Back Кафка, Франц Abkhazian Franz Kafka Afrikaans Franz Kafka ALS ፍራንዝ ካፍካ Amharic Franz Kafka AN فرانس كافكا Arabic فرانتس كافكا ARY فرانز كافكا ARZ ফ্ৰান্জ কাফ্কা Assamese Franz Kafka AST
Franz Kafka | |
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 Kafka in 1923 | |
| Born | 3 July 1883 Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | 3 June 1924 (aged 40) Klosterneuburg, Lower Austria, Austria |
| Resting place | New Jewish Cemetery, Prague |
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| Alma mater | German Charles-Ferdinand University |
| Occupations |
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| Works | List |
| Style | Modernism |
| Signature | |
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Franz Kafka[b] (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a Jewish Austrian-Czech[4] novelist and writer from Prague who wrote in German. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic,[5] and typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity.[6] His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926). The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.[7]
Kafka was born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which belonged to the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today the capital of the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia).[8][9] He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time in various legal and insurance jobs.[10] Being employed full-time forced Kafka to relegate writing to his spare time. Few of his works were published during his lifetime; the story collections Contemplation (1912) and A Country Doctor (1919), and individual stories, such as his novella The Metamorphosis, were published in literary magazines, but they received little attention. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died relatively unknown in 1924 of tuberculosis, at the age of 40.
Kafka was a prolific writer, but he burned an estimated 90 percent of his total work due to persistent struggles with self-doubt. Much of the remaining 10 percent is lost or otherwise unpublished. In his will, Kafka instructed his close friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika (1927), but Brod ignored these instructions and had much of his work published. Kafka's writings became famous in German-speaking countries after World War II, influencing German literature, and its influence spread elsewhere in the world in the 1960s. It has also influenced artists, composers, and philosophers.
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- ^ Koelb 2010, p. 12.
- ^ Czech Embassy 2012.
- ^ "Kafka". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Archived from the original on 26 December 2014.
- ^ Herz, Julius M. (1978). "Franz Kafka and Austria: National Background and Ethnic Identity". Modern Austrian Literature. 11 (3/4): 301–318. JSTOR 24645937. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
Kafka, after all, was not just a Prague Jew living in Bohemia. He was also, for more than thirty-five years, an Austrian citizen caught in the middle of many cross-currents.... We might wonder whether or to what extent he considered himself an Austrian, for this question must have occurred to him more than once. For the Jews living in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy life was seriously affected by the highly heterogeneous population.
- ^ Spindler, William (1993). "Magical Realism: A Typology". Forum for Modern Language Studies. XXIX (1): 90–93. doi:10.1093/fmls/XXIX.1.75. ISSN 0015-8518.
- ^ Franz Kafka at the Encyclopædia Britannica
- ^ Steinhauer 1983, pp. 390–408.
- ^ "Heroes – Trailblazers of the Jewish People". Beit Hatfutsot. Archived from the original on 31 July 2020. Retrieved 14 November 2019.
- ^ "A new translation of Franz Kafka's diaries restores much of his Jewish musings". www.jta.org. 12 January 2023. Retrieved 2 October 2024.
- ^ Gray, Jefferson M., review in The Federal Lawyer, October 2009, of Franz Kafka: The Office Writings. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009.