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Franz Kafka

  • Франц Кафка
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Kafka, Franz
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Type
Person
Gender
Male
Date of birth
1883-07-03
Place of birth
Praha
Date of death
1924-06-03
Place of death
Austria

Wikipedia

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a novelist and writer from Prague. He wrote in German and is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It 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. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.

Kafka was born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today the capital of Czechia, also known as the Czech Republic). He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time, for a year handling cases for the indigent in the city's Provincial and Criminal Courts by an insurance company, then working for nine months for an Italian insurance company, and finally, starting in 1908, spending 14 years with the Austrian Imperial and Royal Workmen's Accident Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia and its successor under the Czechoslovak Republic, rising to the position of chief legal secretary.

Being employed full-time forced Kafka to relegate writing to his spare time. 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 in obscurity in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.

Kafka was a prolific writer, spending most of his free time writing, often late into the night. He burned an estimated 90 percent of his total work due to his persistent struggles with self-doubt. Much of the remaining 10 percent is lost or otherwise unpublished. Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime; although the story collections Contemplation and A Country Doctor, and individual stories, such as his novella The Metamorphosis, were published in literary magazines, they received little attention.

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, 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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Annotation

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer.

Last modified: 2020-10-11 (revision #32239)

Editions

NameFormatISBNRelease Date
Das SchloßPaperback3-596-20900-51982-10
Die Verwandlung (white box cover, Oliver Jahraus afterword)Paperback978-3-15-009900-12019
Amerika (Fischer Bücherei, red beam)Paperback?1967-03
Die Verwandlung (manuscript cover)Paperback3-15-009900-52002
La metamorfosis y otros cuentosPaperback95003966612013
The Metamorphosis (Stanley Corngold translation and edit)Paperback9780393967975?
Briefe an MilenaPaperback978-3-596-25307-41986
Das SchloßHardcover3-353-00183-21987
Das Urteil und andere Erzählungen (fence cover)Paperback?1952-11
Brief an den VaterPaperback978-3-596-21629-11981-08-01
Der ProzeßPaperback3-596-20676-61980-02
Das Urteil und andere Erzählungen (archway cover)Paperback?1958-02
Die Verwandlung (white box cover, Egon Schwarz afterword)Paperback978-3-15-009900-12014
Der Proceß (Reclam UB, yellow cover with handwriting)Paperback978-3-15-009676-52011
Sämtliche Erzählungen (Franz Kafka, brown cover)Paperback?1970-01
Sämtliche Erzählungen (Franz Kafka, cover with drawing)Paperback3-596-21078-X1981-05
ПревращениеHardcover978-5-17-153567-42023-08
Erzählungen (Kafka / Brecht / Böll collection)Paperback?1970
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Identifiers

Goodreads Author ID
5223
ISNI
0000 0001 2280 370X
LibraryThing Author
kafkafranz
MusicBrainz Artist ID
43b658ff-e3e4-4928-9685-b1b7224d61d4
OpenLibrary Author ID
OL33146A
VIAF
56611857
Wikidata ID
Q905
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Last Modified
2024-07-21