I have always loved Kafka. His unsettling, mind-bending psychological works are incredibly disturbing and fascinating in their genius. The writer as a person is even more intriguing; his torturous, dizzying thought pattern and painful consciousness create magnetizing enigmas that contain innumerable confusing, disquietingly mysterious passageways that resemble those contained in The Trial. His loneliness, despair, and struggle to make sense of the world and his place in it are beautifully compelling in their yearning, aching wistfulness.
In the writer’s letters to Milena Jesenská, a married Czech journalist and editor (who translated and edited several of Kafka’s pieces), readers experience Kafka more personally, witnessing the torturous love he felt for Milena, how language’s ability to both connect and isolate molded his relationships, his internal battle with his difficult-to-reconcile intersections of identity, and his debilitating struggle with fear and insomnia.
Major themes
Love
Reading Kafka’s letters to his beloved Milena opens up a new window into the author’s soul. In his published works (many of which the writer actually did not want published), he employs an intense psychological approach, carrying his own neurosis into the topsy-turvy worlds of his fiction; however, in his letters, his words drip with heartache and love. Although there exists controversy regarding whether the letters should ever have been made public due to Kafka’s extremely private nature, I am beyond grateful that I have had the opportunity to read the beautiful words he addressed to the woman he loved (but could not be with) and better understand Kafka as a person.
It is exceedingly difficult to select only a handful of beautiful quotes concerning the theme of love, of which Kafka’s letters are replete, but some of my favorites include:
- “Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most — you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love. This, my dear, is love.”
- “… now I just think about my own sickness and health: however, in any case both of them, the first as well as the second, are you.”
- “Today I looked at a map of Vienna, for a moment it seemed incomprehensible to me that they would build such a huge city when you only need one room.”
- “It is a blow because it will take time and I need all the time I have and a thousand times more than all the time I have and most of all I’d like to have all the time there is just for you, for thinking about you, for breathing in you … I’d like many things to be different and I’d prefer it if the office (Kafka worked at a bank) didn’t exist at all; but then I think that I deserve to be hit in the face for speaking beyond the present moment, this moment, which belongs to you.”
- “Either the world is so tiny or else we are so gigantic; in any case we fill it completely.”
- “So now I seat you in the chair, unable to grasp the scope of my fortune with words, eyes, hands, and my poor heart, my happiness that you are here and really mine. And actually it’s not at all you I love, but rather the existence you have bestowed on me.”
- “I’m tired, can’t think of a thing, and my sole wish is to lay my head in your lap, feel your hand on my head, and stay that way through eternity—”
- “Good heavens, Milena, if you were here, and my pitiful, unthinking mind! And still I would be lying if I said I missed you: it’s the most perfect, most painful magic, you are here, just as I am and even more so; wherever I am, there you are too, and even more intensely.”
- “It’s so wonderful to have received your letter, to have to answer it with my sleepless brain. I can’t think of anything to write, I’m just walking around here between the lines, underneath the light of your eyes, in the breath of your mouth like in some beautiful happy day, which stays beautiful and happy even if my head is sick, tired, and if I have to leave Monday via Munich.”
Communication
Kafka and Milena’s relationship was created and defined by differences in communication: he spoke German and rusty Czech, and she spoke Czech and German; he wrote, and she translated his work. The two frequently discussed how to best preserve the meaning of Kafka’s words as they journeyed across languages, which their closeness and understanding of each other facilitated. However, language, while it holds the power to build and shape worlds, identities, and relationships, also limits, its inextricability to experience producing an inability to fully express deep feelings and ideas.
- “I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.”
- “Agonizing misunderstandings are the result. Milena, you complain about some letters that you turn them in all directions and nothing falls out, but if I’m not mistaken those are precisely the ones where I was so close to you, my blood so restrained, restraining your own, so deep in the forest, so resting in rest, that nothing needed to be said, except perhaps that you can see the sky through the trees, that’s all.”
- “… your translation is faithful and I have the feeling that I’m taking you by the hand through the story’s subterranean passages, gloomy, low, ugly, almost endless (that’s why the sentences are almost endless, didn’t you realize that?) hopefully in order to have the good sense to disappear into the daylight at the exit.”
- “… I am moved by your faithfulness toward every little sentence, a faithfulness I would not have thought possible to achieve in Czech, let alone with the beautiful natural authority you attain.”
- “But I wanted to read you in Czech because, after all, you do belong to that language, because only there can Milena be found in her entirety …”
- “Misunderstanding through and through; no, it’s worse than mere misunderstanding, Milena, even if you do correctly understand the surface — bur what is there to understand or not understand.”
Identity
Living in a German-speaking Prague as a Jewish man in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kafka possessed dizzying (and what many historically declared contradictory) intersections of identity, placing him in a confusing, dangerous niche, an unsettling, lonely no-man’s land.
- “… I have never lived among Germans. German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate …”
To read longer passages on this theme, see pages 19 and 196 of the Schocken Kafka Library’s edition of Letters to Milena.
Fear
While readers explore new facets of Kafka in these letters, reading his love-filled words and his struggle with identity and communication, the fear that pervades his major works appears again here (if it didn’t, I’d have to wonder if it was truly his work).
- “I am unable to read them (Milena’s letters) and naturally I read them anyway, the way an animal dying of thirst drinks, and with that comes fear and more fear; I look for a piece of the furniture to crawl under; trembling, totally unaware of the world, I pray you might fly back out of the window the way you came storming in inside your letter. After all, I can’t keep a storm in my room; in these letters you undoubtedly have the magnificent head of Medusa, the snakes of terror are quivering about your head so wildly, while the snakes of fear quiver even more wildly about my own.”
- “The only thing I do fear — and I fear this with my eyes wide open, I am drowning in this fear, helpless (if I could sleep as deeply as I sink into fear I would no longer be alive) — is this inner conspiracy against myself … which is based on the fact that I, who am not even the pawn of a pawn in the great chess game, far from it, now want to take the place of queen, against all the rules and to the confusion of the game — I, the pawn of a pawn, a piece which doesn’t even exist, which isn’t even in the game — and next I may want to take the king’s place as well or even the whole board.”
- “As it is I have no one, no one here except the fear, together we roll through the night locked in each other’s arms.”
- “There’s only one thing I cannot bear without your express help, Milena: the ‘fear.’ I’m much too weak for that, it’s so immense I cannot see beyond it — and this monstrous flood is washing me away.”
- “Furthermore: it’s not a question of what will happen later on, the only certainty is that I cannot live apart from you without completely submitting to fear, giving it even more than it demands, and I do this voluntarily, with delight, I pour myself into it.”
- “You are right to reproach me in the name of fear for my behavior in Vienna, but this fear is particularly mysterious; I do not know its inner laws, only its hand on my throat — and that really is the most terrible things I have ever experienced or could experience.”
- “Perhaps the logical explanation is that we’re both married: you in Vienna, I to my fear in Prague, in which case you’re not the only one tugging in vain at marriage.”
Insomnia
Kafka famously struggled with extreme insomnia, a sickness he both battled and embraced, exploiting the time and frame of mind the night provided him to write often.
- “If course it would be stupid to resist, sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.”
- “You may have noticed that I haven’t slept for several nights. It’s simply the ‘fear.’ It really is stronger than I am, it tosses me around at will, I don’t know up from down anymore or right from left.”
- “When will this crazy world finally be straightened out a little? I wander around with a burned-out head by day — there are such beautiful ruins everywhere in the mountains here, they make me think I have to become that beautiful myself — but once in bed instead of sleep I have the best ideas.”
- “… how could I have slept since I — who am too light for sleep — was constantly flying around you.”
Letters to Milena Edition
I have the Schocken Kafka Library edition of Letters to Milena, and I greatly enjoyed the translation. It attempts to faithfully preserve the author’s grammar and writing style, and it even reproduces portions of the author’s handwriting, bringing you one step closer to him.