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PARTISAN REVIEW
Soon Kafka was being published in editions of tens of thousands of
copies and every new volume sold out before the first review came out in the
papers. People wanted to understand the kind of world they were living in,
what determined the parameters of their lives, and what their purpose was–
if there were any purpose at all in this society. And they hoped that Franz
Kafka would be able to give them an answer. Many were probably disap–
pointed in the end, because they found no formula for escaping from their
vicious circle . But certainly Franz Kafka and the circumstances which led him
to
write helped them identify the situation and orient themselves in it.
And what about Kafka in Prague today? Twelve years after Liblice he has,
I suppose , become literature again. He has not lost any of the qualities of
which Karst and Garaudy spoke, but he has ceased to be
res politiea.
He could
be that only as long as the Czechs and Slovaks could identify themselves with
Surveyor K. and his anguished efforts
to
break down the wall and enter the
Castle.
But they finally entered the Castle on the night of August 21, 1968, and
during the days and months that followed. There is no mystery any more, no
enigma, no inaccessible goal which they must reach. They no longer say,
"This is just like Kafka!" Everybody knows by now that the Castle is empty,
that there is nothing there for them-at least not what they had been looking
for. Just crude power, military might. Police.
Which makes the answer to their questions that much easier and more
concrete.
II
Among the speakers at Liblice was Roman Karst . In his lecture, entitled
"An Attempt at Man's Salvation," he said:
Kafka 's parables destroy his heroes ' illusions and their mistaken faith
that they are living in a free and rational world which is governed by
moral principles. On every side we hear tragic outcries against this era of
lies and half-truths , laments about how history has failed, exhortations
to
lead a new kind of life . Kafka is an author of infinite negation, but
certainly not of capitulation.
Karst 's own path resembles that of a Kafka character. One of the melan–
choly intellectual "heroes of our time," he is a Jew from a country where,
during the 1930s , the Communists were the only political party which would
accept aJew as a member. Poland's defeat in 1939 found him- "luckily"–
in a part of the country which was occupied by the Soviet Army. Stalin im-
