Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka[b] (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and writer from Prague. He is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic.[4] It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity.[5] His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.[6]
"Kafka" redirects here. For other uses, see Kafka (disambiguation).
Franz Kafka
3 July 1883
3 June 1924 (aged 40)
- Austria (until 1918)[a]
- Czechoslovakia (from 1918)[1][2]
- Novelist
- short story writer
- insurance officer
Kafka was born into a middle-class German-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today the capital of the Czech Republic).[7] He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time by an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died in obscurity in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.
Kafka was a prolific writer, spending most of his free time writing, often late in the night. He burned an estimated 90 percent of his total work due to his persistent struggles with self-doubt. Much of the remaining 10 percent is lost or otherwise unpublished. Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime; the story collections Contemplation and A Country Doctor, and individual stories, such as his novella The Metamorphosis, were published in literary magazines but received little attention.
In his will, Kafka instructed his close friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, but Brod ignored these instructions and had much of his work published. Kafka's writings became famous in German-speaking countries after World War II, influencing their literature, and its influence spread elsewhere in the world in the 1960s. It has also influenced artists, composers, and philosophers.
Critical response[edit]
Critical interpretations[edit]
The poet W. H. Auden called Kafka "the Dante of the twentieth century";[198] the novelist Vladimir Nabokov placed him among the greatest writers of the 20th century.[199] Gabriel García Márquez noted the reading of Kafka's The Metamorphosis showed him "that it was possible to write in a different way".[121][200] A prominent theme of Kafka's work, first established in the short story "Das Urteil",[201] is father–son conflict: the guilt induced in the son is resolved through suffering and atonement.[19][201] Other prominent themes and archetypes include alienation, physical and psychological brutality, characters on a terrifying quest, and mystical transformation.[202]
Kafka's style has been compared to that of Kleist as early as 1916, in a review of "Die Verwandlung" and "Der Heizer" by Oscar Walzel in Berliner Beiträge.[203] The nature of Kafka's prose allows for varied interpretations and critics have placed his writing into a variety of literary schools.[116] Marxists, for example, have sharply disagreed over how to interpret Kafka's works.[110][116] Some accused him of distorting reality whereas others claimed he was critiquing capitalism.[116] The hopelessness and absurdity common to his works are seen as emblematic of existentialism.[204] Some of Kafka's books are influenced by the expressionist movement, though the majority of his literary output was associated with the experimental modernist genre. Kafka also touches on the theme of human conflict with bureaucracy. William Burrows claims that such work is centred on the concepts of struggle, pain, solitude, and the need for relationships.[205] Others, such as Thomas Mann, see Kafka's work as allegorical: a quest, metaphysical in nature, for God.[206][207]
According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the themes of alienation and persecution, although present in Kafka's work, have been overemphasised by critics. They argue that Kafka's work is more deliberate and subversive—and more joyful—than may first appear. They point out that reading Kafka while focusing on the futility of his characters' struggles reveals Kafka's humour; he is not necessarily commenting on his own problems, but rather pointing out how people tend to invent problems. In his work, Kafka often creates malevolent, absurd worlds.[208][209] Kafka read drafts of his works to his friends, typically concentrating on his humorous prose. The writer Milan Kundera suggests that Kafka's surrealist humour may have been an inversion of Dostoyevsky's presentation of characters who are punished for a crime. In Kafka's work, a character is punished although a crime has not been committed. Kundera believes that Kafka's inspirations for his characteristic situations came both from growing up in a patriarchal family and from living in a totalitarian state.[210]
Attempts have been made to identify the influence of Kafka's legal background and the role of law in his fiction.[211][212] Most interpretations identify aspects of law and legality as important in his work,[213] in which the legal system is often oppressive.[214] The law in Kafka's works, rather than being representative of any particular legal or political entity, is usually interpreted to represent a collection of anonymous, incomprehensible forces. These are hidden from the individual but control the lives of the people, who are innocent victims of systems beyond their control.[213] Critics who support this absurdist interpretation cite instances where Kafka describes himself in conflict with an absurd universe, such as the following entry from his diary:
