Letters to Felice

Product Information

Despite first language, Kafka also spoke fluent Czech. Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of the French language and culture from Flaubert, one of his favorite authors. Though his family cannot understand his voice, Gregor can hear all of their conversations. He learns that they have some money left in what they had saved after Mr. Samsa’s business went bankrupt. However, they do not want to dig into those funds yet, and they wouldn’t last very long. This revelation causes Gregor to feel guilty and ashamed, particularly at the idea that his mother and sister may have to find work. Reading is also carnal, perhaps because Kafka so often spoke the lines of his work aloud, or had friends read them to him: after one such reading, he thinks, “one sentence rubs against the next like the tongue against a hollow or a false tooth.” Later, he reads sentences by Goethe “as if I were running along the stresses with my whole body.” Even abstractions take on a lush tangibility. Kafka’s gifts smart like injuries: he senses his “abilities, as if I were holding them in my hand; they tightened my chest, they inflamed my head.” When he squanders his talents on reports and memos at work, he regards the results “with a feeling of disgust and shame as if it were raw meat, cut out of my own flesh.” These words of Canetti's had the same effect on me as Kafka's letters had on him. There is something incredibly valuable in seeing authors in their roles as readers as well, as die-hard fans of other people's thoughts, words, dramas. The - occasionally - difficult relationship between author, reader, work and criticism is turned into a beautiful love affair, a mutual, fruitful and necessary interdependence. Kafka αναφέρεται αδιάκοπα και φαίνεται πως αισθανόταν πως υπήρχαν δυνάμεις που του υπαγόρευαν τα όσα έγραφε. Δεν ξέρω αν όλα αυτά τα εννοούσε συμβολικά ή αν πίστευε πως υπάρχουν ως ανεξάρτητες οντότητες, κάτι παρόμοιο με τους μεσαιωνικούς δαίμονες. Άλλωστε η ιδέα που έχει για τον εσωτερικό Πύργο της Βαβέλ του υποδεικνύει πως το ίδιο γεγονός μπορεί να ερμηνευθεί με διαφορετικούς τρόπους, μπορεί να υπάρχει σε διαφορετικά επίπεδα και να παίρνει την ανάλογη μορφή.

Para que lo sepas, mi amor, pienso en ti con tanto amor y devoción como si Dios te hubiera confiado a mí con las más inequívocas palabras."Kafka first studied chemistry at the Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague but after two weeks switched to law. This study offered a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father, and required a longer course of study that gave Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history. At the university, he joined a student club, named Lese- und Redehalle der Deutschen Studenten, which organized literary events, readings, and other activities. In the end of his first year of studies, he met Max Brod, a close friend of his throughout his life, together with the journalist Felix Weltsch, who also studied law. Kafka obtained the degree of doctor of law on 18 June 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts. Literature usually reaches us in its finished form, when it has already ossified into irrevocability. By the time a book is bound and printed, it is easy to forget that the words were once in motion. Franz Kafka’s fitful fiction provides a reminder. Most of his work was published posthumously, through the efforts of his best friend, Max Brod, and much of it still bears the marks of its author’s uncertainty. Kafka finished none of the three novels he started, and his final attempt, “ The Castle,” leaves off abruptly midsentence. The ineradicable peculiarity of Kafka's cast of mind is shown by his inability to learn from mistakes. Failure multiplied by failure does not, in his case, equal success. The difficulties always remain the same ones, as if to demonstrate that they are by nature insuperable."

Bulgarian novelist Elias Canetti wrote about the correspondence in Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice. Through a reading of the letters along with sections of The Trial Canetti examined Kafka's struggle between a comfortable middle-class life and individual isolation. The more than five hundred letters Kafka wrote to Felice - through their breakup, a second engagement in 1917, and their final parting in the fall of that year, when Kafka began to feel the effects of tuberculosis that would eventually claim his life -  reveal the full measure of his inner turmoil as he tried, in vain, to balance his desire for human connection with what he felt were the solitary demands of his craft. the] earmarks of his fiction: the same nervous attention to minute particulars; the same paranoid awareness of shifting balances of power; the same atmosphere of emotional suffocation– combined, surprisingly enough, with moments of boyish ardor and delight. [4] Later life [ edit ]That said, the lengthy introduction by Heller is one of the most powerfully insightful pieces of critical writing on Kafka I've come across and it should not be missed. Kafka’s correspondence with Felice has all the earmarks of his fiction - the same nervous attention to minute particulars, the same paranoid awareness of shifting balances of power, the same atmosphere of emotional suffocation - combined, surprisingly enough, with moments of boyish ardour and delight."  -   Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Es el 13 de agosto 1912 y Franz Kafka asiste a una velada íntima en la casa de su amigo y albacea Max Brod. The myth of Kafka as an inveterate melancholic has not prepared us for his endearments toward stairs. From this master of self-flagellation we expect only litanies of miseries and maladies. And the diaries do include their share of obligatory despairing. Kafka takes evident pleasure in posturing as an incurable, and he is unfailingly dramatic about minor infirmities. When he has a headache, it is as if he has “two little boards screwed against my temples”; when he cannot sleep, he feels as if he has laid his head “in a false hole.” He was keenly sensitive to sound, and in a short piece later published in a magazine he whines that his bedroom is “the headquarters of the noise of the whole apartment.” His letters have much to say about his phobia of mice. As his biographer Reiner Stach so aptly puts it, “For this man absolutely anything could become a problem.”

