Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena Jesenská: story of a tormented and impossible love through one hundred letters and two meetings
There was a time, somewhere in the 1910s, to read Kafka it was tremendously fashionable. A book, specifically, his Letters to Milena. Girls shared it on Tumblr, extrapolating some desperate love quotes and associating them with images from films about two lovers who ended irremediably badly, possibly one of the two died and this love was never able to come true. Or they photographed themselves, dressed in black and with a bow tied around their neck, while reading the volume lying on the bed. I envied the version that American girls flaunted which had a pastel pink cover and a giant “K” drawn on it, while mine, borrowed from the provincial library, was illustrated with a black and white image of a glass with a banal rose inside. While I’m trying to finally get hold of that much-desired book in English with a pink cover, I discover that it has also reached the TikTok generation, because the blurb who features the book on Amazon is “TikTok’s surprising bestseller.” What a fascination for that love story between the writer Franz Kafka, whose 100th anniversary of death marks June 3, 2024, and his Czech translator Milena Jesenská still resonates today, there is nothing surprising about it, on the contrary, perhaps it is precisely today that we can better understand and appreciate its nuances, but above all its limits. They have never been engaged or lovers in the carnal sense, they have only seen each other twice in their lives: first they spent four days together in Vienna, while the second time they met for a day in an Austrian town. Theirs was a relationship that developed in the interstices of the letters they sent each other with punctuality and poetic intensity. What today we could define, using the jargon of the generation that rediscovered it on TikTok, one situationship.
In Milena’s translations, Kafka finally feels understood
They met in a literary circle in Prague in 1920, at the café among friends they enjoyed talking about new releases in bookstores and making mischievous comments on the failures of the most established writers. Milena takes courage and after that first meeting she writes a letter to Kafka in which she tells him that she has read some of her stories and that she would like to become his translator from German to Czech. He immediately likes the idea, given that she writes in German, a language that, given the historical moment, she considers that of the oppressors, while she sees Czech as the language of the people. Milena’s translations open up possible universes in him in which he finally feels understood: she translates the sentences exactly as he means them. He liked to wallow in the idea of being alone and misunderstood in the world, so it seems impossible to him that anyone could understand him so well and not judge him for the nonsense he writes.. They begin a correspondence that will end only with his death, 130 letters in total, collected in 300 pages, of which however only those written by the author have been handed down to us and not by his translator, whose answers we can only imagine.
From “Very kindly. Kafka” to only “Yours”
When they begin to write to each other, Franz Kafka is going to the sanatorium in Merano to treat his lung disease: he suffers from tuberculosis and over the years the letters testify to the worsening of the disease for which he will die at the age of 40 in 1924. A very sweet detail that has identified immediately by Gen Z on TikTok is the evolution of the words he chooses to conclude his letters, which range from formal “Very cordially. Kafka” to the more colloquial “Your Franz K.”, which then becomes “Your Franz K.”, a written F and that’s it, to then finally transform into “Your. (Now I also lose the name; it has become shorter and shorter and now it sounds: Yours.)”.
Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka
The tormented love story par excellence
Those who grew up on Tumblr were a generation that fed on impossible love stories and delighted in torturing themselves by sharing quotes about falling in and out of love. So what happened between Kafka and Milena bordered on perfection, the unachievable love par excellence, delicately thought and said through letters, but never consummated. «You in Vienna, I with anguish in Prague, and not only you, but I too, drag out our marriage in vain», Kafka writes in a letter, clearly explaining the impediment to their story: Milena had been married for years and she had no intention of leaving her husband, despite experiencing a sexual promiscuity with him that did not satisfy her at all and which she resolved by regularly using drugs. Kafka, for his part, was first engaged to Felice Bauer, then engaged, and re-engaged again. But this did not prevent them from exchanging fleeting passionate letters full of desperate declarations: «And perhaps it is not true love if I say that you are the dearest thing to me; love is the fact that you are for me the knife with which I search inside myself”, writes Franz in one of these. Already in one of the first of his he concludes by writing in a footnote: «It occurs to me that I cannot remember any precise detail of his face. I still only see how she walked away between the coffee tables, her figure, her dress.”
