Wedekind, Christoph Martin Wieland and Stefan Zweig.³ However, we should not assume that a single mention of a writer such as Strobl in the correspondence, or the presence of his work on Kafka’s bookshelves, implies any special significance. There is no doubting the importance of Goethe, Kleist, Stifter, Walser, Kraus and Wedekind for Prague German literature and for Kafka in particular; with Kölwel, Hardt and some others the case is not so clear.4 The same distinction applies to Czech writers, who will be discussed below.

As a reader of fiction, magazines and periodicals such as Die Aktion (Action), Die Fackel (The Torch), Vom jüngsten Tag (Judgment Day), Prager Tagblatt (Prague Daily News), Der Artist (The Artist), Der Anbruch (Dawn), Donau (Danube) and Das junge Deutschland (Young Germany)⁵, Kafka should thus be seen primarily in a ‘German’ intellectual context,⁶ although some of what German scholars claim as German literature (on the basis of the language it is written in) is not necessarily regarded as such by Kafka himself – his own work not excepted.⁷ In his visits to the cinema or cabaret he quite clearly preferred programs in German.⁸ Yet his interests were by no means confined to German literature and culture. His familiarity with Yiddish and Hebrew literature extended well beyond the Yiddish theatre, and his reading of periodicals such as Selbstwehr (Self-Defence), Jüdische Rundschau (Jewish Review), and Der Jude (The Jew),⁹ as well as more academic works on the art, history and religion of Judaism (which were also to be found in his library), oblige us to see him equally in a ‘Jewish’ intellectual context.10 We should also consider Czech literature as a part of Kafka’s literary field,¹¹ including the Czech periodicals that published translations of his short stories (many in his own lifetime), and not be surprised to find resonances from and parallels with both classic and modern Czech literature in his own texts.

Kafka’s knowledge of Czech literature and culture was surprisingly comprehensive. He had his first encounter with Czech culture in Czech lessons at school. Without that thorough grounding, which doubtless also encouraged him in his later reading for both work and pleasure, it is hard to imagine how in the post-war years he could have fared so well in his job at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company, where Czech was the working language not only officially but partially also in everyday practice. Indeed, one part of his school subjects had been also the study of Czech abstract texts. And this contact with written Czech and Czech intellectual life continued after he left school in 1901, so that years later we find him reading Czech newspapers and periodicals and apparently knowing all about the most recherché writers and literary groupings of the day.

Kafka’s knowledge of Czech literature and culture has been documented by Jürgen Born on the basis of the diaries, the correspondence and the books contained in his estate,¹² though the author provides no commentary. František Kautman, who went into the subject in some depth in the 1960s, concluded that mentions of Czech literature in the diaries and other sources were quite random titles that don’t tell us much about Kafka’s interest in Czech culture’.¹³ This observation, however, applies equally to German authors and books which, while occurring far more frequently in the same sources, provide us with little insight into Kafka’s mental world without an accompanying commentary. Here too – as with the references to Czech literature and culture – the data requires further interpretation.¹⁴

CZECH AS A MEDIUM LANGUAGE

Kafka’s active knowledge of spoken and written Czech was considerable. Although his use of the language was not error-free, he was able to meet all his communicative needs in a wide range of communicative areas. In view of the range of authors in his library and the references to them in his letters and diaries, it is clear that Czech – like German – provided Kafka with a means of access to the literatures of other languages, and above all to works by Slavonic writers, to whom the Czech intellectuals of the day paid particular attention. Thus as well as reading Dostoyevsky in German15, Kafka also read his political writings in Czech translation.¹⁶ Tolstoy, too, he knew through Czech translations,¹⁷ as was probably also the case with Gorki’s ‘Reminiscences of Tolstoy’.¹⁸ But his interest was not confined to Russian culture. A diary entry for 20 October 1911 reads: ‘with Löwy in the National Theatre for the “Dubrovnická trilogie” (Dubrovnik Trilogy)’,¹⁹ a work dating from 1903 with elements of both symbolism and naturalism by the Croatian playwright Ivo Vojnović (1857–1929). Here, too, Czech was Kafka’s bridge to the Slavonic world.

There can thus be no arguing with Bert Nagel’s assertion that Kafka felt a strong affinity with Russian writers.²⁰ In those years Tolstoy and especially Dostoyevsky, both of whom were well represented in Kafka’s library, were – each for a different reason – key authors not only for Kafka but for a host of Prague intellectuals, both Czech and German: Tolstoy for (among other things) his ideas on social reform, Dostoyevsky for the way he saw beyond external appearances, which – as illustrated in Filla’s 1907 painting Reader of Dostoyevsky – resonated with Kafka’s ‘psychoanalytical generation’. What is less understandable, however, is why Nagel’s book excludes any mention of Czech writers – including figures of unquestionable international stature such as Otakar Březina – despite Kafka’s familiarity with them and despite the importance of Czech for him as a gateway to other literatures and cultures. This applies not only to the Slavonic world, but to a certain extent also to Hebrew, Classical, French and American culture.²¹

Thus in Kafka’s library we find the volume Židovské besídky (A Jewish Miscellany),22 published in Roudnice nad Labem in 1912 by the rabbi Richard Feder. Among its authors and translators, besides Feder himself, were Alfred Fuchs, Otakar Smrčka and O. L. Šťastný. Aimed mainly at the younger reader, its contents are quite heterogeneous. Alongside translations of Shakespeare, Lessing and Byron by Josef Václav Sládek and Jaroslav Vrchlický we find texts by and relating to Judah Ha-Levi and L. A. Frankl, as well as Jewish anecdotes and texts on the Hanukkah and rules of conduct from the Talmudic period.

The book was praised (as the cover informs us) by Josef Sedláček, professor of theology at Charles University in Prague. His book Základové hebrejského jazyka biblického (A Primer in Biblical Hebrew), published in 1892 by Stýblo in Prague, was also in Kafka’s possession.²³ The Hebrew vocabulary notebooks kept by Kafka, which can be inspected at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, suggest that he learnt Hebrew through German. Nonetheless, the existence of Sedláček’s textbook in his library proves he was able to read lengthy theoretical texts in Czech and could use Czech as a possible medium for acquiring a new language – or, at the very least (if he received it as a gift), that other people thought he could do so. The fact that the book looks ‘used’ (although it contains no notes or underlinings), might argue – albeit with little certainty – that Kafka made use of it when studying Hebrew. The German-language Hebrew textbooks he owned also have a used look about them, but they too are without notes or markings, save the occasional ‘underlining’ in the margin.²⁴

The assumption that Kafka was able to read substantial Czech texts on specialised subjects as a result of his thorough schooling is supported by the existence of other theoretical and philosophical works in Czech that he is known to have read, among them Jaroslav Goll’s Chelčický a Jednota bratrská v XV. století (Chelčický and the Unity of Brethren in the 15^th Century), Vlastimil Kybal’s Svatý František z Assisi (St Francis of Assisi), and Tomáš G. Masaryk’s Sebevražda hromadným jevem (Suicide as a Mass Phenomenon).²⁵ Although the Goll and Masaryk titles first appeared in German,²⁶ Kafka seems to have read them in Czech.

As regards Classics, which had a prominent place in the grammar school curriculum, we know Kafka had a copy of Plato’s Phaedo in Greek ‘for use in schools’,27 which had an introduction in Czech. It even contains handwritten notes in Czech, though they are unlikely to be Kafka’s. If we compare the handwriting with that of Kafka’s manuscripts from the 1920s we find the same sloping script, but while the letter z appears similar, the k, t and other letters are noticeably different. It is the same with his copy of E. Coursier’s Handbuch der französischen und deutschen Konversations-Sprache (Manual of French and German Conversation), which contains notes in both German and Czech. Again, Kafka’s authorship is highly unlikely.

More helpful is a passage in a Czech letter to his brother-in-law Josef David concerning their joint reading of Horace:

 

Why a poem, Pepa; don’t put yourself to such trouble, why a new poem? Horace has already written many beautiful poems and we have read only one and a half of them. Besides, I already have a poem of yours. Near here there is a small military infirmary and all evening there is marching along the road and it’s always ‘Panthers’ and ‘turning round and round’ [reference to Czech popular songs].²⁸

 

Binder explains this apparent shared reading of Horace thus:²⁹ Josef David, inspired by Kafka’s idea of taking off for the remote forests of the High Tatras, adapted Horace’s Latin ode in praise of the Sabine Hills and subsequently translated it into Czech.³⁰ In his letter Kafka draws an ironic parallel between literature (Horace) and reality (the loudly singing soldiers).

Czech was certainly a means of getting to know North American culture: witness for example the lecture Kafka attended by František Soukup, Amerika a její úřednictvo (America and its Public Administration)³¹, or his reading of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which he recommended to his father³² and which may have provided certain ideas or motifs for the unfinished novel Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared), also known by the title chosen by Max Brod, Amerika. The book’s genesis, however, was far from straightforward.33

Kafka also had lighter Czech reading-matter sent to him. During his rustic retreat in Siřem (Zürau) in autumn 1917, he received a letter from Felix Weltsch (written 5 October 1917) outlining the likely contents of his next book parcel:

 

About the books: we don’t have the Stekel. I can do nothing about that. Memoirs: I found one Cz. edition series that deals exclusively in those kinds of autobiographies as well as Cz. translations from French; they would be all together. They’re quite small books, easy to transport; print is so-so; but maybe in the country there is more light than in the town.

I have ready for you:

Paměti (Memoirs) of Countess Potocka

        „     M. de Marbot

        „     again

Zpověď (Confessions) of Prince Rakoczy

Polit[.] úvahy (Polit. Writings) of Dostoyevsky

more Marbot again (something else again)

Rolandová, Paměti (Memoirs by Madame Roland)

Hel. Rakowitza – On Lasalle

Chamfort – Příhody (Anecdotes)

Sir Malet – Život diplomatův (Sir Edward Malet – Life of a Diplomat)

La Porte, Komoří Ludv. XIV – Paměti (Memoirs of Pierre de La Porte, Louis XIV’s valet)

Please send someone to pick up the books, or tell me which you would like.³⁴

LANGUAGE AND VALUES

Alongside German, the Czech language and Czech culture formed the very air that Kafka breathed. By this I do not mean merely that Kafka enjoyed walking the streets of Prague, listening to Czech and admiring the city’s architecture and monuments. Kafka was neither a compulsive urban pedestrian à la Apollinaire, nor a modern tourist, but a native of Prague with his roots firmly in Czech lands. As a little boy he apparently created a puppet show about George of Poděbrady35 (his mother in fact hailed from Poděbrady), the 15^th century Bohemian ruler who became a central figure in the national myth of the unique identity of the Czechs – a nation defined by language and devoted to freedom and democracy. These values were considered to be rooted in Hussitism and the Reformation, as mythologized by František Palacký (who also drew on Czech pre-history and the Libuše saga) in his Dějiny národu českého v Čechách a v Moravě (History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia) and Tomáš G. Masaryk in Česká otázka (The Czech Question) – though the latter avoids any reference to the ‘prehistorical’ period. Post-1918 this myth became part of the state ideology. As we noted above, it was a subject that clearly occupied Kafka – to the extent that he even read specialized literature on it.

Hussitism and its iconography were highly visible in Prague. From 1915 on, Kafka’s daily route across Old Town Square took him past the Art Nouveau monument to Jan Hus by Ladislav Šaloun (1870–1946), which was unveiled in that year to commemorate the martyr burnt at the stake in Constance in 1415.³⁶ He was also familiar with the allegorical monument to František Palacký (1798–1876), a work by Šaloun’s contemporary Stanislav Sucharda (1866–1916) that had been unveiled on the banks of the Vltava three years earlier.³⁷ Much of Palacký’s oeuvre can be seen as an interpretation of Hussitism – even Sucharda’s monument alludes to the resurrection narrative. The Hussite theme is also evident in the sculpture of František Bílek (1872–1941), whose works include the (nationally non-specific) Blind Man (1902),³⁸ designs for national monuments to Jan Žižka and John Amos Comenius,³⁹ as well as the Hus memorial in Kolín,⁴⁰ which Kafka particularly admired:

 

In saying this I keep thinking of the Hus at Kolín (not so much the statue in the Modern Gallery and the monument in Vyšehrad Cemetery and still less the mass of relatively inaccessible small pieces in wood and graphic which used to be shown and are growing dim in my memory). At Kolin you come out of the side street and see before you the big square with the small houses bordering it, and in the centre Hus. At all times, in snow and in summer, it has a breathtaking, incomprehensible, and thus seemingly arbitrary unity, which is nevertheless imposed anew at every moment by that powerful hand and even takes in the spectator himself. The Weimar Goethe House achieves something of the sort, perhaps largely through the blessing of time. But it would be rather difficult to campaign for the creator of that, and the door of his house is always closed.41

 

While Kafka enthused about Bílek’s work, he rejected that of Šaloun and Sucharda:

 

You also do not mention Bílek, though I wish you would take him in your arms. I have long been thinking of him with great admiration. Lately a remark in a Tribuna article dealing with other matters (I think it was by Chalupný) reminded me of him again. It is a wanton and senseless impoverishment of Prague and Bohemia that mediocre stuff like Šaloun’s Hus or wretched stuff like Sucharda’s Palacký are erected with all honours, while on the other hand sketches of Bílek’s for a Žižka or Komenský monument, sketches of incomparable quality, remain unexecuted. If it were possible to rectify this disgrace, that would be doing a great deal, and a government organ would be the right place to begin.⁴²

 

All three sculptors, however, draw for their themes on the Czech national myth of democratism (still very much alive at the time) personified by Hus, Žižka and Comenius as representatives of the Czech Reformation, which for Palacký was one of the high points of Czech history. Yet in Kafka’s opinion only Bílek produced a masterpiece, suggesting that national considerations played no part in his artistic judgment, but only aesthetic criteria. It is certainly not by chance that Kafka mentions Bílek in his correspondence in 1922, at the time of his exhibition at the Dům umělců (House of Artists) – an exhibition introduced by Otokar Březina,⁴³ to whom we shall return later. By then, however, Kafka was already acquainted with the sculptor’s work.

Czech visual art, existing as it did without the need of written language, appears to have had a special importance for Kafka. In a diary entry for 5 June 192244 he recorded as a momentous event the funeral of Josef Václav Myslbek (1848–1922), whose sculptural work was of primary importance for Czech culture and Czech national consciousness – witness his contribution to the decoration of the National Theatre (opened in 1881, reopened after fire in 1883), the figures from Czech pre-history and myth he created for Palacký Bridge, and the equestrian statue of St Wenceslas in Wenceslas Square in Prague, unveiled in 1912. An earlier diary entry of 12 September 1911 shows that Kafka was also familiar with Alfons Mucha (1860–1939),⁴⁵ whose works include the monumental cycle The Slav Epic (1910–1928), as well as with Mikuláš Aleš.⁴⁶ As we noted above, Kafka was no stranger to the National Theatre,⁴⁷ where besides Myslbek’s sculptures he would also have seen Aleš’s murals. He certainly also knew the writings of Alois Jirásek (1851–1930), whose historical novels are a romanticised and sentimentalised take on Palacký’s History.⁴⁸ In 1916 Jirásek’s Husitský král (The Hussite King), based on the life of George of Poděbrady, started to appear in instalments in the daily Národní politika (National Politics), of which Kafka was a reader, but after a few issues it was banned for political reasons.

One could continue, if not indefinitely then for a considerable time, cataloguing the many substantiated facts documenting Kafka’s contacts with Czech literature, Czech visual arts, and generally Czech culture and its history. But that is not the point. These facts serve simply to show that on the basis of sometimes quite marginal allusions to Czech culture – a marginality perhaps ascribable to the fact that Kafka and his circle took such things for granted – we may assume he had a good overall knowledge of what was going on in Czech culture and society. It is surely no accident that is his ‘Character sketch of small literatures’ Kafka drew not only on Yiddish but equally on his knowledge of Czech literature.

KAFKA’S ‘CHARACTER SKETCH OF SMALL LITERATURES’

In 1911 Kafka twice wrote in his diary about his ‘Character sketch of small literatures’. In this he was able to draw on his knowledge of Czech as well as of Yiddish literature, to which he had recently been introduced by the actor Yitzchak Löwy:

 

25 December [1911]. What I understand of contemporary Jewish literature in Warsaw through Löwy, and of contemporary Czech literature partly through my own insight, points to the fact that many of the benefits of literature – the stirring of minds, the coherence of national consciousness, often unrealized in public life and always tending to disintegrate, the pride which a nation gains from a literature of its own and the support it is afforded in the face of a hostile surrounding world, this keeping a diary by a nation which is something entirely different from historiography and results in a more rapid (and yet always closely scrutinized) development, the spiritualization of the broad area of public life, the assimilation of dissatisfied elements that are immediately put to use precisely in this sphere where only stagnation can do harm, the constant integration of a people with respect to its whole that the incessant bustle of the magazines creates, the narrowing down of the attention of a nation upon itself and the accepting of what is foreign only in reflection, the birth of a respect for those active in literature, the transitory awakening in the younger generation of higher aspirations, which nevertheless leaves its permanent mark, the acknowledgment of literary events as objects of political solicitude, the dignification of the antithesis between fathers and sons and the possibility of discussing this, the presentation of the national faults in a manner that is very painful, to be sure, but also liberating and deserving of forgiveness, the beginning of a lively and therefore self-respecting book trade and the eagerness for books – all these effects can be produced even by a literature whose development is not in actual fact unusually broad in scope, but seems to be, because it lacks outstanding talents. The liveliness of such a literature exceeds even that of one rich in talent, for, as it has no writer whose great gifts could silence at least the majority of cavillers, literary competition on the greatest scale has a real justification.

A literature not penetrated by a great talent has no gap through which the irrelevant might force its way. Its claim to attention thereby becomes more compelling. The independence of the individual writer, naturally only within the national boundaries, is better preserved. The lack of irresistible national models keeps the completely untalented away from literature. But even mediocre talent would not suffice for a writer to be influenced by the unstriking qualities of the fashionable writers of the moment, or to imitate the foreign literature that has already been introduced; this is plain, for example, in a literature rich in great talents, such as the German is, where the worst writers limit their imitation to what they find at home. The creative and beneficent force exerted in these directions by a literature poor in its component parts proves especially effective when it begins to create a literary history out of the records of its dead writers. These writers’ undeniable influence, past and present, becomes so matter-of-fact that it can take the place of their writings. One speaks of the latter and means the former, indeed, one even reads the latter and sees only the former. But since that effect cannot be forgotten, and since the writings themselves do not act independently upon the memory, there is no forgetting and no remembering again. Literary history offers an unchangeable, dependable whole that is hardly affected by the taste of the day.

A small nation’s memory is not smaller than the memory of a large one and so can to digest the existing material more thoroughly. There are, to be sure, fewer experts in literary history employed, but literature is less a concern of literary history than of the people, and thus, if not purely, it is at least reliably preserved. For the claim that the national consciousness of a small people makes on the individual is such that everyone must always be prepared to known that part of the literature which has come down to him, to support it, to defend it – to defend it even if he does not know it and support it.49

 

A character sketch of small literatures.

Good results in both cases.

Here the results in individual instances are even better.

1. Liveliness:

a. Conflict.

b. Schools.

c. Newspapers.

2. Less constraint:

a. Absence of principles.

b. Minor themes.

c. Easy formation of symbols.

d. Throwing off of the untalented.

3. Popularity.

a. Connection with politics.

b. Literary history.

c. Faith in literature, can make up their own laws.

It is difficult to readjust when one has felt this useful, happy life in all one’s being. [. . .] How weak this picture is. An incoherent assumption is thrust like a board between actual feeling and the metaphor of the description.⁵⁰

 

Although these texts do not contain the name of a single writer, we can surely agree with Kafka that he knew Czech literature from his ‘own insight’, and not only of ‘contemporary’ authors. His conclusions that ‘literature is less a concern of literary history than a concern of the people’, that in small literatures ‘literary events’ become objects of ‘political solicitude’, and that the nation takes pride and succour in a literature that acts as its ‘journal’, and reveres people engaged in literature – all this applies to the central role of language and literature in 19^th century Czech national culture, defined as it was by language and therefore predominantly verbal, in which for a socially undeveloped ethnic community that defined itself primarily in terms of language, a consciously created and cultivated literature51 became a substitute – at least initially – for political engagement, finding an outlet even in the National Theatre (along with the Czech press a key institution of Czech culture), which Kafka as a theatre-goer was well acquainted with.

This typically 19^th century identification of literature with nation, confirmed here by Kafka, can also be clearly seen, in the context of Czech national ‘resurrection’ and ‘renewal’, in 19^th century Czech school readers such as those used by Kafka in his Czech lessons at grammar school. Thus Antonín Truhlář writes:

 

Among the Czech people, whose literary significance was minimal because of past misfortunes, the reforms contributed to an awakening and enlivening of national consciousness.⁵²

 

A nation and its ‘condition’ is thus measured by the extent and importance of its literary output. Literature and its language are not simply one feature of a nation’s culture; they are the principal emblem of that nation. This explains the key role played by writers, who are regarded as leaders or – to use Truhlář’s word – ‘chieftains’ in the process of national revival.⁵³

But if literature becomes identified with the nation, and the ‘national character’ is reinforced thanks to the ‘applause of audiences’ and ‘more distant works [. . .] such as The Bartered Bride’,⁵⁴ the values through which literature and writers are viewed and judged must be other than aesthetic. In Truhlář and others we repeatedly find writers being evaluated not in terms of literary or aesthetic merit, but solely with regard to their national sentiment and their commitment to the language and the nation. This, of course, Kafka could scarcely fail to notice:

 

These writers’ undeniable influence, past and present, becomes so matter-of-fact that it can take the place of their writings.55

 

What is valued in this conception of literature is the fostering of love for one's own people, the raising of awareness of national concerns, and the strengthening of the foundations of national literature as the representative of the nation.⁵⁶ Kafka, too, discerns these traits in small literatures – albeit from a critical distance. As one who judges literature by aesthetic criteria, he is sceptical about literatures ‘not penetrated by a great talent’ that have ‘no gap through which the irrelevant might force its way’. It is not that there are no talents; only that there are none gifted enough to break through the requirements of a nationally conceived literature and its canon of values, where what constitutes ‘genius’ is decided and judged by national rather than aesthetic criteria. That, of course, does not reflect terribly well on the Czech literary classics that Kafka has in mind. But Kafka knows what he’s talking about.⁵⁷ He also knows that in a literature like that there is no place for him.

CZECH CLASSICAL LITERATURE

The lecture on small literatures that Kafka drafted but never delivered, made public mention of no specific writers, nonetheless shows that he was well acquainted with the issues surrounding Czech and Yiddish literature. He even tells us explicitly that he can judge contemporary Czech literature ‘through my own insight’.⁵⁸ As we know from research on Kafka’s study of Czech literature at school this is no exaggerated claim and applies as much to older Czech literature as to that of the 19^th century. Zimmermann seeks to draw a parallel between Comenius’s Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart and The Castle. In his interpretation the name Klamm, for example, is an allusion to Comenius and his characters Klam and Mam which mean ‘illusion’ and ‘deception’.59 We have already mentioned Kafka’s interest in the Unity of the Brethren, of which Comenius was the last bishop. Comenius exercised a dominant influence on Czech literature and culture, as well as on Prague German writers such as Franz Werfel, to whom we shall return later. Of course the name Klamm has other possible associations. It could refer to Count Clam-Gallas, the owner of Frýdlant Castle, depicted on a postcard to Max Brod dated 1/2 February 1911.⁶⁰ And naturally Kafka knew Clam-Gallas Palace, the family property in the heart of Prague Old Town.

Kafka’s familiarity with the classics of Czech literature was based primarily on knowledge he acquired at school, but also on his frequent visits to the National Theatre. This familiarity is taken quite for granted by Kafka and his correspondents (such as Max Brod, or his sister Ottla), so that in the letters a simple mention of a writer’s or artist’s name generally suffices, without any explanatory comment. Or even less. When, referring to František Bílek, he talks about ‘the tomb in Vyšehrad Cemetery’⁶¹ – i.e. Bílek’s sculpture Grief – he is indirectly alluding to the historical novelist Václav Beneš Třebízský (1849–1884) as well as to Slavín itself, the part of the cemetery reserved for the nation’s great writers and artists. In those days, to walk among the tombs of Vyšehrad was to be given a comprehensive review of 19^th century Czech literature and culture.⁶²

When it comes to particular writers mentioned by Kafka, Božena Němcová has a special place. Extracts from her writings were included in his Czech school readers and were discussed in class. So it is no surprise to find Anna Pouzarová recalling⁶³ how he recommended Němcová’s novel Babička (The Grandmother) to his sisters and even bought an illustrated Czech edition from which she has to read to them. And we know he returned to Němcová later in life. In a letter to Felix Weltsch dated 22 September 1917 he told his friend how impressed he was with her letters,64 which he had been reading in Siřem (Zürau). In a letter to Ottla dated 28 July 1921 he mentions how he used to think of Němcová when he was at Domažlice.⁶⁵ And elsewhere he wrote: ‘In Czech I know of only one musical language – that of Božena Němcová.’⁶⁶

It is therefore likely that Kafka had absorbed Němcová’s The Grandmother, and that the impulse for the story in The Castle of Amalia and Sortini the official came from Christina’s tale of harassment at the hands of the Italian manservant Piccolo in The Grandmother.⁶⁷ Němcová’s story ‘V zámku a podzámčí’ (Castle and village) has a similar structure. But in one respect the two writers differ radically: while Němcová’s The Grandmother ends, thanks to the princess, on a conciliatory note, the surveyor in Kafka’s The Castle enters a world that no intercession can redeem – either on the part of Count Westwest or of his senior official. As Kautman rightly observes, Kafka’s attitude to Božena Němcová can be characterized as ‘attraction based on contrasts’.⁶⁸

But Kafka could also be scathing of ‘the classics’. Commenting on a stage production by Jaroslav Kvapil of Jaroslav Vrchlický (1853–1912), he criticised the playwright as much as the director:

 

Day before yesterday Hippodamie. Bad play. A rambling about in Greek mythology without rhyme or reason. Kvapil’s essay in the program which expresses between the lines the view apparent throughout the whole performance, that a good production (which here, however, was nothing but an imitation of Reinhardt) can make a bad play into a great theatrical work. All this must be sad for a Czech who knows even a little of the world.⁶⁹

 

This negative appraisal was no doubt influenced by Kafka’s reluctance to spend the evening watching Vrchlický’s drama, just when his thoughts were beginning to ‘move more freely’ and he felt he might be ‘perhaps be capable of something‘.70 That may explain his later interest in Vrchlický’s correspondence with Sofie Podlipská.⁷¹ As writer of the epic Bar Kochba (1897) and the drama Rabínská moudrost (The Rabbi’s Wisdom, 1886) with its clearly philosemitic stance, Vrchlický was highly thought of in the Czech Jewish movement.⁷²

NEWSPAPERS, PERIODICALS AND OTHER MEDIA

Knowing the Czech language, being able to handle its more complex literary forms, and keeping abreast of Czech literature and culture are a far cry from actually identifying with that culture. Modern culture, in any case, operates along different lines. Still, we can safely say that Kafka had a very good grasp of its past and present problems, values and symbols. One fact alone may suffice to justify this assertion: Kafka’s regular attendance at the pre-election meetings of Czech politicians. Brod mentions František Soukup, Václav Klofáč and Karel Kramář. Kautman thinks we should add Tomáš G. Masaryk, while Janouch mentions Alois Rašín. But on the evidence of Kafka’s texts we can only be certain of an ‘encounter’ with Jan Herben and František Soukup, and with Masaryk’s writings.⁷³ Moreover, we know that Kafka was a more or less regular reader of the Czech press (especially Čas, Národní listy and Národní politika),⁷⁴ which he subscribed to or had sent to him even after illness had somewhat reduced his financial circumstances,75 and in which he may have found inspiration for his writing. Nuska, for example, sees a number of parallels between The Trial and the political scandal involving Karel Šviha, Reichsabgeordneter and chairman of the parliamentary fraction of the Czech National Socialist Party, who was alleged to have acted as an informant on his own party and other politicians. The story, which broke in Národní listy in March 1914 and culminated in May with Šviha’s trial (at which the unconvincing public prosecutor was, ironically, widely regarded as a suspect), aroused considerable interest not only in Bohemia but in Vienna and Germany as well. The parallels Nuska reconstructs are sometimes very compelling, especially in some of the novel’s secondary motifs and passages later excised by the author.⁷⁶ Another factor that could be cited in support of Nuska’s interpretation is Kafka’s proven interest in judicial proceedings: ‘I arrive on Wednesday. We could think about whether we should go to the Kestranek trial.’⁷⁷

Czech literature and culture also formed (even before Czechoslovak independence in 1918) an integral part of the cultural landscape of the ‘Arconauts’, as they were known – the habitués of the Arco coffee house in Hybernská Street. We know that Max Brod (1884–1968), Rudolf Fuchs (1890–1942) and Otto Pick (1887–1940), as well as Franz Werfel (1899–1945) and Ernst Pollak, with whom Kafka was in regular contact, had long championed Czech art and Czech artists both at home and abroad. Through Max Brod, for example, Kafka knew the composers Leoš Janáček⁷⁸ and Josef Suk,⁷⁹ as well as the Langer brothers. And it was probably because his friends had translated a number of Czech works that Kafka had in his possession German editions of Petr Bezruč, Fráňa Šrámek and, in all likelihood, Otokar Březina.

ANTHOLOGY

In his monograph on German translations of Czech poetry, Nezdařil notes the special position occupied by anthologies of modern Czech poetry to which Prague German writers had also contributed.80 The most relevant of these with regard to Kafka is the first, published by Franz Pfemfert (1879–1954) in Berlin in 1916 under the title Jüngste tschechische Lyrik. Eine Anthologie (Recent Czech Poetry. An Anthology), which Pfemfert sees as ‘a political act binding peoples together’. Besides works by Bezruč and Březina, who were of particular interest to the Cafe Arco group, the anthology also contained texts by Petr Křička,⁸¹ Stanislav Kostka Neumann, Josef Kodíček, Ervín Taussig, Stanislav Hanuš and Richard Weiner. Among others represented in the volume were Karel Hlaváček, Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, Otokar Fischer, Josef Svatopluk Machar, Antonín Sova and Fráňa Šrámek.

Included in this colourful company were vitalists (Křička, Šrámek), anarchists (Neumann, Šrámek, Karel Toman), and the writers of the Moderní revue circle (Hlaváček, Karásek, Theer), to whom we shall return later. There also appeared works in Czech by Jewish authors, such as Weiner, Taussig, Kodíček and Fischer. Classic Czech modernism was represented by Březina and Sova, as well as Machar and Bezruč. The translations were by Otto Pick, Rudolf Fuchs, Paul Eisner, Emil Saudek, Ernst Pollak and Jan V. Löwenbach.

Binder believes that Kafka not only knew this anthology,⁸² but actually helped Rudolf Fuchs translate a number of the poets into German (Bezruč, Hlaváček, Dyk, Kodíček, Křička, Neumann, Sova, Taussig and Theer), an assertion supported among other things by Kafka’s recommendation of Rudolf Fuchs to Martin Buber after they met in Vienna in 1917.⁸³ For Binder the clue is a note that Kafka posted to Fuchs on 18 August 1916,⁸⁴ in which he apologises for a delay in sending a manuscript to Otto Pick, who at the time was acting as co-ordinating editor for the anthology.

A few years later, in June 1921, Otto Pick (who had recently joined the editorial board of the state-run Prager Presse) published a volume entitled Tschechische Erzähler (Czech Storytellers)85 that included among others Karel Čapek. He and his brother Josef, who was for a while a member of a group of artists known as the Skupina výtvarných umělců that cultivated dialogue with Prague German artists, had already established links with the Czech avant garde at the time of publication of the verse anthology.⁸⁶ But Otto Pick and his circle were not alone in their endeavours. As early as in 1917 Paul Eisner had published a Tschechische Anthologie. Vrchlický – Sova – Březina (Czech Anthology. Vrchlický – Sova – Březina) as the twenty-first volume in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Österreichische Bibliothek (Austrian Library) series.⁸⁷

There can be no doubt that Kafka knew the anthology Jüngste tschechische Lyrik, on which so many of his friends and acquaintances had worked. We will come across many of these names in connection with Kafka later, mostly in allusions that, the names being well-known to all concerned, required no further explanation.

OTOKAR BŘEZINA

In 1923 Kafka received a copy of Musik der Quellen by Otokar Březina (1868–1929) direct from its Leipzig publisher Kurt Wolff, as we know from a letter dated 18 October.⁸⁸ The title of the newly-published volume was taken from a collection of essays, Hudba pramenů (Music of the Springs). The German translator was Emil Saudek, on the basis of whose literal version Franz Werfel recreated the poems in verse. Yet Kafka must surely have encountered Březina’s work long before that, at the very least in Pfemfert’s Die Aktion or in the Prague press.⁸⁹ In the almanac Vom jüngsten Tag,90 published by Wolff in 1917, Kafka underlined in red a number of names – Max Brod, Carl Sternheim, Franz Werfel and others on the Neue Bücher junger Dichter (New Books by Young Poets) list – as well as Otokar Březina’s Hymnen (Hymns), first brought out by Wolff in 1913 in a translation by his friend Otto Pick. On page 252 of the same almanac we find Březina’s 1897 poem Gebet für Feinde (Prayer for Enemies) in a verse translation by Albert Ehrenstein. It is clear that Březina’s works – as can be seen in Werfel’s preface to the German edition of Bezruč’s Slezské písně (Songs of Silesia),⁹¹ or Hermann Bahr’s foreword to the German edition of Šrámek’s poems, which appeared under the title Flammen (Flames)⁹² – formed a self-evident part of the cultural landscape not only for the ‘Arconauts’ (and thus for Franz Kafka), but also for the authors of Austrian and German modernism – witness the activities of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Bahr and Franz Pfemfert.

This is because much of Otokar Březina’s work was translated soon after its appearance. A bibliophile edition of his Hände (after the Czech title Ruce – Hands) had been produced by the Vienna publisher Moritz Frisch in 1908, in a translation by Emil Saudek (1876–1941), with ‘book decoration’ and four illustrations by František Bílek. After Březina’s Hymnen, Kurt Wolff published, in Munich, Baumeister am Tempel (1920, The Temple Builders; in the Czech original Stavitelé chrámu) translated by Otto Pick, and in the same year, also in Munich, the collection Winde von Mittag nach Mitternacht (Winds from Noon to Midnight; original Czech title Větry od póĺů, literally, ‘Winds from the [N and S] Poles’), in translations by Emil Saudek and Franz Werfel.⁹³ In 1923 Wolff brought out Musik der Quellen (as we noted above), this time in Leipzig, also translated by Saudek and Werfel. Translations of Březina in Kafka’s day were not hard to find: apart from the almanac Vom jüngsten Tag (From Judgment Day, 1917) and a number of newspapers and periodicals, they also appeared in Paul Eisner’s Tschechische Anthologie (Czech Anthology, 1917), and could be heard, for example, at a literary evening held at the Mozarteum in Prague on 29 March 1920.⁹⁴ In view of his trip to Meran it is unlikely that Kafka attended that particular event; but over the years he had plenty of opportunities – some of them positively documented – to become acquainted with Březina’s work.

FRÁŇA ŠRÁMEK

One of the books in Kafka’s library was Otto Pick’s German translation of Šrámek’s Flammen (Flames, original title Plameny),95 which we have already referred to. It was published in Leipzig in 1913 in the last days of the first Rowohlt Verlag, with a foreword by Hermann Bahr. In the same year there appeared Erwachen (Awakening / Probuzení); in 1920, Der silberne Wind (Silver Wind / Stříbrný vítr); and in 1921 Sommer (Summer / Léto) – all in translations by Pick. Kafka was probably also familiar with Šrámek’s work from Pfemfert’s anthology Jüngste tschechische Lyrik (1916). Here, too, the translator was Otto Pick, who in 1927, three years after Kafka’s death, compiled his own collection called Wanderer in den Frühling (Strolling into Spring). It was published by František Khol (1877–1930), with whom Kafka was in contact – certainly in 1913–14.⁹⁶ Khol was chief librarian at the National Museum from 1904 to 1915, then dramaturg at the National Theatre until 1925. Kafka is likely to have also known Šrámek’s texts in the Czech original – one identified by Born is Splav (The Floodgate).⁹⁷

Kafka almost certainly knew Šrámek personally, either through their mutual friend Otto Pick or through Max Brod, as certain diary entries indicate: ‘At Fr.’s with Max’,⁹⁸ ‘Yesterday Fráňa’.⁹⁹ This form of the name František is sufficiently unusual – added to the known fact of Šrámek’s contacts with Prague’s German writers – to justify the assumption that these meetings were indeed with the Czech poet.

For the German intellectuals Fráňa Šrámek embodied the general mood of anarchist, pacifist protest. Together with Stanislav Kostka Neumann, Antonín Sova and Karel Teige, he initiated the establishment of a ‘socialist council of intellectual workers’ on 6 July 1919,¹⁰⁰ and in a proclamation published in two languages in the periodical Červen (June, in Czech literally the ‘Red Time’), they called on their German colleagues to join them. Some, such as Hugo Sonnenschein, Franz Werfel and Albert Ehrenstein, actually heeded the call. On 20 March 1920, at a socialist protest evening at the Mozarteum organised by Otto Pick, there were readings from Max Brod, Oskar Baum, H. G. Scholz, Otto Pick, Johannes Urzidil and Fráňa Šrámek.101 Šrámek was also on the program at a second literary evening on 29 March 1920, when works by Bezruč, Březina, Dyk, Machar, Sova and Karel Čapek were also presented.¹⁰² And on 28 May an ‘Abend sozialer Lyrik’ (An evening of social poetry) again included texts by Šrámek, as well as Weiß, Trakl, Werfel and Hasenclever.¹⁰³

While Kafka’s acquaintance with Šrámek, both literary and personal, is well documented for the latter years of his life, it is doubtful whether they met in the years around 1910 in the anarchist circles mentioned by Max Brod, which will be discussed below.¹⁰⁴

PETR BEZRUČ

Another book in Kafka’s library was the first volume of Schlesische Lieder (Songs of Silesia) by Petr Bezruč (1867–1958), published in 1917 in a translation by Rudolf Fuchs and with a foreword by Franz Werfel. (The second volume did not appear until 1926.) Eva Brod, in a letter to Kafka dated 20 December 1917,¹⁰⁵ mentions the book in a way that presupposes his prior knowledge of it,¹⁰⁶ as this particular German edition had enjoyed unexpected success. Fuchs’s first translation of Bezruč had appeared in 1912 in Herder-Blätter, a Prague journal in which Kafka himself published.¹⁰⁷ We may assume that Kafka was also aware of other Czech writers working and publishing in the same environment, especially since their translators were people he knew well.

As the case of these three writers (Březina, Šrámek and Bezruč) shows, Kafka’s acquaintance with Czech literature was by no means limited to a few isolated modern authors viewed without context. Rather, his was a deeper, broader understanding, originating in his school years, then fostered and nurtured in the specific context of the Prague intellectual community.

In this Kafka was no exception. Werfel, for instance, the author of Das Reich Gottes in Böhmen (The Kingdom of God in Bohemia, 1930)108, attempts in his foreword to the German edition of Bezruč’s Songs of Silesia to invoke the ‘creative tradition’ of Czech culture by naming, in the same breath, Chelčický, Comenius and Březina:

 

But compare the titles that the author of ‘Orbis pictus’ gave his books with those of Březina; ‘The Centre of Safety’, ‘The Paradise of the Heart’ and ‘The Mournful’ is what Comenius called three of his works; in another, in a strange and mystical architecture, he attempted to construct a ‘Pansophia’ based on the ground plan of the temple of Solomon. Now consider Březina’s titles: ‘The Temple Builder’, ‘Winds from both Poles’. Does one not feel in these chance features the deep, slow, full tolling of the same blood? – Again it must be stressed that Hussitism is not a negative; it is not a nationalistic revolt that sprang from a hatred of Germans: it is the holy urge of an entire nation towards return and rebirth.¹⁰⁹

 

Whereas the Leipzig censors failed to pick up these words, their colleagues in wartime Prague and Vienna were sharper-eyed. For the reference to Herder, who saw in Jan Hus and Hussitism the spark that ignited the Reformation, could be seen as implying that the same spark had leapt to Masaryk’s Česká otázka (The Czech Question) and thence might equally inflame his readers, so that the book was almost certain to be banned. Masaryk, it must be remembered, believed that the same spark had ignited not only the Reformation but the Czech national revival itself, helping to bring to an end the so-called Dark Age¹¹⁰ and providing, so he thought (as had Palacký before him), a constant axis of meaning running through Czech history. It was this axis that he invoked in his proclamation ‘Independent Bohemia’, issued in 1915 on the anniversary of Hus’s burning at the stake in Constance, at a time when he himself had been branded a war enemy and sentenced to death in absentio for high treason. This ‘enemy’ had won the trust of Werfel and the other ‘Arconauts’ before 1918.¹¹¹

THE LANGER BROTHERS

Kafka’s contacts with Jiří (Georg) Mordechai Langer (1894–1943), who had attended the same grammar school as Alfred Fuchs and was on friendly terms with him, began in 1915 on Langer’s return from Galicia: ‘with Max and Langer on Saturday at the Wonder-rabbi’s’.112 Their acquaintance (it was Brod, Langer’s cousin, who had brought them together) soon grew closer on account of their shared interest in religion. They studied and practised Hebrew together;¹¹³ Kafka wrote in his diary about ‘Langer’s stories’.¹¹⁴ This is echoed in Langer’s Hebrew poem ‘On the death of the poet Franz Kafka’, most likely written in 1924, but at the latest in 1929.¹¹⁵ Their exchanges probably covered a wide range of intellectual topics:

 

With Langer: he will only be able to read Max’s book thirteen days from now. He could have read it on Christmas Day – according to an old custom you are not allowed to read Torah at Christmas (one rabbi made a practice of cutting up his year’s supply of toilet paper on that evening) but this year Christmas fell on Saturday.¹¹⁶

 

The last trace of Georg Langer, whom Brod (and Kafka) wished but were unable to help in his work,¹¹⁷ is a diary entry on 20 October 1921: ‘In the afternoon Langer, then Max, who read Franzi aloud’.¹¹⁸ However, Langer’s poem suggests that their friendship lasted until Kafka’s death.

František Langer (1888–1965), George’s brother, also appears to have been in regular contact with Kafka, who asked the Leipzig publisher Kurt Wolff to send his friend a review copy of Betrachtung (Contemplation). In a letter of 22 April 1914, František Langer, then editor of Umělecký měsíčník (Art Monthly) tells Kafka of his intention to ‘publish a few translations from the book’.119 The project came to nothing as the periodical was closed down in the same year; but in 1913 Langer had mentioned Kafka twice in its pages. Discussing the Der jüngste Tag series, he particularly appreciates Kafka’s fragment ‘The Stoker’, published in May 1913.¹²⁰

Langer also recalled, in a 1964 television interview, receiving from Kafka a copy of The Metamorphosis and giving him his own book Zlatá Venuše (Golden Venus).¹²¹ Brod even sees parallels between Langer’s drama Periferie (The Periphery) and Kafka’s The Trial.¹²² Although Langer recalls attending meetings at the Arco coffee house (Otto Pick translated both his and Čapek’s stage works), he claims to have had only a poor command of German.¹²³ Whether he and Kafka discussed their literary interests in Czech, however, we will probably never know.

MODERNÍ REVUE

If Otokar Březina, who owed his literary and social success to his publications in the Moderní revue at the turn of the century, was as significant an influence on the Prague German writers as has been claimed, we must give careful but cautious consideration to Hugo Siebenschein’s controversial remark that ‘Kafka and his closest friends enjoyed cordial relations with Arnošt Procházka and the poets associated with the Moderní revue (Modern Revue)’.¹²⁴ This comment has not been discussed by German Kafka scholars, or if so its significance has been played down on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Kafka may or may not, they say, have been acquainted with the Moderní revue writers.¹²⁵

In the light of references in Kafka’s letters and diaries, however, and the books in his library, there is not the slightest reason to doubt the truth of Siebenschein’s observation. Consider the diary entry of 6 November 1910126 in which Kafka mentions Paul Claudel (1868–1955), who from 1909 to 1911 was consul general in Prague. The French poet and playwright was well known among the young German intelligentsia¹²⁷ and was a personal friend of Miloš Marten (1883–1917), who dedicated his dialogue Nad městem (Above the City, 1915) to Claudel.¹²⁸ In the years around 1910 Miloš Marten (along with Arnošt Procházka and Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic) was a leading light in the Moderní revue. The diary entry, added to what we know about Marten, indicates that in all likelihood Kafka moved in the same intellectual circles as the Moderní revue writers.

That Kafka knew Claudel is evident from a brief reference in a letter dated 19 July 1920 to Milena Jesenská, who at the time was translating Claudel’s essay ‘Arthur Rimbaud’.¹²⁹ Of course Kafka’s main interest was in Milena herself, but the phrase ‘this was exactly what’ suggests that he was far from indifferent to Claudel:

 

Back then I read Claudel’s essay immediately, but just once and too quickly; my enthusiasm, however, was neither directed at Claudel nor at Rimbaud. I didn’t want to write about it until after I had read it a second time, nonetheless I was very glad this was exactly what you chose to translate. Is it complete?¹³⁰

 

This is not the only time Kafka mentions the Moderní revue. Most significantly, he alludes to it in a letter to Brod,¹³¹ where he quotes from the Czech newspaper Čas:

 

Her pure, clear, emotional little voice did indeed sound pleasant.¹³²

 

The line quoted by Kafka refers to the actress in the title role of Milá sedmi loupežníků (Sweetheart of Seven Thieves) by Viktor Dyk, in whose honour a literary evening was held on 11 March 1910 for invited guests – although Kafka can hardly have been among them. Sybil Smolová was by all accounts a remarkable young lady; of interest here, however, is the fact that both Brod and Kafka knew her by name and knew her as an actress (Kafka refers to her as ‘die Smolová’133), just as they were familiar with Viktor Dyk and his literary circle. Kafka takes Dyk’s part, for example, by distancing himself from a biassed review:

 

And that after they have already heaped praise on the predictable filth of the rest of the evening.¹³⁴

 

This is interesting for two reasons. First, Viktor Dyk (1877–1931) had belonged to the exclusive Moderní revue circle in the early years of the century (also using the pseudonyms Peterka and R. Vilde); his debut as a playwright was with the ‘Intimate Free Stage’ group, whose leading members were closely involved with the Moderní revue circle. Second, the actress Sybil Smolová (?1886–1972, baptized Anneta Smolová) made her stage debut on 15 February 1910 in the dramatic poem Apollonius z Tyany (Apollonius of Tyana) by Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, that is to say only a month or so before the literary evening alluded to in Kafka’s letter. She was nevertheless not unknown to Kafka and Brod despite the fact that her debut took place in the exclusive circle of the Moderní revue, which after a long hiatus resumed its public program with that very performance.

The dramatic poem Apollonius z Tyany ‘was first performed by students of the drama section of the Vinohrady Academicians in Prague. They decided to put on a series of “literary profile” evenings devoted to modern Czech writers. The first of these took place on 15 February in the large auditorium of the National House in Royal Vinohrady and was dedicated to Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic.’¹³⁵ A short introduction by Miloš Marten preceded the performance. The house was full, although apart from the invited critics and playwrights (among them Gabriela Preissová) the audience consisted mostly of ‘kindred spirits’.¹³⁶ These ‘soirées d’auteurs’ put on by the Moderní revue were by their very nature exclusive (though on this occasion the independent reviews were not entirely kind.)137

Another literary evening was held on 2 March 1910. But according to Přehled and Čas, Smolová performed neither there nor anywhere else. Thus her second stage appearance was probably not until the literary evening devoted to Viktor Dyk mentioned above. Yet even before that performance – which Kafka could not have attended – the name Smolová meant something to both him and Brod. The only explanation seems to be that, thanks to Brod’s contacts in the theatre, they did indeed see Smolová’s first stage performance; either that, or she caused such a sensation that she was copiously discussed in their circle of friends. That circle, however, must have included people sympathetic to, or at least knowledgeable about, the events put on by Moderní revue, which were accessible mostly by invitation only. A likely candidate here would be Otto Pick, Dyk’s translator, who was in regular written and personal contact with the playwright.¹³⁸ Here it may be worth noting that from February 1909 Max Brod worked for the Post Office Directorate in Prague,¹³⁹ where Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic was also employed.

The second hypothesis regarding how Kafka ‘knew’ Smolová seems the more likely. By all accounts she made a powerful impression: Miloš Marten, who met her at the premiere of Apollonius z Tyany and is credited with inventing her stage name Sybil, dedicated not only his short story Cortigiana to her, but notably the novella collection Dravci (Predators), subtitled Rozhovor jedné noci (Conversation of One Night). František Zavřel (1879–1915) was also struck by her, recommending her to Max Reinhardt, whom he had met in Berlin, and accompanying her thither. When Smolová absconded to Munich, Zavřel went after her and, far from persuading her to return to Berlin, urged her to go to Paris. Others, such as Václav Tille, Karel Hugo Hilar and Max Brod (who corresponded with Smolová), hoped to win her for the Prague stage,¹⁴⁰ but by now she was making a career in film in Berlin. Yet however strong the impression she had made at her staged reading, only a handful of people – at least some of whom had been in the audience that evening – can have heard of and talked about the young actress at that time. The critics’ reaction to her first public performance had on the whole been positive, though it was hardly mindless adulation.141 Brod was more enthusiastic in his recollections, declaring he and Kafka ‘loved her’.¹⁴²

These were not the only contacts Kafka had with the Moderní revue circle. Another admirer of Sybil Smolová was Arnošt Dvořák (1881–1933), who dedicated several of his plays to her. He had at one point also been associated with the Moderní revue, as well as with Nový kult. His historical drama Král Václav IV (King Wenceslas IV, 1910; first performance 1911), often described as a ‘crowd drama’, was produced in Leipzig in 1914 as Der Volkskönig (The People’s King) in a translation by Brod, and in Prague at the Vinohrady Municipal Theatre, directed by František Zavřel. Kafka certainly knew the play, at least as a text, as he mentions it in a letter to Brod on 7 August 1920.¹⁴³ Moreover, Zavřel’s fellow-editor on the theatre periodical Scéna in 1913–14, Arnošt Dvořák, was the translator of Werfel’s Bocksgesang (Goat Song), published in Czech (Kozlí zpěv) in 1923, and of Chekhov’s story ‘On the road’ (Czech: Na velké cestě), which was published by Staša Jílovská, a friend of Milena Jesenská, in 1920. Kafka refers to this book in a letter to Jesenská.¹⁴⁴

This brought the Jesenská connection full circle, since Milena’s aunt Růžena Jesenská, whose articles Kafka read,¹⁴⁵ had also been close to the Moderní revue circle in the early years of the century.¹⁴⁶

Siebenschein’s assertion about Kafka’s contacts with the Moderní revue seems very plausible, bearing in mind that the journal not only brought important European writers to the notice of Czech readers, but also devoted considerable space to Prague German literature and culture. Thus we see in Moderní revue the publication in German of Rilke’s poem Der Kirchhof; and in the closely affiliated periodical and later publishing house Symposion (which counted among its contributors Hugo Kosterka, Arnošt Procházka and Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic), Leppin’s Die Thüren des Lebens (The Doors of Life, Prague 1901), also in German, as part of their ‘Deutsche Serie’ (German Serie).¹⁴⁷ It is significant that at a time of growing nationalism a Czech literary periodical should choose to publish in German, thus breaking a major cultural taboo. It shows, at least in the case of the Moderní revue, that the boundaries of language and culture in Prague were not only porous but fluid. Siebenschein’s perceived influence of Arnošt Procházka, however, is less apparent. A close study of the Moderní revue writers may reveal certain parallels in terms of motif; but the nature of Kafka’s writing is far removed from theirs.

THE LEFT AND MILENA JESENSKÁ

The widely held conviction that Kafka was particularly close to the Czech political left stems largely from the fact that during his lifetime Milena Jesenská’s translations of his stories appeared in left-wing periodicals such as Kmen, Tribuna and Cesta.148 Other translations, by Milena Illová, were published in the social-democrat Právo lidu.¹⁴⁹ The Czech left-wing press also carried appreciations of Kafka’s work (Stanislav Kostka Neumann in Kmen¹⁵⁰ and Rudé právo¹⁵¹), as well as his obituary (in Komunistická revue¹⁵²). Various ‘testimonials’ (see Mareš, Janouch, Kácha) that he had contacts with Czech anarchists and attended their meetings for about a year, starting in October 1909, also played a part in accentuating Kafka’s leftist sympathies. Yet despite the undisputed interest in Kafka’s work shown by the Czech left in the early 20^th century,¹⁵³ which was partly connected with his translator Milena Jesenská and with the socialist convictions of some of the people he knew (the Café Herrenhof group,¹⁵⁴ Max Brod,¹⁵⁵ Otto Pick), it is debatable, to say the least, whether Kafka had any active contact with Czech anarchists in the years around 1910.

Prochazka, and later Binder, argue against any such involvement.156 First there is the fact that at about that time Kafka became the co-founder of an asbestos factory, and any contact with anarchist elements would have been in stark contradiction to his social position. Yet there is no mention of any conflict in his diary (which at the time he kept quite assiduously), an omission that would have been inconceivable, or at least very surprising, given what we know of Kafka’s personality. It would have been equally surprising for Max Brod not to know anything of such contacts, as he was very close to Kafka at that time. Later Brod was to write of his association with Michal Kácha (1874–1940):

 

With another group of Czechs seated at the table in this big inn room sat another German guest, who looked very thin, and very young, although he was apparently over thirty. He didn’t utter a word the whole evening, only looked on attentively with his great grey gleaming eyes, which stood out in strange contrast to his brown face under his thick coal-black hair. It was Franz Kafka the writer. He often came and attended this gathering quite peacefully. Kácha liked him, and called him a ‘kliďas’, that is, a ‘close-mouth’.¹⁵⁷

 

We may ask whether Kácha would really have liked such a listener, who could easily have been mistaken for a secret policeman. It is also surprising that the police, who had disbanded the Klub mladých in October 1910, were never alerted to Kafka by any of their informants. On the contrary, when he was setting up the asbestos factory they issued him with a certificate of no criminal record; and on more than one occasion during the war they provided him with a passport.¹⁵⁸

Prochazka and Binder have already found a number of inconsistencies in various ‘eyewitness’ accounts – all published at a later date – by Michal Mareš (1946), Gustav Janouch (1951), Michal Kácha, and Max Brod (1938/1954, 3^rd edition) – which tend to compromise their reliability. For instance, Kafka cannot possibly have known František Gellner, Karel Toman, Fráňa Šrámek, Stanislav Kostka Neumann, Michal Mareš and Jaroslav Hašek from his attendance at the Club, as Brod later claimed.159 Gellner lived in Munich from 1905–1908, and then in Paris; Toman, in his 1906 volume Melancholická pouť (Melancholy Pilgrimage), was already distancing himself from anarchism; and Šrámek and Kafka were yet to meet. Neumann, who left Prague in 1904 and from 1905 lived in Řečkovice and later at Bílovice near Brno, was familiar with Kafka’s name through Milena Jesenská but does not recall meeting him in that period. Hašek turned away from anarchism in 1907 and in 1910 married the eminently respectable Jarmila Mayerová.¹⁶⁰ In any case it is unlikely that Kafka knew Hašek personally, either then or at a later date. František Langer, who knew Kafka and attended the anarchist events and election meetings of Hašek’s quasi-illegal Progress Party (Strana pokroku) where Kafka is alleged to have met the future creator of Švejk, does not remember ever seeing Kafka there.¹⁶¹ Michal Mareš (1893–1971), whose Czech book Policejní šťára (A Police Raid) Kafka praised¹⁶² and whom Kafka himself discounted as a witness of any import,¹⁶³ could not have been a member of the Club by reason of his age. In the case of Gustav Janouch (1903–1968) we should ask ourselves whether Kafka, given his critical attitude towards Janouch,¹⁶⁴ would have shared with him such private and for him as a public servant incriminating information regarding his (alleged) anarchist past. All this would seem to rule out any affinity or acquaintance between Kafka and the Czech anarchists.

Solid evidence of Kafka’s links with the Czech Left can thus be found only among those who translated him and wrote about him. The search for that reception takes us, via Ernst Pollak, to Milena Jesenská, whose translations of Kafka appeared in the left-wing press partly because that is where her political sympathies¹⁶⁵ and those of her husband and his circle lay, and partly because of the cosmopolitan outlook of the intellectual left.

Kafka’s reception among Czechs has been repeatedly and thoroughly examined elsewhere,¹⁶⁶ and is not the subject of this study. But we cannot completely ignore the first Czech reactions to his writings. We know from his correspondence with Milena and Ottla that Kafka followed Milena’s work with keen (if not entirely regular) interest,167 so we may assume he was familiar with the contents of at least those issues of the Czech periodicals in which her translations and reviews appeared. Those publications were all left-leaning. First among them was Kmen (1917–1922), which was edited by Stanislav Kostka Neumann from 1919 until its amalgamation with Červen¹⁶⁸ (1918–1921) – also an important source for Kafka. Červen’s place was filled by Proletkult (1922–1924).¹⁶⁹ It was in these magazines that he came across ‘the first good original piece’, making a note of its author Vladislav Vančura (1891–1942) and mentioning him in a letter to Milena Jesenská.¹⁷⁰ From Kafka’s letters to Milena it is also abundantly clear that he read the newspapers and magazines she published in very carefully, noticing even a short piece like ‘Židé a komunism’ (Jews and Communism) containing an attack on his ex-classmate Rudolf Illový, which he cites in a letter to Milena.¹⁷¹

Thus in issue No. 23 of Kmen (19 August 1920), in which the first instalment of Jesenská’s translation of a study of Hölderlin by Gustav Landauer appeared, Kafka could also read Vančura’s ‘Vzpomeň si na něco veselého!’ (Remember something cheerful!), as well as texts by Josef Hora, Čestmír Jeřábek, Ivan Kastner and František Němec; in Kmen No. 24 (26 August 1920) there were pieces by Jindřich Hořejší, Zdeňek Kalista, Eduard Kučera and Albert Gleizes on dadaism; and in Kmen No. 25 (2 September 1920) texts by Tolstoy (‘Cizinec a mužik’, Jesenská’s translation of ‘The stranger and the peasant’), Zdeněk Kalista again, Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, and others; and in No. 26 (9 September 1920), besides Jesenská’s translations of his own stories, he would have found Franz Werfel, Max Krell, Ivan Kastner and Miloš Jirko. In this way, through reading articles, new prose and reviews, Kafka got to know many Czech avant-garde writers and artists, in a context where his own works were presented for the first time in a language other than German alongside texts by Franz Werfel, Hugo Sonnenschein and others.

