BOOKS
MONSTROUS DUST
LETTERS TO MILENA. By Fronz Kofka. Edited by Willy Haas. Transloted
by Tania and Jomes Stern. Schocken Books. $3 .75.
The recipient of these letters was Milena Jesenlci, the "M"
of Kafka's later diaries. With her he corresponded at length in the early
stages of a love affair which began in 1920 and lasted for some two
years. He was very ill with consumption at the time; and after his death,
in 1924, Milena preserved his letters, entrusting them to Willy Haas
on the eve of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. Her part in the
correspondence has not survived and she herself died in a Nazi concen–
tration camp. Mr. Haas, who tells her story in the introduction to this
volume, knew her well, as he had also known Kafka. He seems to have
planned the book as a memorial to her.
She belonged, he writes, to a notable burgher family of Prague; and
though Kafka was a native of the same city, he does not appear to have
been acquainted with her there. Milena was of a younger generation
and had been caught up "in the erotic and intellectual promiscuity of
the Viennese literary cafe society in the wild years after 1918." Even
in that setting she was a rarity: "passionate, intrepid," "a character
such as Stendhal lifted out of the old Italian chronicles." When Kafka
first knew her, Milena was twenty-four and lived in Vienna with a
husband from whom she thought of separating. She taught school, wrote
for the magazines, admired Stevenson as well as Dostoevsky, and had
been quick to see the genius of Kafka's few published stories. She had
undertaken to translate his
Metamorphosis
into Czech, and it was while
corresponding about this project that they discovered one another.
To reconstruct the affair in its external developments would be
tedious,
if
not impossible, in the present state of the letters. This the
editor admits to be quite tentative. Mostly undated, often unclear in
their allusions to events and people, supplied with a minimum of edi–
torial notes, and occasionally deleted "out of consideration for persons
still alive," the letters must be read as a mere monologue. It hardly
matters. So far as one can make out, "our relationship," as Kafka (or
the translators) drearily term it, was probably poor in event. Kafka and
