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Letters to Milena
Franz Kafka
The passionate but doomed epistolary love affair between a Czech translator and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial.
“Extraordinary…touching, horrifying, brilliant, sickly, [and] heartbreaking…. The most significant key we have for a reading of the author’s novels and short stories.” —The New York Times
In no other work does Kafka reveal himself as in the Letters to Milena, which begin essentially as a business correspondence but soon develop into a passionate “letter love.” Milena Jesenská was a gifted and charismatic woman of twenty-three. Kafka’s Czech translator, she was uniquely able to recognize his complex genius and his even more complex character.
For the thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was “a living fire, such as I have never seen.” It was to her that he revealed his most intimate self. It was to her that, after the end of the affair, he entrusted the safekeeping of his diaries.
Newly translated, revised, and expanded, this edition contains material previously omitted because of its extreme sensitivity. Also included for the first time are letters and essays by Milena Jesenská, herself a talented writer as well as the recipient of these documents of Kafka’s love, anxiety, and despair.
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Rae
“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
▸ While reading it, It reminded me of a struggle I had with no experience in this sort of love when love is just vulnerability where you open your ribcage and everything ugly is out for others to poke at painfully. Reading it gave me a sense of clarity at the time that my definition of love isn’t always flowers and smiles or ‘we are destined to be together and happily ever after’, it is also the intimacies of allowing yourself to feel even in your loneliness and hurt. It also reminded me of this tension I had between the fear of life experiences and aching to be close with someone.
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