The name of Karel Čapek also appears in Kafka for the first time in connection with Milena Jesenská, when he sends her a ‘little volume’ (‘Bändchen’) she has asked for172. But he must certainly have come across him before that, if only because Čapek had been involved as an editor in the Jüngste tschechische Lyrik anthology of 1916, which was discussed above. He was another Czech writer who was translated into German relatively quickly – his Der Räuber (Loupežník; The Robber) was given a public reading in German at the Mozarteum on 29 March 1920.¹⁷³ Not only was Čapek represented in the compendium Tschechische Erzähler (Czech Storytellers, 1921), edited by Otto Pick; his drama R.U.R. appeared in instalments in the Prager Presse in a German version entitled W.U.R., translated by Otto Pick, who also worked on the newspaper.¹⁷⁴ Although at the time of the Mozarteum reading Kafka was in Matliary in the Tatra Mountains, he can hardly have failed to notice a writer who had established himself so successfully in his own immediate intellectual circle. The correspondence with Milena Jesenská provides tangible evidence for a fact that even without her would be evident enough: Kafka had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Czech literature, which he acquired through the medium of the Czech language.

FLORIAN AND OPUS BONUM

Given the early reception of Kafka’s work it may come as a surprise to learn that the first Czech (and first foreign-language) book edition of his fiction was published by a group associated with the Catholic reformer Josef Florian (1873–1941), based at Stará Říše in South Moravia. Kafka may have been interesting for this group in the course of his perennial search for moral and spiritual truth. As to who brought Florian and Kafka together, the literature suggests several possible candidates.

Gustav Janouch claims it was he, thanks to his translation of Ein Traum (A Dream; Czech Sen), published as an introduction to Otto Coester’s six etchings for Proměna (The Metamorphosis; Stará Říše, 1929), who initiated the first Czech book edition of the novella.¹⁷⁵ In the same year one of its translators, Ludvík Vrána, also published translations of eighteen stories from Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor) and Betrachtung (Contemplation). Janouch also claims it was he who first made Kafka aware of Opus Bonum (in Czech Dobré dílo) by bringing him an anthology of French religious verse in Czech translation176 that had come out in the Nova et Vetera series.¹⁷⁷ It was Florian, on the other hand, who allegedly suggested that Janouch keep a record of his conversations with Kafka in the mid-1920s.¹⁷⁸

Yet Josef Florian and his collaborators seem to have preferred a more direct form of contact with their authors. Jakub Deml, at one point a member of Florian’s circle, was able to publish his authorized translation of Rilke’s Geschichten vom lieben Gott (Stories about God, 1900/1904; Czech edition Příběhy o Pánu Bohu, 1906) without any special mediation. In view of this, Jiří Olič’s notion that the proposal to translate Kafka,¹⁷⁹ as well as some of the funding, came from his ‘schoolmate’ Kamil Vaněk (1884–1964), would seem somewhat reckless. If there is any truth in it, then that ‘schoolmate’ must have been a relative of Zdenko Vaněk who, according to the class register of the German grammar school in Prague Old Town, was Czech, Catholic and born in 1881.¹⁸⁰ He was only in Kafka’s class in the penultimate eighth year, excelling only in the optional Czech lessons – which of course Kafka also attended.

It would seem, however, that no such mediation was necessary. Florian’s circle, which was by then well established in the Czech literary world and well known among the informed, certainly had need of sponsors, but not of agents. We know, for example, that Florian and his associates regularly read the Prager Tagblatt and cultivated personal contacts with its staff.¹⁸¹

Moreover, Josef Florian and Franz Kafka must have known of each other’s existence before 1920, which also speaks against the scenarios presented by Janouch and Olič. In a letter to Milena on 9 July 1920, Kafka mentions Rudolf Jílovský (husband of Milena’s friend Staša Jílovská¹⁸²) and his planned trip to Brno to visit Florian. In another letter a few days later, writing about the Lucerna palace, he recalls the Opus Bonum window display that had at one time been in the arcade there.¹⁸³ From this it is clear that he knew of Opus Bonum before 1920 – and not necessarily through Milena Jesenská and her friends.

One thing is certain: Kafka’s discovery of Josef Florian and his publishing and other activities did not happen in the way we have been made to believe. The reason is simple: on his walks around Prague Kafka kept his eyes open. When he spotted a display in the Lucerna arcade advertising Dobré dílo publications, his interest in the Czech cultural scene naturally made him commit the name to memory. The fact that from 1919 to 1922 a close friend of Milena Jesenská, Staša Jílovská, worked for Josef Florian as publisher and manager of his Prague office (she produced over twenty titles),184 explains Kafka’s increased interest in the group in around 1920.

If Josef Florian and his circle needed agents or mediators at all, then the most likely person in Kafka’s case was Staša Jílovská. As early as in 1919 she wrote to Florian offering him ‘a book by Franz Kafka, a German expressionist, the best, the translation of which someone is offering gratis’.¹⁸⁵ That ‘someone’ was most likely Milena Jesenská. But Florian had already heard the name Franz Kafka – he just hadn’t paid him much attention.¹⁸⁶ Then on 23 February 1920 he wrote to Jílovská asking her to send a book ‘by that Kafka’.¹⁸⁷ And in another letter on 19 November 1920 he ordered, among other titles, a copy of In the Penal Colony, adding the publishing details and price: ‘In der Strafkolonie. Erzählung. Kurt Wolff Verlag, München, 9 K 60’.¹⁸⁸ It was, moreover, the only German-language edition he asked for in that letter. Jílovská confirmed the order on 24 November with a promise to dispatch it in the next few days,¹⁸⁹ so we may assume he received it. This was the moment, it seems, when the foundations were laid for future translations and editions of Kafka: the translations by P. L. Vrána that appeared in Florian’s Archa (The Ark) in 1929, and the book edition of Proměna (The Metamorphosis) translated by Vrána and F. Pastor, also published at Stará Říše in 1929.¹⁹⁰ That publication in turn led to editions by Josef Portman in Litomyšl.¹⁹¹ It was there, in 1932, that excerpts from The Trial appeared in Gedeon (which called itself a ‘Revue en miniature for the spiritual life of the present and for the friends of Palestine’),¹⁹² one of whose contributors was Jakub Deml, a former close associate of Josef Florian.¹⁹³ Similarly, the publication in the magazine Středisko in 1932/33 of the poem ‘On the Death of a Poet: For Franz Kafka’, by Jiří Langer (who translated it from Hebrew into Czech), can be linked to Florian and his circle.194 Other Kafka editions by Catholic publishers go back to the same source.¹⁹⁵ But that would be another study altogether: Kafka as Reading and Myth.

PROOF-READING CZECH TRANSLATIONS

Kafka made a point of reading the Czech translations of his texts that were published in his own lifetime. A favourite (but by no means the only) piece of evidence for his ability to correct translations from German into Czech is his revision of Milena Jesenská’s version of ‘The Stoker’, which is noteworthy in the way it demonstrates an active as well as a passive knowledge of Czech:

 

Column I line 2 arm here also has the secondary meaning: pitiable, but without any special emphases of feeling, a sympathy without understanding that Karl has with his parents as well, perhaps ubozí

l 9 freie Lüfte is a little more grand, but there’s probably no alternative

l 17 z dobré nálady a poněvadž byl silný chlapec should be removed entirely.¹⁹⁶

 

Kafka is certainly right in saying that the Czech adjective ubohý (pitiable, miserable) is a closer semantic equivalent for the German arm in the first sentence of his text than chudý (poor). He explains why himself. The choice of the form ubozí (nominative plural), which refers to both parents, indicates that Kafka preferred the active verbal construction rather than the passive, that is, something like ‘whom his poor parents had sent to America’ rather than the passive ‘who had been sent to America by his poor parents’, where instrumental ubohými would be used in Czech.¹⁹⁷ Jesenská went for the second option, in other words for the more literal translation using the compound passive (the German is: der von seinen armen Eltern nach Amerika geschickt worden war¹⁹⁸), which is further removed from habitual Czech usage than what Kafka suggests, partly because compound passive forms (even taking aspect into account) are less common in Czech than in German199 and, at least here, would sound rather formal.

Kafka’s dissatisfaction with the phrase freie Lüfte is also perfectly understandable. Jesenská translates his und um ihre Gestalt wehten freie Lüfte (around her form the free breezes blew)²⁰⁰ as kolem její postavy vanul volný vzduch.²⁰¹ But since the ‘figure’ here is the Freiheitsgöttin (Goddess of Freedom), which Jesenská renders as socha Svobody (Statue of Liberty), it would seem that the most recent Czech translation of ‘The Stoker’ by Věra Koubová, who chooses the combination svobodné povětří / bohyně Svobody²⁰² (‘free breezes’ / ‘Godess of Freedom’), better expresses the abstract sense of the German frei in freie Lüfte, with its obvious echo of Freiheit, than Jesenská’s version.

Generally, Kafka’s comments all go to show that his passive command of Czech was excellent while also indicating a good active command. The last note in the passage cited above is not a comment on the translation but a correction of his own text, which he wants to shorten, and illustrates Kafka’s ability to work creatively on a Czech text:

 

„Ich bin doch fertig“, sagte Karl, ihn anlachend, und hob aus Übermut, und weil er ein starker Junge war, seinen Koffer auf die Achsel.²⁰³

„Ale vždyť jsem hotov,“ usmál se na něj Karel a z bujnosti a protože byl mladý a silný, zvedl kufr na rameno.²⁰⁴

‘I’m all ready,’ said Karl with a smile, and in his exuberance, and because he was a powerful youth, he swung his suitcase onto his shoulder.²⁰⁵

 

Further evidence of Kafka’s exceptional passive knowledge of Czech is his grasp of the subtle differences between Czech equivalents of the German Platz – místo (‘place’), but also náměstí (‘square’) – and of the use of the spatial prepositions v (in / in) and na (an, auf / at, on) in the Czech translation of his short story ‘The tradesman:²⁰⁶

 

Just so you see I was reading it for mistakes: instead of bolí uvnitř v čele a v spáncích – uvnitř na. . . or something like that – the thought is namely that just as claws can work on the forehead from the outside, this can also happen on the inside; potírajíce se means to become confused? To thwart one another? – Right after that, instead of volné místo, it might be better to say náměstí – pronásledujte jen, I don’t know whether nur is jen here, you see this nur is a Prague-Jewish nur, signifying a challenge like ‘go ahead and do it’ – the final words aren’t translated literally. You separate the maidservant from the man, whereas in German they merge.207

 

His reservations about the suitability of Jesenká’s potírajíce se (‘fighting each other’) for the German durcheinander gehen in the sentence Doch genießet die Aussicht des Fensters, wenn die Prozessionen aus allen drei Straßen kommen, einander nicht ausweichen, durcheinander gehn und zwischen ihren letzten Reihen den freien Platz wieder entstehen lassen (But enjoy yourselves there looking out of the window, see the processions converging at once, not giving way to each other and leaving the open space free again.)²⁰⁸ are aptly and adequately expressed in his suggestion of an alternative phrase: einander durchkreuzen? / kříží se navzájem? (lit. ‘cross [pass through] each other’).

His doubts about the use of jen (only) as a modal particle in the context Pronásledujte jen toho nenápadného muže²⁰⁹ for Verfolget nur den unscheinbaren Mann²¹⁰ (lit. ‘Only follow that inconspicuous-looking man’) are also justified, as the use of this particle (when it is used at all) requires a different word order in colloquial Czech than does the German nur, with jen at the beginning of the sentence, often followed by klidně (= German ruhig), as in Koubová’s translation of ‘The Stoker’: Jen klidně pronásledujte toho nenápadného muže!²¹¹ (roughly: ‘Go right ahead and follow that inconspicuous man’). The word order used by Jesenská is not impossible, but the effect is too formal for direct speech.

The final sentence of the passage quoted above also makes it clear that Jesenská’s translation (listed third below) contains some semantic inaccuracies, particularly in her rendering of the German während (while):

 

‘Dann muß ich aussteigen, den Aufzug hinunterlassen, an der Türglocke läuten, und das Mädchen öffnet die Tür, während ich grüße.’²¹²

 

‘Pak musím vystoupit, poslat výtah dolů, zazvonit u dveří, a služebná otvírá, zatímco já zdravím.’213 (literally: ‘Then I must get out, send the lift down, ring the doorbell, and the maid opens the door while I greet [her] [i.e. say Good evening].’)

 

Nyní musím vystoupiti, spustiti zdviž, zvoniti na zvonek u dveří; služka otvírá dveře a já vcházím.’²¹⁴ (literally: ‘Now I must get out, send the lift down, ring the doorbell; the maid opens the door and I enter.’)

 

In this context we should also mention Kafka’s reaction to another of Milena Jesenská’s translations, although in this quotation his linguistic knowledge can only be inferred:

 

The essay is much better than in German, although it still has some holes – or rather entering it is like entering a swamp, it’s so difficult having to pull out your foot at every step. Recently a reader of Tribuna conjectured that I must have done a lot of research in the lunatic asylum. ‘Only in my own’, I said, whereupon he still tried to make a compliment out of ‘my own lunatic asylum’. (There are 2 or 3 small misunderstandings in the translation. / I’m holding onto the translation for a little while.)²¹⁵

 

The editor of Kafka’s letters to Milena tells us the ‘essay’ in question was Gustav Landauer’s article on Hölderlin, which was ‘no easy reading even for Germans’ and consequently caused Jesenská some difficulties. This relatively long piece appeared in instalments in Kmen.²¹⁶ Demanding though the text may have been, Kafka was capable of making a critical evaluation of Jesenská’s translation and pointing out various mistakes, which he may have then discussed with her when they met in Gmünd on 14–15 August 1920.

