Kafka’s Letters To Milena
“So, now I’ve been brooding over this letter until 1:30 at night without doing anything else, just staring at it, and through it at you,” Franz Kafka writes in Prague on a November evening in 1920. “Your face is hidden by your hair. . . I run my hands along your forehead to your temples and now I’m holding your face in my hands.”
Franz Kafka was writing to Milena Jesenská, a beautiful, intelligent, married 23-year old translator, who lived in Vienna.
What started as a professional correspondence after Milena translated Kafka’s short story “The Stoker” into Czech turned into something more. The unlikely lovers exchanged letters falling headlong into the hope and ecstasy of love, mingling with the sadness of maybe never being together.
Milena was the only writer to be romantically involved with the thirty-six-year-old, chronically ill Kafka (he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917).
The epistolary love affair lasted from April to November 1920. They only met twice, spending four blissful days in Vienna, and then later a stolen day in Gmünd, an Austrian town on the border of what is now the Czech Republic.
Kafka eventually ceased the correspondence, as the agony of unfulfilled romance became too much for him, ghosting Milena in the autumn.
“Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts… One can think about someone far away, and one can hold on to someone nearby. Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way,” he concluded.
Milena Jesenká was a journalist, a translator, a rebel, and a passionate romantic. The daughter of a conservative surgeon, Milena dropped out of medical school and partied all night with her friends, indulging in drugs and love and mingling with Prague’s circle of writers. She married Ernst Pollak, a Jewish literary critic, which put a permanent strain on her relationship with her father.
Pollak didn’t make enough money to support his wife, so Milena worked as a journalist, writing on fashion and lifestyle, and then later progressing to political topics like economic deprivation in postwar Vienna.
With time, Milena’s complicated marriage to Pollak dissolved. In 1924, Kafka’s lungs succumbed and he died, but not before entrusting all his private diaries in his once-lover’s safekeeping.
In 1925, Milena returned to Prague and remarried. Later in her life, she became politically active with the Communist Party, and started contributing to the liberal-democratic journal Presence, where she wrote on the Nazis’ expanding power in central Europe.
After the Nazis occupied Prague, she wrote for the underground press and helped Jews escape to Poland. The Gestapo arrested Milena in 1939 and sent her to a concentration camp, where she died after a failed kidney operation at the age of 47.
Only two writers of extraordinary soul and talent can sustain a relationship for approximately eight months solely through letters, channeling their longing in hope of a love that was destined to remain unfulfilled in words.
We read Franz Kafka’s letters to Milena knowing the letters themselves constitute the relationship, stunning any reader with their breathless beauty and tragedy.
While the lovers did not experience the idyll of togetherness in their lifetime (other than those four days in Vienna), the letters immortalize their longing in a perpetual love affair, enduring beyond time and even death.
By Iman Sultan
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.