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Letters To Milena

Letters To Milena

by Franz Kafka (Author), Franz Kafka (Author), Franz Kafka (Author), Tania Stern (Translator), Dr James Stern (Translator)

  • Used

    Paperback 1992

    $18.20
Synopsis

Kafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was translating his early short prose into Czech, and their relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so, laid bare his heart and his conscience. Milena, for her part, was passionate and intrepid, cool and intelligent in her decisions but reckless when her emotions were involved. Kafka once described her as living her life 'so intensely down to such depths'. If she did suffer through him, it was part of her great appetite for life. However while at times Milena's 'genius for living' gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In 1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving record of their relationship.

$18.20

Quantity

1 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 192
 Edition: 9
 Publisher: Vintage Classics
Published: 16 Apr 1992
ISBN 10: 0749399457
ISBN 13: 9780749399450
Book Overview: These letters, written by Kafka to his one-time lover Milena, document an extraordinary relationship and offer unusual insight into Kafka's private world, revealing another side of the legendary literary genius.

Media Reviews
In his letters we have a series of self-portraits desperate and courageous, always eager and warm in feeling and, of course, by drollery. His candour is of the kind that flies alongside him in the air. He was a marvellous letter writer -- V.S. Pritchett
Fascinating reading... [a] part of his oeuvre * Independent *
Author Bio
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the state Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; The Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. Only a few of his friends knew that Kafka was also at work on the great novels that were published after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial, and The Castle.