Kafka writer professional#

Surely a writer of Kafka's caliber can describe the terror of a slowly emerging totalitarian regime (Nazi Germany) without being a precursor of communism, as Communist criticism as often claimed. Yet in a conversation with his friend Janouch, he spoke highly of the Russian Revolution, and he expressed his fear that its religious overtones might lead to a type of modern crusade with a terrifying toll of lives. That Kafka was the propagator of the working class as the revolutionary class has been maintained not only by official Communist criticism, but also by Western 'progressives.' And it is true that Kafka did compose a pamphlet lamenting the plight of workers. Marxist criticism of Kafka has shifted back and forth between outright condemnation of Kafka's failing to draw the consequences of his own victimization by the bourgeoisie and between acclarnations stressing the pro-proletarian fighting quality of his heroes. Following the Marxist-Leninist dictum that art must function as a tool toward the realization of the classless society, this kind of interpretation is prevalent not merely in Communist countries, but also among the New Left critics this side of the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. Within the sociological type of interpretation, one of the most popular methods of criticism judges Kafka's art by whether or not it has contributed anything toward the progress of society. What the sociological and the psychological interpretations have in common is the false assumption that the discovery of the social or psychological sources of the artist's experience invalidate the meaning expressed by his art. For the critic arguing this way, the question is not what Kafka really says but the reasons why he supposedly said it. There is the sociological interpretation, according to which Kafka's work is but a mirror of the historical-sociological situation in which he lived. Freud himself often pointed out that the analysis of artistic values is not within the scope of the analytical methods he taught. As soon as this becomes more than one among many aids to understanding, however, one is likely to read not Kafka, but a text on applied psychoanalysis or Freudian symbology. One may therefore read Kafka with Freud's teachings in mind. We know Kafka was familiar with the teachings of Sigmund Freud (he says so explicitly in his diary, after he finished writing 'The judgment' in 1912) and that he tried to express his problems through symbols in the Freudian sense. The psychological or psychoanalytical approach to Kafka largely ignores the content of his works and uses the 'findings' of the diagnosis as the master key to puzzling out Kafka's world. Kafka's disenchantment with and eventual hatred of his father were a stimulus to write, but they neither explain the fascination of his writing nor tell us why he wrote at all. In it, I merely poured out the sorrow I could not sigh out at your breast', it is nevertheless dangerous to regard the anxieties permeating his work solely in these terms. While it is probably true that few writers have ever been moved to exclaim, 'My writing was about you. This interpretation claims that Kafka's works are little more than reflections of his lifelong tension between bachelorhood and marriage or, on another level, between his skepticism and his religious nature. Among the many approaches one encounters is that of the autobiographical approach. Compelling and empathetic, this book sheds new light on a man of unique genius and on his enigmatic works.A major problem confronting readers of Kafka's short stories is to find a way through the increasingly dense thicket of interpretations.

And he asserts that the unsettling flavor of Kafka’s books-stories suffused with guilt and frustration-derives from his sense of living in a mysteriously antagonistic world, of being a criminal without having knowingly committed a crime.

He analyzes Kafka’s poor relationship with his father, Hermann, which found its most eloquent expression in Kafka’s story “The Judgement,” about a father who condemns his son to death by drowning.

Kafka writer professional#

He describes Kafka’s demanding professional career, his ill health, and the constantly receding prospects of a marriage he craved. Nicholas Murray paints a picture of Kafka’s German-speaking Jewish family and the Prague mercantile bourgeoisie to which they belonged. This engrossing biography of the Czech novelist and short-story writer emphasizes the cultural and historical contexts of his fiction and focuses for the first time on his complex relationship with his father. The definitive biography of the representative writer of our age Although Franz Kafka (1883–1924) completed only a small number of works in his lifetime, perhaps no other author has had a greater influence on twentieth-century consciousness.