Letters to Milena

Letters to MilenaThe passionate but doomed epistolary love affair between a Czech translator and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. "Extraordinary touching, horrifying, brilliant, sickly, [and] heartbreaking. The most significant key we have for a reading of the author's novels and short stories." The New York Times In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins

The passionate but doomed epistolary love affair between a Czech translator and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial.

"Extraordinary...touching, horrifying, brilliant, sickly, [and] heartbreaking.... The most significant key we have for a reading of the author's novels and short stories." --The New York Times

In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into an epistolary love affair. Kafka's Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, was a gifted and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka's complex genius and his even more complex character. For thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was "a living fire, such as I have never seen." It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping.