We know this sentence written by Franz Kafka in his diary on August 2, 1914, often commented on: “Germany has declared war on Russia. — In the afternoon, swimming pool. » A mixture of heaviness and carelessness, a way of being foreign to the world, wherever it is, whatever happens.
In the first volume of his monumental biography of the Austro-Hungarian writer, Kafka. Time for decisions (Le Cherche midi, 2023), Reiner Stach left us with a Kafka wanting to resign from the Insurance Office, leave the parental home, settle in Berlin and make a living from writing.
But nothing will really happen as he dreamed. This second volume,Kafka. The time of knowledge, immerses us in the turbulent years from 1915 to 1924 (the third volume, which is much less interesting, will cover the writer’s childhood years). The psychodrama of the end of his engagement to Felice Bauer, the abandonment of writing Trialthe state of the world and the editorial upheavals linked to the war will particularly affect Kafka – without forgetting the tuberculosis diagnosed in 1917.
From the author of Metamorphosis at this moment in his life, “private disaster and collective disaster” meet, tells us the biographer, who once again admirably goes back and forth between the events of the writer’s inner and creative life and the historical and family context that was his.
In 1915, Franz Kafka was a 32-year-old man, single, insomniac and migraine sufferer. Deemed fit for military service in 1914, obstinate for the next two years in his desire to serve in the army (he even bought himself a pair of military boots) and considering himself useless at work, Kafka was nevertheless deemed indispensable by his employer.
His irresolution, his endless scruples, his suicidal thoughts: Kafka, for Reiner Stach, is “an archetype, the paradigmatic example of an abstract interiority which devours itself”. Despite the efforts and deprivations, nothing will succeed in erasing the powerful feeling of failure that he felt, in all spheres of his existence.
“At a time when works of language are subject to massive competition from faster and more impactful media,” writes Reiner Stach, “the need to write, if not writing itself, has something of an obsolete fad. And Kafka’s glory has contributed not a little to inhibiting our empathy for his despair as a writer. »
His “failure”, we know today, was not one. A clear case of literary dysmorphia – an abundant condition these days, however with symptoms most often the opposite. During the last ten years, Kafka will nevertheless write A country doctorthere Letter to father, The castle. In addition to passionate letters addressed to Milena Jesenská, his Czech translator.
More than a biographer, Reiner Stach is an interpreter, with the profile of a sociologist and historian. The author of a fantastic dive into the heart of a tormented era, through the ups and downs of a major writer of the 20th centurye century.