I was left alone in the room and was seized with such longing for you that all I wanted to do was lay my head on the table for some kind of support

Select a format:

In her solo play with music Felice to Franz (1992), [8] [9] [10] performance artist Claudia Stevens portrays Felice as she responds to Kafka's letters. The play's text [11] recreates the letters Felice might have written to Franz. in any case, what business have my hands to write letters if all they are made for and all they want is to hold you ! (Olivie Blake has a quote like this in "Alone w you in the ether", she thought I wouldn't notice, but I did girl!! Kafka fans, let me hear you) Felice Bauer (18 November 1887– 15 October 1960) was a fiancée of Franz Kafka, whose letters to her were published as Letters to Felice. Daddy Long Legs لجين وبستر، وأعتقد أنني وقعت في هوى الرسائل منذ ذلك الحين! لم أجد حرجًا في قراءة الرسائل الخاصة بين كافكا وفيلس أبدًا، بل أظنني التهمتها ووددت لو كانت رسائل كاملة. يقول كانيتي إنها لم تكن رسائل حب بالمعنى الدقيق للكلمة، ولست أدري لمَ على رسائل الحب ألا تتضمن شيئًا سوى العواطف؟! هذه الرسائل هي فرصة كي أتعرف نفسي والآخر، أصرح فيها عن مخاوفي وشكوكي وقناعاتي ومسلماتي.. وكافكا فعل كل ذلك، لكن بالمقابل حرمنا من الاطلاع على رسائل فيلس التي كانت ستكشف لنا شخصيتها بالقدر نفسه. في بادئ الأمر وجدت اندفاع كافكا نحوها غريبًا وقد أوحى لي بهشاشة كافكا وتعلقه السريع بالأشخاص، بدا فتى عذريًا في انجذابه الأول وحماسه الشديد نحو فيلس، وهو ما يكشف عن قلقه، غير متيقن دوماً ممن يحب، لذلك تعلق بصديقة فيلس سريعًا بمجرد أن بادلته الرسائل وبدت مطواعة أكثر... Whether out of self-protective rationalization or mere pragmatism — the onset of tuberculosis was, after all, what ended the relationship five years later — he plaintively points to a physiological reason, almost as an excuse for the psychological:

Aside from these forays into fiction, the diaries’ most arresting writing is clinically visual. Kafka’s many meticulous descriptions of acquaintances, strangers, and urban tableaux are as cruelly observant as a portrait by Lucian Freud. “Artless transition from the taut skin of my boss’s bald head to the delicate wrinkles of his forehead,” one reads. “An obvious, quite easily imitated failing of nature, bank notes should not be made in such a way.” A Yiddish actor reciting a monologue “clenches the skin of his forehead and of the root of his nose as one believes only hands can be clenched.” Kafka writes unsentimentally about his lovers, but he displays incongruous tenderness about striking scenes around the city: at one point, he effuses, “The sight of stairs moves me so much today.” Por otro lado, la idea de convivir con una esposa lo aterra. Íntimamente ella lo sabe y seguramente se habrá dado cuenta que nunca iba a funcionar. Es claro, ella quiere vivir con él en Berlín mientras que él prefiere establecerse en Praga y vivir de la literatura. Es más, juntos averiguan distintos apartamentos y casas para alquilar pero nunca llegan a zanjar la cuestión.The problem is that whenever one looks at the personal lives of writers, painters or other artists we find ourselves confronted by their defect as humans which undermines our ability to appreciate the greatness of their work. As Maurice Minnifield a character in the American television series "Northern Exposure" once observed, the effect of the exercise is to drag our heroes down to our own level. This is certainly what happens when one reads "Kafka's Other Trial." The great writer comes across as a very abject human being.