You would have been 141 years old today. Sadly, you fell about 100 years short of that mark; you passed away — of tuberculosis — just a month shy of your 41st birthday, on June 3rd of 1924.

I heard so much about you during that summer of 1991 when I lived in Prague, the city of your birth. Although you were educated in German schools, and spoke and wrote primarily in the German language, you had become the pride of your native Czechoslovakia.

I learned that your life was a difficult one: your physical health, your lack of self-confidence, your sexual confusion, fear of your tyrannical father, boredom with your routine daytime jobs . . . all of these undoubtedly contributed to your general melancholy. But your level of intelligence and profound thought processes helped you to overcome your difficulties for the most part, and you found satisfaction in your writing. You were influenced by the writings of others such as Edgar Allan Poe and Friedrich Nietzsche, and were so taken with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov that you were known to refer to that author as a “blood relative.” Is it any wonder, then, that your own works tended to lean so heavily toward the dystopian?

But that summer of 1991 was also the “Year of Mozart” in Prague. And I found myself attending so many concerts of his music in the evenings after work, and exploring the many wonders of Prague and the surrounding areas on weekends, that I found no time for reading. And in all the years since, I confess — with no small measure of shame — that I have yet to read any of your works.

But I am about to remedy that shortcoming. I have ordered an anthology of your most famous Metamorphosis and other stories, and having just finished the book I’ve been engrossed in for the past week, will dig right into yours as soon as Amazon delivers. Which should actually be any minute now.

Being myself a fan of Dostoevsky (though I claim no familial relationship), I expect not to be disappointed — or freaked out — by your creative imaginings. I’ll let you know.

In the meantime . . .

. . . happy birthday, Franz Kafka, wherever you are.

Brendochka
7/3/24