Chapter 65 Franz Kafka, Father of 20th Century Literature

In the history of world literature, as a literary master, Kafka is extremely rare not to be the spokesperson of his own country or nation, and he does not seem to be the "conscience of the times".The contradiction and particularity of his identification made him doomed to have no refuge: he was a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but grew up in Prague, Czech Republic, and worked as a clerk in an Italian insurance company.His native language is German, but his ancestry is Jewish, but he kept a very large distance from Jewish life, religion and customs all his life.He can only be claustrophobic in his own small world with an ambiguous identity, focusing on some more important things, such as the individual's loneliness, discomfort and despair in front of a heterogeneous world.And it is these that made his immortal literary achievements, and he is called the pioneer and master of Western modernist literature together with Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

Kafka's life was ordinary and short.He was born in July 1883 in a middle-class family in Prague, then the Austro-Hungarian Empire.He is the eldest son of 4 siblings.His father was a self-made Jewish wholesaler of department stores. He was bossy and rude, and he was a "tyrant" in the family.After graduating from middle school, Franz Kafka once studied literature and medicine, but was soon forced by his father to study law at the German University in Prague and obtained a doctorate in law.After graduation, he practiced in a court for one year and then worked in an Italian insurance company.From 1908 until his retirement due to illness in 1922, he worked in a semi-official workers' accident insurance.In his life, he has only been to some cities in neighboring Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland.Kafka started hemoptysis in 1917, suffered from tuberculosis, and was weak. He died in the Kierling Sanatorium on the outskirts of Vienna in June 1924, and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Straschnitz, Prague on June 11. Only lived a short 41 years.He was engaged three times, and three times he voluntarily dissolved the engagement, but he never started a family of his own.Only half a year before his death, he lived with a Hebrew female teacher named Dora Dimante as a cohabitant, and accompanied him until his death.

Kafka was a diligent amateur writer.He loved literature since he was a child, and read and studied the literary and philosophical works of Ibsen, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Darwin.He started literary creation when he was studying in university, and often participated in some literary activities in Prague with his classmate and close friend Max Brod. He was employed in 1908 and left for recuperation due to serious illness in 1922. In more than ten years, he used his spare time to write dozens of short stories, three novels, "America", as well as diaries and letters, with no less than several million words.As a person who has been ill for a long time and has no fixed occupation, Kafka is undoubtedly a diligent amateur writer.

Most of Kafka's works are gloomy and mysterious, with bizarre and absurd plots, emphasizing the isolation, strangeness, and incomprehension between people.In his representative works, he brought the absurdity of life to the extreme.The titular land surveyor K trekked to the castle one snowy night, hoping to meet the owner of the castle and maybe get permission to start a family here.But from the moment he arrived at the village under the jurisdiction of the castle, his fate was doomed: although he made various efforts, he could even establish a certain relationship with the castle and achieved some results, but he could not step on it until his death. Step into the castle.

Commentators have different opinions on the castle he built. Some say it symbolizes the powerful state machine in capitalist society, while others say it represents a way of God in Judaism: forgiveness.We can also see it as a great metaphor about writing, and through solitude, Kafka can constantly approach it in various ways, because it is completely personal and his only; An incarnation of him, either K, or Karl, or a name constructed in the same way as Kafka, all living in the shadow of a brutish father or something like a father figure, all "shy, timid, Cowardly and kind", yet courageous in the hopeless struggle for entry into nothingness.

In the West, Kafka only attracted the attention of the world after World War II.Kafka was almost unknown during his lifetime, and only a handful of his works were published during his lifetime.His first collection of novels "Observation" had a total of 800 copies printed in the first edition, and more than half of them were still in the warehouse five years later.Kafka himself said that in a famous bookstore in Prague, a total of 11 books were sold over the years, "10 of them were easy to find buyers, because he bought them himself, but he always wanted to know who bought them. Take the 11th book." In 1963, when Kafka's 80th birthday was celebrated, an international Kafka Symposium was held in his hometown, which attested to the fact that "no one can offer a total denial Kafka's reason." After that, Kafka became the most important and influential writer in the world.The famous German writer Thomas Mann "listed the works written by Kafka as the most worth reading masterpieces of world literature".Hesse said: "I believe that Kafka will always belong to those figures who creatively, though painfully, expressed the premonition of great changes." A "distinguished learning".Not only did his work become the object of study for a new discipline, but it was listed as one of the most popular electives at the university.Kafka is known as "one of the best writers in the 20th century", "a legendary hero and a saint-like figure", and some people think that "his relationship with our era is the closest to that of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and their era". relation".

Kafka is considered to be the originator of modernist literature and the pioneer of expressionist literature. The themes of his works are tortuous and obscure, the plots are fragmented, the ideas are incoherent, the jumps are great, and the symbolic meaning of the language is very strong, which makes reading and understanding him difficult. The work poses certain difficulties.Kafka's works are difficult to read, and even German-speaking readers find it difficult to understand these works, but his unique understanding, profound criticism, and penetrating descriptions all deeply attract people.