But Kafka’s correspondence with Milena Jesenská provides evidence of his considerable knowledge of Czech not only in his comments on her translations and his ability to detect errors, including misprints, in Czech – as for example when he asks Milena what the word ‘pammatikální’ means (it should have read ‘gramatikální’ = ‘grammatical’).²¹⁷ Kafka also reads, cites and comments – mostly on the letters themselves, responding sensitively and considerately to Milena’s sometimes infelicitous formulations:

 

You write: ‘Ano máš pravdu, mám ho ráda. Ale F., i tebe mám ráda’ (Yes, you are right, I do love him. But F., I also love you) – I am reading this sentence very exactly, pausing in particular at the ‘also’ – it’s all correct. You would not be Milena if it weren’t correct and what would I be if you weren’t, and it’s also better that you write it from Vienna than say it in Prague. All this I perfectly understand, maybe better than you and yet out of some weakness I can’t get over the sentence, it reads endlessly, and finally I’m transcribing it here for you to see as well and for us to read together, temple to temple. (Your hair against my temple.)218

CONCLUSION

We may conclude that Kafka’s knowledge of Czech literature and culture should not be underestimated. That applies equally to the classics of the 19^th century, which Kafka was introduced to in his Czech lessons at school, and to contemporary literature, as besides regularly reading the Czech press he also kept himself well-informed about the Czech arts scene and was familiar even with non-mainstream groups such as Moderní revue and Dobré dílo. Yet his judgment of Czech literature and culture, insofar as it embodied the ideals of modernism, was based on aesthetic rather than national criteria. The Czech language, which allowed him to acquire an intimate knowledge of Czech culture, also became a means of access to other literatures and cultures. Finally, any description of Kafka’s knowledge of Czech would be incomplete without mentioning his ability to read and interpret Czech texts critically, often (in the case of translations) with reference to their German originals. With this capacity and skill he was able not only to evaluate translations from German into Czech and suggest corrections to Czech versions of his own texts, but also – as we saw in the case of translations by Max Brod (Jenufa) and Rudolf Fuchs – to revise texts translated from Czech into German.

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1 See Max Brod – Franz Kafka, Eine Freundschaft. Briefwechsel (A Friendship: Correspondence). Ed. by Malcolm Pasley. Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1989, pp. 13, 18, 44, 50, 89, 104, 121, 358, 394, and the list Kafka enclosed in a letter to Brod before he started attending Sauer’s lectures. For the scope of Kafka’s general reading see Jürgen Born, Kafkas Bibliothek. Ein beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Kafka’s Library: A Descriptive Index). Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1990; Hartmut Binder, Kafka-Handbuch in zwei Bänden (A Kafka Manual in two Volumes). Stuttgart: Kröner 1979; Manfred Engel, Dieter Lamping (eds), Franz Kafka und die Weltliteratur (Franz Kafka and World Literature). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2006; Monika Schmitz-Emans, Poetiken der Verwandlung (Poetics of Metamorphosis). Innsbruck, Vienna, Bozen: Studienverlag 2008.

2 See list of classes Kafka attended at university on p. 153 f. For more on Sauer see Steffen Höhne (ed.), August Sauer (1855–1926) – ein Intellektueller in Prag im Spannungsfeld von Kultur- und Wissenschaftspolitik (August Sauer: An Intellectual in Prague between Cultural and Scholarly Politics). Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau 2011.

3 For a more complete study see Herbert Blank, V Kafkově knihovně / In Kafkas Bibliothek (In Kafka’s Library). Prague: Nakladatelství Franze Kafky 2004.

4 For Kölwel and Hardt see Franz Kafka, Briefe an Felice und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit (Letters to Felice and other Correspondence from the Time of Engagement). Ed. by E. Heller and Jürgen Born. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1967, p. 748 and p. 573.

5 We know that in 1917–18 Max Brod sent Kafka copies of Die Aktion. See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, pp. 181, 185, 193, 206, 211, 221, 230, 233, 237, 490, 512 f. For Die Fackel see Kurt Krolop, Prager Autoren im Lichte der ‚Fackel’ (Prague Writers in the light of ‘Die Fackel’). In: Prager deutschsprachige Literatur zur Zeit Kafkas (Prague German-written Literature in Kafka’s Time). Ed. by Österreichische Franz-Kafka-Gesellschaft Wien-Klosterneuburg. Vienna: Braunmüller 1989, 92–117; for Der Artist, Der Anbruch, Donau and Das junge Deutschland see especially Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, pp. 487, 206, 219.

6 See reprint of Born’s article ‘Kafka als Leser’ (Kafka as reader) in Jürgen Born, „Daß zwei in mir kämpfen. . .“ und andere Aufsätze zu Franz Kafka (‘Two combatants at war within me . . .’ and Other Papers on Franz Kafka). Furth im Wald, Prague: Vitalis 2000, p. 147ff. See also Bert Nagel, Kafka und die Weltliteratur. Zusammenhänge und Wechselwirkungen (Kafka and World Literature: Contexts and Impacts). Munich: Winkler 1983.

7 See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 360.

8 See Hanns Zischler, Kafka geht ins Kino (Kafka Goes to the Cinema). Reinbek b. Hamburg: rowohlt 1996; Hartmut Binder, Wo Kafka und seine Freunde zu Gast waren. Prager Kaffeehäuser und Vergnügungsstätten in historischen Bilddokumenten (Where Kafka and his Friends met: Prague Cafés and Etablissements in Historical Pictorial Documents). Prague, Furth im Wald: Vitalis 2000. Měšťan mentions Kafka’s visits to the Czech cabaret in the Lucerna theatre, his apparent enthusiasm for the film Daddy Long Legs, which he saw in its Czech version Táta dlouhán, and his liking for Czech operetta. Kafka was certainly familiar with the Pištěk Theatre in Vinohrady. See Antonín Měšťan, Slované u Franze Kafky (Slavs in Franz Kafka’s oeuvre). In: Antonín Měšťan, Česká literatura mezi Němci a Slovany (Czech Literature between Germans and Slavs). Prague: Academia 2002, pp. 38–67, p. 50.

9 See correspondence with Max Brod and Felice Bauer. See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 189 et al., Kafka, Briefe an Felice et al. Also see Born, Kafkas Bibliothek.

10 Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 109ff. In this context we could also mention Kafka’s reading of Abraham Grünberg. See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, 172, p. 480 et al.

11 See Pierre Bourdieu, Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford University Press 1996.

12 Kafka’s library was not officially included in his estate. For documentation of the estate see Martin Svatoš, Písemná pozůstalost. Franz Kafka (1883–1924) (Written Remains: Franz Kafka). Prague: Literární archiv Památníku národního písemnictví 1984; Martin Svatoš, Pozůstalostní spis Franze Kafky (Documentation of remains of Franz Kafka). Documenta Pragensia 15 (1997), pp. 301–338.

13 František Kautman, Franz Kafka und die tschechische Literatur (Franz Kafka and Czech literature). In: Eduard Goldstücker – František Kautman – Paul Reimann (eds), Franz Kafka aus Prager Sicht 1963 (Franz Kafka from the Prague Perspective). Prague: ČSAV 1965, 44–77, here p. 49.

14 See also Peter Zusi, Kafka and Czech literature. In: Caroline Duttlinger (ed.), Kafka in Context. Cambridge UP, in print.

15 See Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 30 ff., 326.

16 Felix Weltsch to Franz Kafka, 5 October 1917. – See Franz Kafka, Briefe April 1914–1917 (Letters April 1914–1917). Ed. by Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 2005, p. 756.

17 See Franz Kafka, Briefe an Milena (Letters to Milena). Extended new edition. Ed. by Jürgen Born and Michael Müller. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1998, p. 277ff.

18 According to Gustav Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka. Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen (Conversations with Kafka. Notes and Memoirs). Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer [1968] 1981, p. 111.

19 Franz Kafka, Tagebücher (Diaries). Ed. by Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, Malcolm Pasley. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1990, p. 93.

20 See Nagel, Kafka und die Weltliteratur, p. 328.

21 Felix Weltsch to Franz Kafka, 5 October 1917. – See Kafka, Briefe April 1914–1917, p. 756. See also Milena Jesenská’s translation of Claudel.

22 See Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 93.

23 Also mentioned in Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 155.

24 For a list of sources contained in the University Library, Wuppertal, see Born, Kafkas Bibliothek.

25 See Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 9. For Goll, see also Franz Kafka to Ottla, 1 February 1919. – See Kafka, Briefe: April 1914–1917, p. 66.

26 German titles: Jaroslav Goll, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Böhmischen Brüder (Sources and Studies on the History of the Bohemian Brethren). Vol. 1: Der Verkehr der Brüder mit den Waldensern. – Wahl und Weihe der ersten Priester (The Brethren’s Contacts with the Waldensians – Election and Consecration of the First Priests). Prague 1878. Vol. 2: Peter Chelčický und seine Lehre (Peter Chelčický and his Doctrine). Prague 1882. [Reprint: Hildesheim/New York 1977.] – T. G. Masaryk, Der Selbstmord als sociale Massenerscheinung der modernen Civilisation (Suicide as Social Mass Phenomenon in Modern Civilization). Vienna 1881.

27 See also Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 153.

28 Kafka to Josef David, last week of January 1921. – See Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. New York: Schocken 1977, p. 258.

29 See Kafka, Briefe an Ottla und die Familie (Letters to Ottla and Family). Ed. by Hartmut Binder and Klaus Wagenbach. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1974, p. 102.

30 See Hartmut Binder, Kafkas Briefscherze (Kafka’s epistolary jokes). In: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 13 (1969), pp. 536–559, here p. 541.

31 See Kafka, Tagebücher, p. 424.

32 See Franz Kafka, Zur Frage der Gesetze und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß in der Fassung der Handschrift (On the Question of Laws and other Literary Remains based on the Handwritten Manuscripts). Ed. by Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1994, p. 45; Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 169, and Friedrich Thieberger, Kafka und die Thiebergers (Kafka and the Thiebergers). In: Hans-Gerd Koch (ed.), „Als Kafka mir entgegen kam. . .“ Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka (‘As Kafka approached me.’ Recollections of Franz Kafka). Berlin: Wagenbach 1995, pp. 121–127, here p. 125.

33 More see Manfred Engel – Bernd Auerochs (eds), Kafka-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (A Kafka Manual: Life – Oeuvre – Impact). Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler 2010, pp. 175–191.

34 See Franz Kafka, Briefe April 1914–1917. (Leters April 1914–1917) Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 2005, p. 756. The Czech editions of the titles referred to are probably: Paměti z let 1794–1820 by Anna Countess Potocká, translated from the French by Jiří Staněk, Prague: St. Sokol 1906; Janov – Slavkov –Jena – Jílov: Paměti, the memoirs of Marcellina de Marbot, translated from the French by Jiří Staněk, Prague: St. Sokol 1907; Madrid – Wagram – Torrès – Védras: Paměti, memoirs of Marcellina de Marbot, translated from the French by Jiří Staněk, Prague: St. Sokol 1908; Berezina – Lipsko – Waterloo: Paměti, memoirs of Marcellina de Marbot, translated from the French by Jiří Staněk, Prague: St. Sokol 1909; Zpověď – vlastní životopis od Františka knížete Rakocsyho, translated from the French by Adolf Gottwald, Prague: St. Sokol 1908; Politické úvahy by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, translated from the Russian by J. Skružný, Prague: St. Sokol 1907; Paměti by Marie Roland, translated from the French by Maryša Šárecká, Prague: St. Sokol 1909; Příhody a povahy by Nicolas Chamfort, translated from the French by K. Kovář, Prague: St. Sokol 1910; Život diplomatův: rozmanité obrazy z mé činnosti ve čtyřech dílech světa by Edward Malet, translated from the French by J. Skružný, Prague: St. Sokol 1910; Paměti pana de La Porte, prvého komořího Ludvíka XIV., translated from the French by Adolf Gottwald, Prague: St. Sokol 1909.

35 According to Max Brod, Franz Kafka. Eine Biographie (Franz Kafka: A Biography). Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1963, p. 19; see also Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 19.

36 Kafka to Max Brod, 30 July 1922. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 395.

37 Kafka to Max Brod, 30 July 1922. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 395.

38 Kafka to Max Brod, 30 July 1922. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 395.

39 Franz Kafka to Max Brod, 7 August 1922. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 401. For contemporary accounts of the Žižka monument around 1911, see Marie Halířová – Hana Larvová (eds), František Bílek (1872–1941). Prague: Národní galerie 2001, p. 212.

40 Franz Kafka to Max Brod, 20 July 1922, and Franz Kafka to Max Brod, 7 August 1922. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, pp. 390, 401. The Hus monument in Kolín bears the inscription ‘A tree struck by lightning, for all eternity burning’. See Halířová – Larvová, František Bílek, p. 103.

41 Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, p. 349.

42 Franz Kafka to Max Brod, 30 July 1922. – See Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, p. 347.

43 See Halířová – Larvová, František Bílek, p. 417. My assumption that Kafka saw this exhibition is based on the formulation of a reference to the ‘Moderne Galerie’ in his letter to Max Brod, 7 August 1922. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 401.

44 Diary, 5 June 1922. – See Kafka, Tagebücher, p. 922.

45 See Kafka, Tagebücher, p. 245.

46 Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská, mid-November 1920. – See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 291. Mikoláš Aleš (1852– 1913) was one of many artists who contributed to the decoration of the National Theatre, which in the late 19^th century represented not only the hub of Czech dramatic and musical culture but, with its depictions of real and imagined Czech history, a cultural and political symbol of Czech nationhood. Aleš also illustrated Jirásek’s Staré pověsti české (Old Czech Legends, 1894).

47 See Diary, 16 October 1911, 17 December 1911, and 21 January 1922. – See Kafka, Tagebücher, p. 93, 397 f., 883.

48 Franz Kafka to Max Brod, 12 July 1922. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 385.

49 Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910–1913. Edited by Max Brod and translated by Joseph Kresh. New York: Schocken 1948, p. 191 ff.

50 Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1913, p. 195, 201.

51 See esp. Vladimír Macura, Znamení zrodu: české národní obrození jako kulturní typ (Signs of Rebirth: Czech National Rebirth as Cultural Type). Jinočany: H & H 1995.

52 Antonín Truhlář, Výbor z literatury české. Doba nová (Anthology of Czech Literature: Modern Period). Vol. 1. Prague: Bursík and Kohout 1898, 3^th edition, p. 2.

53 See Truhlář, Výbor, p. 3.

54 Kafka, Tagebücher 1909–1912 in der Fassung der Handschrift (Diaries 1909–1912 Based on Handwritten Manuscripts). Ed. by Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1994, p. 56. Max Brod, too, repeatedly refers to Smetana’s opera – for the first time in a review in 1913. For more see Barbora Šrámková, Max Brod und seine tschechische Kultur (Max Brod and his Czech Culture). Wuppertal: Arco 2009.

55 Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1913, p. 193.

56 Truhlář, Výbor, p. 2, 3, 80.

57 ‘Small literatures’ or ‘literatures of small nations’ is a subject also discussed by Max Brod, Im Kampf um das Judentum. Politische Essays (In the Struggle for Jewishness: Political Essays). Vienna, Berlin: R. Löwit 1920, 104–113. For ‘small literatures’ see also Klaus Hermsdorf, Werfels und Kafkas Verhältnis zur tschechischen Literatur (Werfel’s and Kafka’s relation to Czech literature). Germanistica Pragensia 2 (1964), pp. 39–47 as well as Gilles Deleuze – Félix Guattari: Kafka: Pour une littérature minuere (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature). Paris: Les Édition de Minuit 1975, and reception of this approach.

58 See Kafka, Tagebücher, p. 312.

59 See Hans Dieter Zimmermann, Das Labyrinth der Welt: Kafka und Comenius (The Labyrinth of the World: Kafka and Comenius). In: Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers et al. (eds), Brücken nach Prag. Deutschsprachige Literatur im kulturellen Kontext der Donaumonarchie und der Tschechoslowakei (Bridges to Prague: German-written Literature in the Cultural Context of the Habsburg Monarchy and Czechoslovakia). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2000, pp. 309–319. The philosopher Karel Kosík made a similar observation in a 1963 article. See Karel Kosík, Století Markéty Samsové (Century of Markéta Samsa). Prague: Český spisovatel 1993.

60 See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 89.

61 Franz Kafka to Max Brod, 7 August 1922. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 401.

62 For more on Slavín, see Marek Nekula, Smrt a zmrtvýchvstání národa: Sen o Slavíně v české literatuře a kultuře (Death and Resurrection of a Nation: The Dream of the Slavín Pantheon in Czech Literature and Culture). Prague: Karolinum 2016.

63 See Anna Pouzarová, Als Erzieherin in der Familie Kafka (Governess in the Kafka family). In: Hans-Gerd Koch (ed.), „Als Kafka mir entgegen kam. . .“ Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka (‘As Kafka approached me.’ Recollections of Franz Kafka). Berlin: Wagenbach 1995, pp. 55–65, here p. 62.

64 See Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924. Ed. by Max Brod. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1958, p. 170. Probably the 3-volume ‘scandalous’ edition of Božena Němcová’s Correspondence, published between 1912 and 1920 in her Collected Works, which contains some letters of a very intimate nature. See also Jaroslava Janáčková, Alena Macurová et al., Řeč dopisů, řeč v dopisech Boženy Němcové (Language of Letters, Language in Božena Němcová’s Letters). Prague: ISV nakladatelství 2001.

65 See Kafka, Briefe an Ottla, p. 130.

66 Kafka to Milena Jesenská, 29 May 1920. – See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 22; Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena. Edited by Willi Haas. Translated by Tania and James Stern. New York: Schocken Books [1953] 1965, p. 35.

67 See e.g. Max Brod, The Castle: Its genesis. In: Angel Flores – Homer Swander (eds), Franz Kafka Today. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1958, pp. 161–164; and Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka. Eine Biographie seiner Jugend 1883–1912 (Franz Kafka: A Biography of his Youth 1883–1912). Bern: Francke 1958, as well as Hans Dieter Zimmermann, Franz Kafka liest Božena Němcová (Franz Kafka reads Božena Němcová). In: brücken – Germanistisches Jahrbuch N.F. 15 (2007), 182–192.

68 Kautman, Franz Kafka, p. 61.

69 Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1913, p. 181.

70 Diary, 17 December 1911. – See Kafka, Tagebücher, p. 298; Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1913, p. 180.

71 Kafka to Max Brod, 13 February 1918. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 236; Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 221; J. Vrchlický, Dopisy Jaroslava Vrchlického se Sofií Podlipskou z let 1875–1876 (Letters of Jaroslav Vrchlický and Sofie Podlipská) published by F. X. Šalda (Prague 1917). Gustav Janouch claims that Kafka read Vrchlický’s translation of Walt Whitman. See Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka, p. 185 f.

72 See e.g. Oskar Donath, Židé a židovství v české literatuře 19. a 20. století (Jews and Jewishness in the Czech Literature of the 19^th and 20^th century). 2 Vol. Brno: privately printed 1930.

73 See Brod, Franz Kafka, p. 91. Also Hartmut Binder, Kafka. Ein Leben in Prag. Munich: Mahnert-Lueg 1982, p. 119; Kautman, Franz Kafka, p. 51; Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka, pp. 127, 151, and in particular Franz Kafka to Max Brod, 10 March 1910, and Diary, 19 September 1917. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 72, and Kafka, Tagebücher, p. 424.

74 The magazines and newspapers Kafka knew, or at any rate mentioned, are as varied as the reasons he must have read them for: Cesta (Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 135), Čas (Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 73), Červen (Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 284), Česká stráž (Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 252), Česká svoboda (Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 252), Kmen (Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 8, 135, 228, 245, 277; Kafka, Briefe an Ottla, pp. 81, 87), Lidové noviny (Kafka, Briefe an Ottla, p. 118), Lípa (Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 135), Národní listy (Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 82, 305), Naše řeč (Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 78), Tribuna (Kafka, Briefe an Ottla, p. 102; Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 135, 172, 189, 193, 206, 212, 227, 246, 277, 304 f.), Večer (Kafka, Briefe an Ottla, p. 84), Venkov (Kafka, Briefe an Ottla, p. 107).

75 Franz Kafka to Ottla, 1 May 1920, and 21 May 1920. – See Kafka, Briefe an Ottla, p. 84 and 89.

76 See Bohumil Nuska – Jiří Pernes, Kafkův Proces a Švihova aféra (Kafka’s The Trial and the Šviha Affair). Prague: Barrister & Principal 2000.

77 See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 66.

78 Kafka read and corrected Brod’s translation of the libretto of Její pastorkyňa (Jenufa), as is apparent from their correspondence. See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, pp. 173, 174, 175, 177, 197, 201. Brod also forwarded to Kafka a letter from Janáček in Czech. For more on the role of Max Brod see Šrámková, Max Brod und seine tschechische Kultur.

79 Max Brod to Franz Kafka, 19 January 1921. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 305. Janouch also names Vítězslav Novák. – See Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka, p. 155.

80 Ladislav Nezdařil, Česká poezie v německých překladech (Czech Poetry in German Translations). Prague: Academia 1985.

81 Petr Křička (1884–1949), who was serving on the Russian front at the time, first attracted attention in 1916 with his collection Šípkový keř (The Dog-Rose Bush). Brod wrote about his brother, the composer Jaroslav Křička (1882–1969), in the Prager Abendblatt, 29 November 1923. – Franz Kafka to Max Brod, 17 December 1923. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 445.

82 See Hartmut Binder (ed.), Prager Profile. Vergessene Autoren im Schatten Kafkas (Prague Profiles. Forgotten Writers in the Shadow of Franz Kafka). Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag 1991, 21f.

83 See Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, p. 133, and Rudolf Fuchs, Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka (Recollections of Franz Kafka). In: Max Brod, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie (Franz Kafka: A Biography). Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag 1954, 327–330, here 329. For Binder’s interpretation, see Binder, Prager Profile, p. 27.

84 Copy in the Literární archiv Památníku národního písemnictví (Literary Archive of Museum of Czech Literature). Quoted in Ilse Seehase, Drei Mitteilungen Kafkas und ihr Umfeld (Three messages from Kafka and their context). Zeitschrift für Germanistik 8 (1987), No. 2, pp. 178–183, here p. 180.

85 Prager Presse, No. 96, 3 July 1921, p. 13.

86 See Rudolf Fuchs, Die Prager Aposteluhr. Gedichte, Prosa, Briefe (The Prague Astronomical Clock: Poems, Prose, Letters). Ed. by Ilse Seehase. Halle, Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1985, pp. 340–349. See also Binder, Prager Profile, p. 20. Karel Čapek was in close contact with S. K. Neumann from around 1912. 22 October 1918, together with V. Dyk, O. Fischer, J. Herben, J. S. Machar, M. Rutt and K. Toman, he was on the staff of Národní listy (of which Kafka was a reader) until he left the paper in 1921. In 1920 Čapek’s translations appeared in Cesta (The Way), a journal favoured by the Czech Left and also read by Kafka – on account of Milena Jesenská. For more on Karel Čapek see below.

87 See also Nezdařil, Česká poezie.

88 See Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 186.

89 Theodor Lessing, a freelance contributor to the Prager Tagblatt, also knew Březina’s work. See Marek Nekula, Theodor Lessing und seine Rezeption in der Tschechoslowakei (Theodor Lessing and his reception in Czechoslovakia). In: brücken. Germanistisches Jahrbuch Tschechien – Slowakei. NF 4 (1996), pp. 57–103.

90 See also Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 158.

91 See Franz Werfel, Vorrede (Foreword). In: Petr Bezruč, Die schlesischen Lieder (The Silesian Songs). Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag 1917, pp. 5–22, here p. 16 f.

92 See Hermann Bahr, Vorwort (Foreword). In: Fráňa Šrámek, Flammen (Flames). Leipzig: Ernst Rowohlt Verlag 1913, V-VIII, here VI, written in 1912. This foreword, with other texts, is reprinted in the correspondence of Hermann Bahr and Jaroslav Kvapil in an excellent edition by Kurt Ifkovits. See Hermann Bahr – Jaroslav Kvapil: Briefe, Texte, Dokumente (Letters, Texts, Documents). Ed by Kurt Ifkovits. Berlin et al.: Lang 2007.

93 Kafka presented one of these books as a gift to the poet Hans Klaus. See Binder, Prager Profile, p. 62.

94 Prager Tagblatt 45, No. 77, 13 March 1920, p. 4.

95 See Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 44.

96 See Jan Wagner, Dopis Franze Kafky inž. Františku Kholovi v Literárním archivu (Franz Kafkas letter to Ing. František Khol in Literární archiv). In: Sborník národního muzea v Praze. Acta Musei Nationalis Pragae 8 (1963), Serie C, vol. 8, No. 2, p. 84, and Měšťan, Slované u Franze Kafky, p. 48.

97 See Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 9.

98 Diary, 11 April 1922. – See Kafka, Tagebücher, p. 273.

99 Diary, 12 June 1922. – See Kafka, Tagebücher, p. 923.

100 F. Ulbrich Grochtmann, Anarchosyndikalismus, Bolschewismus und Proletkult in der Tschechoslowakei 1918–1924. Der Dichter Stanislav Kostka Neumann als Publizist in der tschechoslowakischen Arbeiterbewegung (Anarchosyndicalism, Bolshevism and Prolekult in the Czechoslovakia 1918–1924: The Poet Stanislav Kostka Neumann as Publicist in the Czechoslovak Proletarian Movement). Munich: Lerche 1979, 101f. See also Binder, Prager Profile.

101 Prager Tagblatt 45, No. 59, 9 March 1920, p. 5.

102 Prager Tagblatt 45, No. 77, 31 March 1920, p. 4.

103 Prager Tagblatt 45, No. 122, 26 May 1920, p. 4.

104 See Brod, Franz Kafka, p. 91.

105 Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig. Born dates the book 1917, though it bears no publication date. See Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, p. 60. Nezdařil dates the second volume 1926. See Nezdařil, Česká poezie, p. 226.

106 See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 215.

107 No. 3: Erstes Kapitel des Buches ‘Richard und Samuel” [First chapter of the book ‘Richard and Samuel’ by Max Brod and Franz Kafka] – with M. Brod; No. 4/5: Großer Lärm (A Great Noise). It was also here, in the ‘Neue tschechische Literatur’ (New Czech literature) section (pp. 47–50); that the first translations of Bezruč appeared (p. 50), with the important introductory texts ‘Tschechische Dichtkunst’ (Czech poetry) by Otto Pick (pp. 47–49) and ‘Petr Bezruč’ by Hans Janowitz.

108 The Slav/Czech theme also appears in Barbara oder Die Frömmigkeit (Barbara or Piety, 1929; Czech edition Barbara neboli zbožnost, 1931). – See also Hartmut Binder, Paul Eisners dreifaches Ghetto (Paul Eisner’s triple ghetto). In: Michel Reffet (ed.), Le monde de Franz Werfel et la morale des nations. / Die Welt Franz Werfels und die Moral der Völker. Berlin et al.: Peter Lang 2000, pp. 17–137, here p. 33.

109 Werfel, Vorrede, XVI–XVII.

110 Werfel says of this period: ‘The Jesuit tossed a hundred thousand books into the flames, which almost devoured a language and its literature for ever’.

111 Brod writes of Masaryk’s various activities (the Hilsner affair, the ‘Manuscripts dispute’) but also of his belief in the future president, which he owed to his Czech-educated friends who went to Masaryk’s lectures and talked about them afterwards. Brod also recounts a meeting with Masaryk, apparently attended by Werfel and Wertheimer as well, which after TGM’s emigration almost cost Brod his job as a civil servant. See Max Brod, Eine Unterredung mit Professor Masaryk (A discussion with Professor Masaryk). In: Ernst Rychnovsky (ed.), Masaryk und das Judentum (Masaryk and Jews). Prag: Marsverlagsgesellschaft 1931, pp. 357–362, here pp. 358, 361.

112 Diary, 14 September 1915, and 6 October 1915. – See Kafka, Tagebücher, pp. 751, 766.

113 See Jiří Langer, Vzpomínka na Kafku (A Memoir of Kafka). In: Jiří Langer, Studie, recenze, články, dopisy (Papers, Reviews, Articles, Letters). Prague: Sefer 1995, pp. 139–141, here p. 140. See also Hartmut Binder, Kafkas Hebräischstudien. Ein biographisch-interpretatorischer Versuch (Kafka’s study of Hebrew: A biographically interpretative approach). In: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 11 (1967), pp. 527–556, here p. 530.

114 Diary, 6 October 1915. – See Kafka, Tagebücher, pp. 766–768.

115 For the date see Milan Tvrdík, Franz Kafka und Jiří (Georg) Langer. Zur Problematik des Verhältnisses Kafkas zur tschechischen Kultur (Franz Kafka and Jiří (Georg) Langer: On Kafka’s relation to Czech culture). In: Klaus Schenk (ed.), Moderne in der deutschen und der tschechischen Literatur (Modern in the German and Czech Literature). Tübingen, Basel: Francke Verlag 2000, pp. 189–199, here p. 199.

116 Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914–1923. Translated by Martin Greenberg. New York: Schocken 1949.

117 Franz Kafka to Max Brod, 14 November 1917. – See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 193f.

118 Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914–1923, p. 394.

119 Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924, p. 127.

120 Umělecký měsíčník 2 (1912/1913, pp. 223–224), and Umělecký měsíčník 3 (1913/1914, pp. 30–31). See Josef Čermák, Die Kafka-Rezeption in Böhmen (1913–1949) (Kafka’s reception in Bohemia 1913–1949). Germanoslavica 1/1–2 (1994), pp. 127–144, here p. 127f.

121 See Josef Čermák, Recepce Franze Kafky v Čechách (1913–1963) (Reception of Franz Kafka in Bohemia 1913–1963). In: Kafkova zpráva o světě (Kafka’s Report on the World). Prague: Nakladatelství Franze Kafky 2000, 14–36, here p. 16.

122 See Max Brod, Der Prager Kreis (The Prague Circle). Stuttgart et al.: W. Kohlhammer 1966, pp. 98, 155.

123 Čermák, Recepce Franze Kafky v Čechách, p. 16.

124 Hugo Siebenschein, Prostředí a čas. Poznámky k osobnosti a dílu Franze Kafky (Milieu and time: Remarks on the personality and oeuvre of Franz Kafka). In: Franz Kafka a Praha. Vzpomínky, úvahy, dokumenty (Franz Kafka and Prague. Memories, Reflections, Papers). Prague: Žikeš 1947, pp. 7–24, here p. 22.

125 See Kautman, Franz Kafka p. 50.

126 Kafka, Tagebücher, p. 121.

127 Čermák notes that Claudel was invited to the ‘Lese- und Redehalle der deutschen Studenten in Prag’ (Reading and Lecture Hall of German Students in Prague) – the circle surrounding Franz Werfel. See Josef Čermák, Junge Jahre in Prag. Ein Beitrag zum Freundeskreis Franz Werfels (Early years in Prague: A contribution to the circle of friends around Franz Werfel). In: Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers et al. (eds), Brücken nach Prag. Deutschsprachige Literatur im kulturellen Kontext der Donaumonarchie und der Tschechoslowakei (Bridges to Prague: German-written Literature in the Cultural Context of the Habsburg Monarchy and Czechoslovakia). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2000, pp. 125–162.

128 Published in Czech in 1917; French edition 1925.

129 Milena Jesenská’s translation of Arthur Rimbaud appeared in Tribuna 2, 8 July 1920.

130 Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena. Translated by Philip Boem. New York: Schocken 1990, p. 97.

131 See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 73. This letter has hitherto been dated to 10 March 1910. But the sequence of events dictates that it cannot have been written before 15 March, when the article Kafka quotes appeared in print.

132 See article in Čas 22, No. 74, 15 March 1910, p. 3, entitled ‘Literární večer’ (Literary evening). For translation see Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, p. 64.

133 Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 73.

134 Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, p. 64.

135 Lumír Kuchař, Dialogy o kráse a smrti. Studie a materiály k české literatuře přelomu 19. a 20. století (Dialogues on Beauty and Death: Studies and Documents on the Czech Literature of the 19^th century Fin de Siècle). Ed. by Marek Nekula. Brno: Host 1999, p. 32.

136 See Kuchař, Dialogy, p. 32. Gabriela Preissová (1862–1946) was known to Brod and Kafka as the author of the drama on which Janáček based the libretto of Její pastorkyně (Jenufa), first performed in 1904 in Brno. Following its success in Prague in 1916 Max Brod produced a German translation, with the title Jenufa, which was published to coincide with the Vienna premiere on 16 February 1918. Kafka did not know Preissová personally, but refers to her in letters to Brod dated on 30 June and 5 July 1922, at a time when they were considering visiting her in Planá nad Lužnicí, where Kafka was also staying. See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, pp. 373, 375f.

137 Čas, 17 February 1910. p. 3; Přehled, 18 February 1910, p. 396.

138 See Literární archiv Památníku národního písemnictví (Literary Archive of Museum of Czech Literature).

139 See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, pp. 58, 463.

140 Kuchař, Dialogy, p. 92.

141 See Kuchař, Dialogy, p. 34.

142 Max Brod, Pražský kruh (The Prague Circle). Prague: Akropolis 1993, p. 47.

143 See Brod – Kafka, Eine Freundschaft, p. 283.

144 See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 314.

145 See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, pp. 82, 305.

146 See Robert B. Pynsent, Láska a slečna Jesenská (Love and Miss Jesenská). Moderní revue 1894–1925. Prague: Torst 1995, pp. 167–187.

147 See Marek Nekula, Franz Kafka und der Kreis um die Zeitschrift Moderní revue. Nebst einigen Bemerkungen zu Kafka und Florians Dobré dílo (Franz Kafka and the circle around the journal Moderní revue. With remarks on Kafka and Florian’s Dobré dílo). In: brücken. Germanistisches Jahrbuch Tschechien – Slowakei. NF 7 (2000), pp. 153–166.

148 See Franz Kafka, Topič (The Stoker). Kmen 4, No. 6, 22 April 1920, pp. 61–72; Franz Kafka, Nešťastný (Unhappiness). Tribuna 2, No. 166, 16 July 1920, pp. 1–2; Franz Kafka, Náhlá procházka, Výlet do hor, Neštěstí mládence, Kupec, Cesta domů, Ti, kteří běží mimo (The sudden walk, Excursion into the mountains, Bachelor’s ill luck, The tradesman, The way home, Passers-by). Kmen 4, No. 26, 9 September 1920, pp. 308–310; Franz Kafka, Zpráva pro akademii (A report to an Academy). Tribuna 2, No. 227, 26 September 1920, pp. 1–4; Franz Kafka, Závodníkům na uváženou (Reflections for gentlemen-jockeys). Tribuna 4, Christmas supplement, 24 December 1922, p. 8; Franz Kafka, Soud (The judgment). Cesta 5 (1923), No. 26/27, pp. 369–372.

149 See Franz Kafka, Před zákonem (Before the law), Právo lidu 29, No. 253, 24 October 1920. Sunday supplement No. 43.

150 Kmen 4, No. 6, 22 April 1920.

151 Rudé právo, Dělnická besídka, 24 August 1924.

152 Komunistická revue, 1924, p. 479.

153 For Kafka’s reception by the Czech left, see esp. Čermák, Die Kafka-Rezeption in Böhmen, p. 130 f. Germanoslavica 1/1–2 (1994), pp. 127–144, here p. 130f.

154 See e.g. Alena Wagnerová, Milena Jesenská. Biographie (Milena Jesenská: A Biography). Berlin: Bollmann 1994.

155 See e.g. Marek Nekula, Theodor Lessing und Max Brod. Eine mißlungene Begegnung (Theodor Lessing and Max Brod: A failed encounter). In: brücken. Germanistisches Jahrbuch Tschechien – Slowakei. NF 5 (1997), pp. 115–122.

156 See Willy Prochazka, Kafka’s association with Jaroslav Hašek and the Czech anarchists. Modern Austrian Literature 11 (1978), No. 3–4, pp. 275–287, Binder, Kafka. Ein Leben in Prag, p. 115 f.

157 Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography. Translated by G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston. New York: Da Capo, 1995, p. 86.

158 The ‘Club of the Young’ had been in trouble with the police since 1905 and was disbanded (after prior surveillance) in 1910. Kafka was on a number of occasions issued with a certificate of no criminal record: in 1906, when applying for the civil service post he briefly held at the Zemský soud (county court); in 1907, on joining Assicurazioni Generali; in 1910, on his lifetime civil service appointment; in 1911, on becoming a partner in the factory; and repeatedly in connection with his foreign trips (1915, 1916 and 1917). This would have been highly unlikely had he attended the Club’s meetings regularly. See related material in the Literární archiv Památníku národního písemnictví (Literary Archive of Museum of Czech Literature). Bauer points out that some of these documents are signed by Commissar Slavíček, the very man who banned the Club. See Johann Bauer [Čermák, Josef] Kafka und Prag (Kafka and Prague). Stuttgart: Belser 1971, pp. 106 f., 116.

159 See Brod, Franz Kafka, p. 91.

160 Jarmila Mayerová Hašková (1887–1931), journalist and writer of fiction, mostly for children.

161 See Čermák, Recepce Franze Kafky, p. 17.

162 Kafka to Milena Jesenská, Sept. 1921. See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 306.

163 According to a letter to Milena Jesenská, Kafka calls him a pitomec (fool, buffoon). Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská, 22 July 1920. – See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 137.

164 Kafka to Robert Klopstock, mid-September 1921. – See Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924 (Letters 1902–1924). Ed. by Max Brod. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1958, p. 352. For the limited reliability of Janouch’s testimony, see also Marek Nekula, Poznámky (Comments). In: Gustav Janouch, Hovory s Kafkou (Conversations with Kafka). Translated by Eva Kolářová, edited and commented by Marek Nekula, epilogue by Veronika Tuckerová. Prague: Torst 2009, pp. 223–252.

165 For his social milieu, opinions and activities at that time see Wagnerová, Milena Jesenská.

166 Most recently Čermák, Recepce Franze Kafky.

167 E.g. Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská, April 1920, 21 July 1920, 26 August 1920, 2 September 1920, September 1920 (Kmen), 22 October 1920 (Červen). See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, pp. 8, 135, 228, 245, 277, 284; Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena. Translated by Philip Boem. New York: Schocken 1990, pp. 4–8, 101, 168, 181. See also Franz Kafka to Ottla, 8 May 1920, from Merano. – See Kafka, Briefe an Ottla, p. 87.

168 From 1919–1920 Michael Kácha worked on the paper as a subeditor, and from 1921 as editor. He was succeeded by S.K. Neumann.

169 Published by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Proletkult was also edited by S.K. Neumann.

170 Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská, 26 August 1920. – See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 228. Vančura’s work was not published in book form until 1923.

171 Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská, 22 October 1920. – See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 284.

172 Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská, November 1920. – See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 297. Čapek’s play Loupežník (The Robber) appeared in 1920, as did his volume of criticism Kritika slov (Critique of Words), which Kafka probably also read.

173 Prager Tagblatt 45, No. 77, 31 March 1920, p. 4.

174 Prager Presse 1, No. 96, 3 June 1921.

175 Translated by Ludvík Vrána and F. Pastor, Stará Říše 1929.

176 See Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka, p. 70.

177 Published by Josef Florian in Stará Říše.

178 See Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka, p. 70.

179 See Jiří Olič, Čtení o Jakubu Demlovi (Reading about Jakub Deml). Olomouc: Votobia 1993, p. 30.

180 See the chapter ‘Franz Kafka at school’, p. 139.

181 See Nekula, Theodor Lessing und seine Rezeption.

182 See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 100.

183 See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 107.

184 See Petr F. Hájek, Kouzelné přátelství (A wonderful friendship). In: Josef Florian – Staša Jílovská, Vzájemná korespondence 1919–1922 (Mutual Correspondence 1919–1922). Prague: Documenta 1993, pp. 7–10, here p. 7f.

185 Florian – Jílovská, Vzájemná korespondence, p. 96.

186 Josef Florian to Staša Jílovská, 31 December 1919. – See Florian – Jílovská, Vzájemná korespondence, p. 98.

187 Florian – Jílovská, Vzájemná korespondence, p. 112.

188 Florian – Jílovská, Vzájemná korespondence, p. 144.

189 See Florian – Jílovská, Vzájemná korespondence, p. 145.

190 See Nekula, Franz Kafka und der Kreis um die Zeitschrift Moderní revue, Čermák, Die Kafka-Rezeption in Böhmen, Čermák, Recepce Franze Kafky.

191 See Franz Kafka, Starý list (A Page from an Old Manuscript). Litomyšl: Portmann 1928; Franz Kafka, Sen (A Dream). Translated by Gustav Janouch, illustrations by Otto Coester. Stará Říše 1929; Franz Kafka Proměna (The Metamorphosis). Translated by L. Vrána and F. Pastor. Stará Říše 1929; Franz Kafka, Zpráva pro akademii (A Report to an Academy). Litomyšl: Portman 1929; Franz Kafka, Venkovský lékař (A Country Doctor). Litomyšl: Portman 1931.

192 This subtitle was changed several times.

193 See Marek Nekula, Jakub Deml zwischen ‘Österreichisch’, ‘Tschechisch’, ‘Deutsch’ (Jakub Deml between ‘Austrian’, ‘Czech’, ‘German’). In: brücken. Germanistisches Jahrbuch Tschechien – Slowakei. NF 6 (1998), pp. 3–31, p. 59.

194 See Tvrdík, Franz Kafka und Jiří (Georg) Langer, here p. 199.

195 See Čermák, Die Kafka-Rezeption in Böhmen, p. 132f.

196 Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská May 1920. – See Kafka, Letters to Milena, p. 13.

197 Kafka, Topič, p. 61.

198 Franz Kafka, Ein Landarzt und andere Drucke zu Lebzeiten (A Country Doctor and Other Texts Published in his Lifetime). Ed. by Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 1994, p. 55.

199 František Štícha et al., Akademická gramatika spisovné češtiny (Academic Grammar of Standard Czech). Prague: Academia 2013, pp. 618 ff., 631 ff.

200 Kafka, Ein Landarzt, p. 55. Franz Kafka, Selected Stories. Translated and edited by Stanley Corngold. New York, London: J. J. Norton 2005, p. 13.

201 Kafka, Topič, p. 61.

202 Franz Kafka, Povídky I. Proměna a jiné texty vydané za života (Short Stories I. The Metamorphosis and other Texts Published in his Lifetime). Translated by Vladimír Kafka, Marek Nekula, Věra Koubová, Josef Čermák. Prague: Nakladatelství Franze Kafky 1999, p. 59.

203 Kafka, Ein Landarzt, p. 55. My emphases.

204 Kafka, Povídky I, p. 59. My emphases.

205 Franz Kafka, Stories 1904–1924. Translated by J. A. Underwood, foreword by Jorge Luis Borges. London: Abacus 1995, p. 59. My emphases.

206 Kafka, Náhlá procházka. . ., p. 309.

207 Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská, September 1920. Kafka, Letters to Milena, p. 207 f.

208 Kafka, Ein Landarzt, p. 23.

209 Kafka, Náhlá procházka. . ., p. 309.

210 Kafka, Ein Landarzt, p. 24. Franz Kafka, Short Stories. Ed. by Nahum N. Glatzer. London: Vintage 1999, p. 386.

211 Kafka, Povídky I, 23. See also Marek Nekula, System der Partikeln im Deutschen und Tschechischen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Abtönungspartikeln (The System of Particles in German and Czech with special Respect to Modal Particles). Tübingen: Niemeyer 1996, p. 54.

212 Kafka, Ein Landarzt, p. 24. My emphases.

213 Kafka, Povídky I, p. 23. My emphases.

214 Kafka, Náhlá procházka. . ., p. 309. My emphases.

215 Kafka, Letters to Milena, p. 137

216 Gustav Landauer, Friedrich Hölderlin. Kmen 4, No. 23 (19 Aug. 1920), pp. 269–274, No. 24 (26 Aug. 1920), pp. 283–286, No. 25 (2 Sept. 1920), pp. 294–297.

217 See Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 130.

218 Kafka, Letters to Milena, p. 84.