Kafka, Franz

Kafka, Franz (fränts käf`kä), 1883–1924, German-language novelist, b. Prague. Along with Joyce, Kafka is perhaps the most influential of 20th-century writers. From a middle-class Jewish family from Bohemia, he spent most of his life in Prague. He studied law and then obtained a position in the workmen's compensation division of Austro-Hungarian government. Most of his works were published posthumously. His major novels include Der Prozess (1925, tr. The Trial, 1937, 1998), Das Schloss (1926, tr. The Castle, 1930, 1998), and Amerika (1927, tr. 1938), the latter the first novel he wrote (1913) and the last to be published. In prose that is remarkable for its clarity and precision, Kafka presents a world that is at once real and dreamlike and in which individuals burdened with guilt, isolation, and anxiety make a futile search for personal salvation. Important stories appearing during his lifetime were "Das Urteil" (1913, tr. "The Judgement," 1945), Die Verwandlung (1915, tr. The Metamorphosis, 1937), "Ein Landarzt" (1919, tr. "A Country Doctor," 1945), In der Strafkolonie (1920, tr. In the Penal Colony, 1941), and "Ein Hungerkünstler" (1922, tr. "A Hunger Artist," 1938).

Bibliography

See his diaries, ed. by M. Brod (tr. 1948–49); his letters to Felice Bauer, ed. by E. Heller and J. Born (tr. 1973); biographies by M. Brod (1937, new ed. 1995), R. Hayman (1981, repr. 2001), E. Pawel (1984), N. Murray (2004), and R. Stach (2005); studies by W. H. Sokel (1966), E. Heller (1974), and S. Corngold (1988).

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Kafka, Franz

Kafka

(credit: Archiv fur Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin)

(born July 3, 1883, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary—died June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria) Czech writer who wrote in German. Born into a middle-class Jewish family, he earned a doctorate and then worked successfully but unhappily at a government insurance office from 1907 until he was forced by a case of tuberculosis to retire in 1922. The disease caused his death two years later. Hypersensitive and neurotic, he reluctantly published only a few works in his lifetime, including the symbolic story The Metamorphosis (1915), the allegorical fantasy In the Penal Colony (1919), and the story collection A Country Doctor (1919). His unfinished novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927), published posthumously against Kafka's wishes, express the anxieties and alienation of 20th-century humanity. His visionary tales, with their inscrutable mixture of the normal and the fantastic, have provoked a wealth of interpretations. Kafka's posthumous reputation and influence have been enormous, and he is regarded as one of the great European writers of the 20th century.

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Kafka, Franz 

Born July 3, 1883, in Prague; died June 3, 1924, in Kierling, near Vienna. Austrian author.

Kafka was the son of bourgeois Jewish parents. He studied at the law faculty at the University of Prague from 1901 to 1906 and worked for an insurance company from 1908 to 1922. Kafka’s stories first appeared in magazines in 1909. The collection Reflection (1913) and the stories “The Judgment” and “The Stoker” (1913) and “The Metamorphosis” (1916) were published separately. After World War 1 Kafka published the story “In the Penal Colony” (1919) and the collections A Country Doctor (1919) and A Hunger-Artist (1924). His friend M. Brod, the executor of his will, published three novels by Kafka in 1925 and 1926—Amerika (unfinished), The Trial, and The Castle —as well as the collection of stories The Great Wall of China (1931).

Kafka’s writing is characterized by verisimilitude of details, events, and the thoughts and behavior of individual people, presented in unusual, often absurd interrelationships and in nightmarish or fantastic fairy-tale-like situations. Embodied in the images and conflicts of Kafka’s works are the tragic powerless-ness of the doomed “little man,” and at the same time the merciless cruelty and absurdity of the bourgeois social system and its laws, customs, and morals. The alogism of thought frequently makes it difficult to understand Kafka’s prose.

Kafka’s creative method, characteristic of 20th-century modernist literature, influenced, to varying degrees and in various forms, many German and Austrian writers, the Swiss authors M. Frisch and F. Dürrenmatt, the French writers J. P. Sartre and A. Camus, such representatives of the “literature of the absurd” as E. Ionesco and S. Beckett, and some literary figures of the USA and other countries of the Americas. Soviet literary criticism views Kafka’s creative work as an artistically brilliant expression of the deep crisis of bourgeois society, seen as a hopeless impasse from which the writer saw no escape.

WORKS

Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–8. Frankfurt am Main, 1951–58.
Tagebücher. [Frankfurt am Main, 1967.]
Briefe. Frankfurt am Main, 1958.
Briefe an Milena. Frankfurt am Main, 1952.
In Russian translation:
Roman, Novelly, Pritchi. [Preface by B. Suchkov.] Moscow, 1965.
“Iz dnevnikov.” Voprosy literatury, 1968, no 2.
“Pis’mo k ottsu.” Zvezda, 1968, no. 8.

REFERENCES

Zatonskii, D. V. Fronts Kafka i problemy modernizma. Moscow, 1965.
Knipovich, E. “F. Kafka.” In Sila pravdy. Moscow, 1965.
Dneprov, V. Cherty romana XX v. Moscow-Leningrad, 1965. Pages 117–71, 199–207.
Suchkov, B. “F. Kafka.” In Liki vremeni. Moscow, 1969.
Janouch, G. Gespräche mit Kafka. Frankfurt am Main, 1951.
Richter, H. Franz Kafka. Berlin, 1962.
Brod, M. Über Franz Kafka. [Frankfurt am Main-Hamburg, 1966.]

L. Z. KOPELEV