Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German language Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his work fuses elements of realism and the fantastique, and typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe situations like those depicted in his writings. His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926). Kafka was born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (later the capital of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic). He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time in various legal and insurance jobs. His professional obligations led to internal conflict as he felt that his true vocation was writing. Only a minority of his works were published during his life; the story-collections Contemplation (1912) and A Country Doctor (1919), and individual stories, such as his novella The Metamorphosis, were published in literary magazines, but they received little attention. He 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 relatively unknown in 1924 of tuberculosis, aged 40. Though the novels and short stories that Kafka wrote are typically invoked in his précis, he is also celebrated for his brief fables and aphorisms. Like his longer fiction, these sketches may be brutal in some aspects, but their dreadfulness is frequently funny. A close acquaintance of Kafka's remarks that both his audience and the author himself sometimes laughed so much during readings that Kafka could not continue in his delivery, finding it necessary to collect himself before completing his recitation of the work. Kafka's impact is evident in the frequent reception of his writing as a form of prophetic or premonitory vision, anticipating the character of a totalitarian future in the nightmarish logic of his presentation of the lived-present. These perceptions appear in the way that he renders the world inhabited by his characters and in his commentaries written in diaries, letters and aphorisms. Kafka's work has influenced numerous artists, composers, film-makers, historians, religious scholars, cultural theorists and philosophers.