The manuscript of “The Metamorphosis” and several items by Kafka are on display in New York

Table of Contents

• 1 “I have little to myself.”
• 2 The author of “Amerika” never set foot in America
• 3 ‌ In what ways has Kafka’s exploration ‍of themes like isolation and ‌absurdity​ influenced ⁣contemporary literature⁢ and cultural understanding of the human condition?

New York, November 22 (EFE).- There are stories that start with unforgettable phrases, which everyone knows even without having read the book, like this one: “When Gregorio Samsa woke up one morning after a restless dream, he found himself in his bed turned into a terrible beast.”

The manuscript “The Metamorphosis” in which Franz Kafka wrote these disturbing images is on display from today until April at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, along with dozens of items belonging to the person -art: postcards in Kafka’s handwriting, first editions, letters to his lovers and many other documents.

The idea of ​​that terrible cock imitating a salesman’s body was so clear in Kafka’s head that you can see how he wrote the first two sentences straight, without changes, and continued to writing the entire first page with very few erasures.

“I was not dreaming,” the text continues after describing in detail the “thin legs that shook without concert” as Gregorio Samsa tried to understand what happened to him.

Kafka was only 29 years old when he wrote ‘The Metamorphosis’, stealing time from his anodyne activities as an insurance broker, and although his calling was literature, he enjoyed neither recognition nor fame in his life. short (he died at the age of 40 years). from consumption).

However, the impact of that work has been enormous: in 1946, another great writer, Vladimir Nabokov, an expert on butterflies, entertained himself by drawing the insect that Kafka the details described in the novel, to arrive at something similar. .

“I have little to myself.”

The exhibition, with material donated by Oxford University’s Bolden Library, includes several letters from his favorite sister, Otta – who was later murdered in the Nazi ovens – as well as description of her serious health problems and her approach to the world. Jewish as an adult, when his family was never aware.

But his interest in Judaism did not help him to enlighten his tormented world. And so, he wrote to his good friend and literary executor when he died: “What do I have in common with the Jews? “I don’t have much in common with myself and I should stay very still in a corner, happy to be able to breathe,” he told him.

His breathing was not accidental: the tuberculosis had greatly weakened him, and his respiratory system was so damaged that he could barely swallow solid food. That may have been one of the reasons why he became a vegetarian, as he admitted to Otta in another postcard that “as you know, I can’t even chew meat… “.

But contrary to the widespread belief that he was a sick person, the exhibition describes Kafka who fought against tuberculosis with large doses of exercise, and who was very fond of swimming and walking in the forests of his native Bohemia.

Kafka, who grew up under the shadow of his ruling father, did not even become independent, and continued to live in the apartment he shared with his parents and three siblings. The family uproar had disturbed him, and his tormented soul referred to his own room as “noise headquarters.”

For this reason, he took advantage of his business trips as an insurance broker to, in the silence of the hotels, write literature, as well as postcards to his lovers and his friend Brod, who saved his work to all for the future. .

The author of “Amerika” never set foot in America

Kafka traveled widely throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy, but he never left Europe. That didn’t stop him from writing ‘Amerika’, a novel he left unfinished about a young man’s trip to the United States, a country he says is ultra-modern, feverishly described modern tools and the struggle of the workers.

The exhibition includes a section on his novel ‘The Castle’, with many posthumous editions when new manuscripts were discovered. It is strange how the novel begins in the first person (“ich”, I in German) and then switches to third person with the name K.

In the novel’s castle, an ominous place where individual K shrinks to nothing, there was a strange translation in real life with the colony designed by the Spaniard Ricardo Bofill in Sant Pere de Ribes , a set of cubes stacked in an almost delirious pile.

A “Kafkaesque” pileup, we might say. There are not many writers in the world who created a world so personal that it gave rise to an adjective.