Last summer, my wife and I visited the Olšan Cemetery to visit her father's grave, Dr. Jaromir Bleche, a noble gentleman for whom I have so many memories. We passed the grave Kafka's, in which, next to the writer, lies the father Hermann and mother Julija. The grave of the Kafkas is in the lower part of the alley, where the path leads, not far, about a hundred meters, from the grave of my family in Prague. On the middle leg is a plaque erected by the Jewish community:
It is the shadow of Dr. Max Brod, native of Prague, writer and thinker, ascetic of Czech culture abroad, friend of Franz Kafka and interpreter of his works.
There are no flowers on the plaque, the flower is withering - it is a Jewish custom to leave a stone on the grave. Next to the marble tablet with the name of the writer Zamka lie the little things left by attendees from all over: a set of keys, with an inscription in Japanese, a plastic message, the size of a palm, in Spanish, a metal rattle with cuneiform letters, a charm, a cellophane booklet, battered by the rain, in Hebrew ...
The tombstone of the Kafkas is narrow, like an obelisk, more modest than others in this - perhaps the largest cemetery of literature, to which it belongs by language. Many rest there, almost the entire Prague circle (creativity 1900 - 1940). This cemetery speaks, perhaps more than any other, German. And behind the German speech there is a long, Jewish silence.
Max Brod
An entire literature lies in the Olšan cemetery.
They were buried there Karel Havlicek Borovski (1821-1856), Václav Kliment Klicpera (1792-1859), Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848, philosopher and theologian from Charles University), Jinjih Figner, an educator Josef Jungmann (1773-1847), František Ladislav Celakovski (1793-1852) - dozens, hundreds of writers, musicians, painters, theologians, architects, a whole history of art.
Why is Prague a mythical center - because it has been in contact with the whole of Europe since ancient times, and for centuries the European river flowed here from everywhere. Both before and after the Habsburg Empire, I don't know if there is another such city, from which you can't travel easily (Prague resists you moving somewhere else from it!), and it can be reached from all sides.
The secret of the city, where the novelist, biographer, publicist, translator, essayist was born Max Brod (1884), is that, although it is a big city, it is able to put on the mask of its suburbs: Jozefov (Jewish mask), or, for example, the mask of Royal Vinohrady (bourgeois), or Libenj (working class), or Karlin (again Jewish mask - that's where I spent my years of happiness), and became seemingly minor, among the big cities of Europe, but in fact it remained what it is - a mailbox of European culture.
Postal, in the sense of a knot, because it contains a Russian gesture and influence, and German, and Slavic-Balkan, and Francophone, and Latin (Latin scholars left an indelible mark on Renaissance as well as Baroque Prague), and Jewish.
It is the chronicle of the Prague cemetery - there lie so many letters, so many letters and cards, postal ones, and those sent at night, via confidential couriers, so many discussions and disputations, written and sent immediately, to the recipient, even if the recipient was in the next street, as Mr. Kafka wrote to his father, or Max Brod, dear Kafka, and vice versa, from one street to the next. But what Prague's Jewish writers wrote to each other were not just letters, it was epistolary literature - and Prague became the postal stage of world literature.
Epistolary love
Epistolaries do not belong to secondary styles, by any means. Writing letters in the Middle Ages was considered an art. Even today, it is so, the works of good writers are not complete without their correspondence - without intimate, personal tones.
Epistolary prose is dialogic prose, in fact, it flared up, with all its poetic power, after one of the great European discoveries, the discovery of dialogue - I mean the ancient, and the scholastic phase of that discovery - because the letter, the intimate act of the one who writes, was born in silence, and of the one who reads, also realized in silence, a special kind of dialogue.
Manifest forms of that dialogue - a family letter, a letter to a friend, a letter to a loved one, an official (administrative) letter, a diplomatic letter (despatch - dispatch, franc. to hurry), an open letter, i.e. a letter through the press, depersonalized so that everyone reads it - are stylistic signs of the writer's relaxation, and his informal speech is a sign of closeness, with the reader, a sign of an emotional connection, a friendly gesture, etc.
But the most important thing in epistolary literature is the miracle of this world: that a letter is written for one reader, and reaches the hands of thousands and hundreds of thousands of others. I understand epistolary prose as the property of hundreds of thousands of readers, as the art of writing, which the author of the letter turns into a literary work, into poetry, into an epistolary novel.
What better example than Kafka's most intimate work: Letters to Milena? In a word, the emotion of art and artistic creativity - through healing the soul with dialogue.
Silent dialogues
Dialogue, which are Elizabethan dramatists, headed by Shakespeare, brought to the highest and farthest literary point in the universe (at least in the universe of the genre), epistolary literature colors emotionally. Dialogue is more the property of the one who writes, and the one to whom it is addressed, than in the public Elizabethan literary work.
[“To see each other sooner, than I think (see, I write 'we see', you write 'we will live together') - and I think... that we will never live together..." - Kafka writes to Milena Jesenska in October 1920 ) -. And it's that plunge into the depths, that probe to the heart, with which other genres don't reach that deep].
Love literary correspondence - the relationship between two people, in their minor worlds, which later becomes literature - is a real monument to this genre, and the books that lovers exchange and write about them in confidence, as if they were old writers, authors, still alive, push the boundaries in the reader's relationship to the book and bring it closer to him, bribe him with it. That's how they write Milena and Franz: they mutually read, and together enjoy the authors:
Dostoevsky, Božena Nȇmcová, literary diva of Czech romanticism (1820-1862), Tolstoy, Rudyard Kipling, Chekhov, Robert Louis Stevenson (Milena loved him especially). - They enjoy the books of mutual friends: Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Rudolf Fuchs (1890-1942), who visited Kafka on his deathbed, in the Kierling sanatorium near Vienna. The two celebrate the comfort of the present, like Max Brod, in their novel Franci, or love of the second order, subtitled A Prague novel, which Kafka had in his hands with the dedication:
"I dedicate the book to those critics, says Brod, who will hardly understand it. Yes, upon my word, I love you, regular readers, who skip over what I care about, and take the poet for that word he thought differently, while in other places you read big, as little, and consider a serious word a joke. And those faces of yours, which say you know all that better! And yet, joking aside, we are comrades, contemporaries, companions, willy-nilly! All right, you, who have followed me on my journey so faithfully, all this far - receive this book, in which the secret role of evil and imperfection in the universe is brought to light."
Gentle sex
The ship announced Biography of Franz Kafka for the first time in 1935-37, in Berlin and Prague, in six volumes, with evaluations of the works of writers. However, later contributions, similar to epistolary ones, although not of a purely copy or correspondence character, contributed to the construction of one big world, with yuppie from small gardens and orchards, and their authors are:
Rudolf Fuchs, Dora Diamond, Oskar Baum, Milena Jesenska, Johannes Urzidil, Robert Weltsch, Franz Werfel, Friedrich Theiberger, Willy Haas, Otto Pick i dr.
Brod is, by vocation, a novelist of a novelist, because, since his beginnings in the Prague Circle, he has shown an interest in Prague biographies - in 1915 he published a novelized biography of a famous astronomer, a naturalized Prague citizen from the beginning of the 17th century, The Silent Brahe (Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott: Tycho Brahe's way to God). They follow Reuben, prince of the Jews (Reubeni, Fürst der Juden); material, Biography of Heinrich Heine (Biografie von Heinrich Heine); Franz Kafka's thinking and learning (Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre); Johan Ruhlin and his struggle (Johannes Reuchlin und sein Kampf) - I am listing only some of Brod's tireless titles.
Brod's path is, to a considerable extent, historical - I am not talking now about the mainstream, where Kafka's gesture and empiricism are always present, but about work outside Kafka's aura - and therefore, I am obliged to distinguish historicity, in the formulation of minor worlds, from psychology within the same formulations. Big difference. History and psychology speak a different language, each has its own.
My personal experience, the Balkans as a whole, suggests to me that I live in an unbearable inflation of historical material. Opinion on the surface of the inflationary, historical method is damaged by history, like a stomach with too much fat, like a heart with too much misfortune, like a body with too much effort.
The most spontaneous Prague companion Gustav Meyrink and Kafke is Max Brod. Practical psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and, in general, the reception of psychoanalytic discourse in recent times also contains much sharper, more ambitious feminist voices, understandably, but in the emergence of psychoanalysis and the emancipatory wave, with dominant female voices, in the orchestra, in parallel, it was far from the case. At that time, in the era of parallel appearances of subconscious, and female, voices of completely new - so, the antagonism towards the feminism of someone who creates a world, exactly conjunct the feminist, psychoanalytic world - does not abate.
By himself joy it is noticed that he sees a woman as another face of a man, admittedly, but still inferior - as a being of a different character, and that he even ridicules the feminist insistence on equality with men. - In the second place, he ignores gender differences-; it is a speech, not only his, but the speech of the age, a social, psychological, mental speech, reminiscent of the ringing voice of the old empires, in which a man from the age of fifteen to sixty does not drop his weapon from his hands.
The field of battle will later expand, the antagonisms relegated to the background, especially after the book Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), Second gender (1949), which will accuse Freud of having created an atmosphere for male supremacy and, in her view, rightly, provoked misogynistic reactions from the female sex.
Literary roses
Max Brod is a prolific writer - 83 titles.
He was not the only one among Kafka's friends who had literary roses - there was also Franz Werfel, admittedly older than both of them, but still belonging to the common nest enough to be able to talk about a generation, tastes and style with common features.
"The world of the Prague Jews was examined, with a dense network of emulation and mutual monitoring, the parental voice did not reach anywhere from afar. However, on this narrow stage, a utopia flashed, promising something like liberation, a kind of life, which is not the life of an old bachelor, nor marriage, but a playful, intoxicating life only for art," he says. Pure sting. And he continues:
"This utopia is called Werfel. Kafka adored this young man, who seems to have managed almost unconsciously everything, for which Kafka reached out his hands in vain - Werfel, admittedly, was not a role model that Kafka could follow or trust; the difference of seven years meant a different level of experience, and responsibility and could not provide a healing closeness." (Reiner Stach, Kafka - Die Jahre der Enscheidungen, S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt, 2002, 411).
"Dearest Max", as Kafka called him, wrote criticism for a newspaper in Prague Prager Tagblatt. Before the war, he immigrated to Israel, where he was a playwright of the national theater for the next three decades Habimachus.
Not only Kafka, whose work he saved from destruction, but also writers Franz Werfel and Felix Weltsch. He was a master of the literary title, see: About the beauty of ugly pictures (1913) A woman who will not disappoint you (1934) An almost gifted student (1952) The woman he longs for (1953) and others.
He died in Jerusalem on December 20, 12, leaving world literature with the composure not to fall into temptation and burn Kafka's legacy.
Bonus video:
