VLADIMIR NABOKOV
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nutshell the difference between the Gogol-Kafka kind of story and
Stevenson's kind.
In
Gogol and Kafka the absurd central character belongs to the
absurd world around him but, pathetically and tragically, attempts to
struggle out of it into the world of humans-and dies in despa ir.
In
Stevenson the unreal central character belongs to a brand of unrea lity
different from that of the world around him . He is a Gothic character
in a Dickensian setting, and when he struggles and then dies, his fate
possesses only conventional pathos. I do not at all mean that Steven–
son's story is a failure. No, it is a minor masterpiece in its own
conventional terms, but it has only two dimensions, whereas the
Gogol -Kafka stories have five or six.
Born in 1883, Franz Kafka came from a German-speaking Jewish
family in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He is the greatest German writer of
our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are
dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him. H e read for law at the
German university in Prague and from 1908 on he worked as a petty
clerk, a small employee, in a very Gogolian office for an insurance
company. Hardly any of his now famous works, such as his novels
The
Trial
(1925 ) and
The Castle
(1926 ), were published in his lifetime. His
greatest short story "The Metamorphosis, " in German "Die Verwan–
dlung," was written in the fall of 1912 and published in Leipzig in
October 1915.
In
1917 he coughed blood, and the rest of his life, a
period of seven years, was punctuated by sojourns in central European
sanatoriums.
In
those last years of his short life (he died at the age of
41), he had a happy love affair and lived with his mistress in Berlin, in
1923, not far from me.
In
the spring of 1924 he went to a sanatorium
near Vienna where he died on 3 June, of tuberculosis of the larynx. He
was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. He asked his friend Max
Brod to burn everything he had written, even published material.
Fortunately Brod did not comply with his friend's wish.
Before starting to talk of "The Metamorphosis," I want to dismiss
two points of view. I want to dismiss completely Max Brod's opinion
that the ca tegory of sainthood, not that of literature, is the only one
that can be applied to the understanding of Kafka's writings. Kafka was
first of all an artist, and although it may be maintained that every artist
is a manner of saint (I fee l that very clearly myself), I do not think that
any religious implica tions can
be
read into Kafka's genius. The other
matter that I want to dismiss is the Freudian point of view. His
