Franz Kafka to Milená Jesenská
    In 1919 the German-speaking Czech writer Franz Kafka, recuperating from tuberculosis in a sanatorium, received a letter from a 24 year old journalist from Vienna, Milená Jesenská. She wanted to translate his enigmatic stories into Czech. Early in 1920 she sent him her first translations, and they bean a tormented two year passion that was conducted almost entirely by correspondence. for Kafka, Milená'a letters were

"...the most beautiful thing that ever happened in my life."
Those letters have been lost. Kafka's own undated letters, preserved by Milená and hidden in Prague during World War II, tell a story with few fixed points. The letter printed here is from near the end of their relationship. The paranoia and uncertainty it expresses--about Milená's husband finding out, and about the potential sexuality of the relationship--typify Kafka's state of mind throughout the affair.
    Initially they wrote in German, Kafka's native language. He later insisted that Milená write in Czech, since he could only capture her whole personality through her native tongue. After the first Czech letter, Kafka wrote:

"I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so determined, it's almost a meeting, although when I try to raise my eyes to your face, what breaks into the flow of the letter...is fire and I see nothing but fire."
Kafka found her intensity intriguing, but felt that the fire in her personality burned mainly for her husband, Ernst Polak. In fact, Milená's relationship with her husband was disintegrating at the time. He excluded her from his social and intellectual life, and made no attempt to hide his affairs with other women. In the face of Ernst's infidelities she reached completely to the sensitive personality that came across in her prose:

"One leans right back and drinks the letters, oblivious of everything except that one doesn't want to stop drinking."
She was not the first woman in Kafka's life, and he tried to be objective about their future together:

"I've been engaged twice (three times, if you wish, that's to say twice to the same girl), so I've been separated three times from marriage by only a few days. The first one is completely over...the second is without any prospect of marriage..."
He wanted to marry, he explained, but feared it would affect his writing. For Kafka, marriage was not a way out of loneliness but a vision of security, a vocation in itself:

"Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world and perhaps even guiding them a little, is I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all."
    Such ordinary happiness was beyond Kafka. He was well liked, thoughtful, and generous, but his real life was a surreal fabric of the mind, beset by anxieties. He analyzed every move until no move was possible. In one of his stories he wrote about a man who is fascinated by a spinning top and wants to know how it works. Yet every time he grabs it, it goes dead in his hands. So too, it turned out, with his and Milená's relationship; it was beautiful in the abstract, but failed to work once it involved physical realities.
    After months of writing to each other, Kafka and Milená became impatient to meet face to face. The struggled to arrange a few days or hours together, either in Vienna or Gmünd, on the border between Austria and Czechoslovakia. Kafka was nervous about the meeting, using any excuse to cancel or delay it. In one letter he argued that their ages were the problem. Milená was so young, he protested, and he was nearly 38 (in fact he was 36). In another he objected on the grounds that the nervous strain would be too much for him:

"I'm quite definitely not coming, but if I do--it won't happen--shock myself by arriving in Vienna, I'll need neither breakfast nor supper but a stretcher."
Gradually he came to accept the idea. Feeling excited, but uncertain, he assured Milená,

"You don't have to worry; once I get into the coach to Vienna, I'll more than likely get out at Vienna, only the getting represents difficulties."
    Four days in Vienna in the summer of 1920 was the most physical point of their relationship. Neither had much taste for,

"the half-hour in bed--men's business,"
as Milená called it. Besides Milená was married, and her husband's interest in her seemed reawakened by Kafka's attentions. During the weeks that followed, they discussed over and over again in their letters the problem of whether they could live together or not. In August Milená wrote explicitly that she could not leave her husband. Kafka replied that he had known her answer all along:

"It was behind nearly all your letters...it was in your eyes."
Simple domestic love could never be theirs:

"We shall never live together, in the same apartment, body to body, at the same table, never, not even in the same town."
    Gradually the letters became less passionate and more like entries in a diary. Kafka's health deteriorated and Milená began to fell that she had added to his anxieties. She suggested a meeting, but he could not bear the pressure of seeing her again, and shortly afterward proposed that they stop writing to each other. He wrote to Milená that he was aware of an

"irresistibly strong voice, actually your voice, that's demanding silence from me...These letters are nothing but torture, produced by torture, irremediable..."
In the end it was Kafka who made the decision that he and Milená should stop seeing each other:

"Don't write and avoid meeting me, just fulfill this request for me in silence, it's the only way I can somehow go on living..."
In fact, he had little more life to live. He died of tuberculosis in 1924, two years after the relationship ended. Milená treasured his letters for the rest of her life.





Text from
Famous Love Letters
Messages of Intimacy and Passion
Edited by Ronald Tamplin