KAFKA, FRANZ. - Born in Prague on 3 July 1882 to a Jewish family, died of tuberculosis in Kierling (Vienna) on 3 June 1924. He graduated in law in 1906 at the university of his native city. To 1912, the year of a journey of his to Weimar, some of his most significant stories date: Das Urteil and Die Verwandlung; it seems that the novel Amerika also dates from this period. In 1915 a literary prize, the "Fontanepreis", was awarded to him.
K.'s bitter and pessimistic experience of life, which is reflected in his work with the monotonous force of a nightmare, is ceaselessly deepened both in the stories whose publication the author himself supervised (the already mentioned ones, plus: Betrachtung [1913], Ein Landarzt and In der Strafkolonie [1919], Der Hungerkünstler [1924]), and in the three great novel drafts published posthumously. The dully hostile world of Amerika, the mysterious court of Der Prozess, the suffocating bureaucracy of Das Schloss represent one of the poles of K.'s poetic world, with a protagonist who, solitary before an unknown and elusive enemy, ends up being suppressed together with his vital problems. The other pole is represented by a faith which, accompanied at times by hope, has led some to imprudently discern in K. a progressive approach to Catholic positions, but which, much more often desperate, recalls existentialist positions, both through the influence of Kierkegaard and, and more so, through analogy of temperament.
In fact the problem which more than any other can bring the reader closer to a deeper understanding of K.'s world and thought is that of the relations between man and the law. A problem that is transfigured into poetic myth in the fragment Vor dem Gesetz, published in 1919, in Ein Landarzt and recast in Der Prozess, ch. 9. The relation of man to the supernatural law is here felt and fixed in the terms of a hallucinated vision, with defined contours, which leaves no room for hope. Every man has his own door, his own guardian; the entrance to the kingdom of the law is precluded and, when the man dies after years of waiting, the guardian closes the door through which no one else will be able to pass. Never, perhaps, as in this brief parable, has K. succeeded in synthesizing the drama of the human soul in search of the divine and of a reason for living: the imperious necessity of postulating a law on the one hand and, on the other, the profound and living sense of the necessity of an inner and individual conquest of the law itself.
This is the drama of all K.'s heroes, and it is this passionate defense of the category of the individual and of the single person that can bring him close to Kierkegaard, among the precursors of modern existentialism, while from the Judaic-Talmudic tradition one can derive the gloomy fatalism and the taste for relentlessly exact analyses, for subtle and exhausting arguments.
Bibliography6 works
Giulio de Angelis