Читать книгу Essential Novelists - Franz Kafka - August Nemo, John Dos Passos, Ellen Glasgow - Страница 3

Author

FRANZ KAFKA was the eldest son of an upper middle-class Jewish family who was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, the capital of Bohemia, a kingdom that was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Tragedy shaped the Kafka home. Franz's two younger brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy by the time Kafka was 6, leaving the boy the only son in a family that included three daughters (all of whom would later die in Nazi death camps or a Polish ghetto).

Kafka had a difficult relationship with both of his parents. His mother, Julie, was a devoted homemaker who lacked the intellectual depth to understand her son's dreams to become a writer. Kafka's father, Hermann, had a forceful personality that often overwhelmed the Kafka home. He was a success in business, making his living retailing men's and women's clothes. Kafka seems to have derived much of his value directly from to his family, in particular his father. For much of his adult life, he lived within close proximity to his parents.

In 1906 Kafka completed his law degree and embarked on a year of unpaid work as a law clerk. After completing his apprenticeship, Kafka found work with the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia.Kafka remained with the company until 1917, when a bout with tuberculosis forced him to take a sick leave and to eventually retire in 1922.

At the time of his death, Kafka was appreciated only by a small literary coterie. His name and work would not have survived if his friend Max Brod had honoured Kafka’s testament—two notes requiring his friend to destroy all unpublished manuscripts and to refrain from republishing the works that had already appeared in print. Brod took the opposite course, and thus the name and work of Kafka gained worldwide posthumous fame.