- Person
- Elias Canetti
- Lived
- 1905–1994
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Bulgarian-born British
The story
Franz Kafka met Felice Bauer, a young Jewish woman working for a Berlin dictation-machine company, at the home of his friend Max Brod in Prague on August 13, 1912. Soon he was writing to her almost daily. He dedicated to her The Judgment, the story he wrote in a single night that September. They became engaged in 1914, broke it off that summer, became engaged again in 1917, and parted for good that December as Kafka's tuberculosis set in.
During those years Kafka also wrote some of his greatest work, including The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and his first attempts at The Trial, begun in 1914. Felice kept his letters. The publisher Schocken acquired them from her in 1955, and they appeared in German in 1967 as Briefe an Felice.
Elias Canetti had admired Kafka since the early 1930s, when reading The Metamorphosis helped shape his own novel. He read the letters with intense involvement, and in 1969 he published a long essay, Der andere Prozess: Kafkas Briefe an Felice, translated into English by Christopher Middleton in 1974 as Kafka's Other Trial.
Reading the letters side by side with The Trial, Canetti traced how Kafka's tormented courtship, his need for solitude and his fear of being absorbed into a conventional married life passed into his fiction. He wrote with sympathy for both Kafka and Felice. The Swedish Academy, in its 1981 Nobel announcement, singled the book out among his literary portraits, noting that it builds a picture of a man whose life and work meant giving up power, a theme close to Canetti's own lifelong study of power.
The essay is valued as the insight of one major writer into another. It encouraged readers to approach Kafka's letters as literature in their own right, and in 2019 Canetti's writings on Kafka were gathered in a new German edition.
Why it matters
Kafka's Other Trial deepened readers' understanding of one of the most influential Jewish writers of the twentieth century and of how his life shaped his art.
About Elias Canetti
Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria who wrote in German, author of Auto-da-Fé, Crowds and Power and a celebrated memoir trilogy; Nobel Prize in Literature, 1981.
More about Elias Canetti
- Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé became a modernist classicElias Canetti's only novel, Die Blendung (1935), known in English as Auto-da-Fé, came to be recognised as a major work of European modernism.
- Elias Canetti sketched 50 characters in EarwitnessIn Earwitness: Fifty Characters (1974), Elias Canetti revived the ancient art of the character sketch with fifty brief, comic portraits of human types.
- Canetti's memoirs portrayed Vienna between the warsElias Canetti's later memoirs, The Torch in My Ear (1980) and The Play of the Eyes (1985), portray the intellectual life of Vienna and Frankfurt before the Second World War.
- Elias Canetti wrote The Voices of MarrakeshElias Canetti's The Voices of Marrakesh, a short book of impressions from a 1954 journey to Morocco, became a classic of travel writing.
- Elias Canetti spent 30 years writing Crowds and PowerElias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960), the fruit of decades of thought, is a much-cited study of how crowds form and how rulers wield power.
- Elias Canetti's notebooks became The Human ProvinceElias Canetti kept notebooks of reflections for decades; a selection from 1942 to 1972 was published as The Human Province.
- Canetti's memoir preserved a lost Sephardic worldElias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free (1977) preserved the vanished world of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in his Bulgarian birthplace, Ruse.
Sources
- Elias Canetti Wikipedia
- Letters to Felice Wikipedia
- Elias Canetti Jewish Virtual Library
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.