A Note on Kafka
I first mentioned the book Kafka’s Last Love, a biography of Dora Diament, only last May. It was published in the US in April. It comes out in the UK next week. A review might be forthcoming on Spike as I’m getting a copy in return for some work I did. The things I do for the love of literature! Meanwhile, there are plenty online already, the latest being Jeremy Adler’s in the Evening Standard.
Earlier this year, in a letter to the TLS, Anthony Rudolf said that as part of the “Advisory Committee of the Kafka Project set up � to track down missing Kafka manuscripts” he reckons that “[w]hile Kafka’s thirty-five letters to Dora Diamant and other papers of his in her possession were .. confiscated by the Gestapo, they were not necessarily destroyed. It is possible that they survived in Eastern Europe. Dora’s diaries were not confiscated or destroyed as reported, though they were lost for nearly half a century before being discovered in private collections in Paris in 2000 and Berlin in 2002. Written in the last year of her life, the diaries of Dora -the only woman Kafka ever lived with -constitute her attempt to explain her view and experience of the writer. Nearly thirty letters that [Robert] Klopstock and Dora Diamant wrote to Kafka’s mother and sisters � offer rich new biographical details of Kafka’s last year, as do the letters that Dora wrote to Max Brod, Marthe Robert and other friends. These letters have been collected and translated into English for the first time in Kafka’s Last Love“.
In her obituary for Kafka, Milena Jesenska said he was “a man condemned to see the world with such blinding clarity that he found it unbearable and went to his death.” Remind you of anyone?
Other Splinters posts of interest:
