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Even though Franz Kafka is one of the greatest, most popular, and most influential authors of the twentieth century, he has to this day remained inexplicable, and his life and literary legacy are subject to various interpretations. These diaries offer us a glimpse into the real Kafka, the man behind the mysterious artist, with all his feelings, fears, ambitions, and dreams.
Covering the time from 1909 to 1923, just a year before the author’s untimely demise, Diaries open the gates to Kafka’s world, providing us with extremely interesting notes about the cultural and social life in Prague at the beginning of the twentieth century. No less interesting are Kafka’s notes on his feelings towards his father who he loved and with whom, due to the ambitions he was trying to pass onto his son, he never managed to establish a harmonious relationship, towards his friend and biographer Max Brod, and to the woman he never married. Finally, his notes of dreams, filled with a constant feeling of guilt and Kafka’s struggle to prove himself as a writer to a world led by dark and unknown mechanisms, fascinate.
Diaries aren’t just necessary to understand Kafka and his novels and short stories, they are an easily legible display of one incredibly turbulent life that makes us think.
* * *Fear of madness. To see madness in every feeling that strives straight ahead and forgets everything else. So what is non-madness? It is not madness to stand in front of the threshold, begging on the side of the entrance, to fail and collapse. There must be madnesses that are greater than their bearers. Perhaps the disgusting thing is the straining of little madmen in their great madness. But wasn't Jesus in the same condition for the Pharisees?
* * *
If I killed myself, it would certainly be nobody's fault, even if, for example, F's behavior was the obvious reason. , as a suitor was rejected, put the letter on the table, went to the balcony, broke away from everyone rushing to hold me and, lowering his hands one after another, jumped over the fence.
* * *
From the point of view of literature, my fate is quite simple. The sense of showing my dreamy inner life suppressed everything else, so it shriveled in a terrible way and continues to shrivel. Nothing else can satisfy me. But my strength for that display is completely incalculable, maybe it is gone forever, maybe it will come to me again, but my life circumstances are not favorable for it.
* * *
There is no doubt that I am in an inhibition that completely surrounds me, but with which I have not yet fully grown, I notice that it occasionally loosens and could be removed. There are two ways, get married or Berlin, the latter is safer, the former is directly more attractive.
- ISBN: 978-953-369-013-1
- Unit ISBN: 978-953-369-004-9
- Dimensions: 142×205 mm
- Number of pages: 232
- Cover: paperback
- Year of the edition: 2022
- Original title: Tagebücher
- Original language: German
- Translation: Nadežda Čačinovič
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