Franz Kafka edited A Hunger Artist on his deathbed

Person: Franz Kafka
Lived: 1883–1924
Field: Literature
From: Bohemian (Czech)

The story

Franz Kafka spent the autumn and winter of 1923 to 1924 in Berlin with Dora Diamant, a young kindergarten teacher from an Orthodox Jewish family. Although already seriously ill with tuberculosis, he wrote steadily there, and he completed four stories that he planned to publish together: First Sorrow, A Little Woman, A Hunger Artist and Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.

By the spring of 1924 the disease had spread to his larynx, making eating and eventually speaking agonisingly painful. In March he returned to Prague, where his sister Ottla and Dora Diamant cared for him, and on 10 April he entered Hugo Hoffmann's sanatorium at Kierling, just outside Vienna.

Even then he kept working. The title story, about a performer who starves himself in a cage as a public spectacle until audiences lose interest in his strange art, first appeared in the magazine Die neue Rundschau in 1924. Kafka was correcting the proofs of the book version on his deathbed. He had begun the story before his own throat closed so far that he could take no nourishment, and because intravenous feeding had not yet been developed, there was no way to feed him. His last story, Josephine the Singer, also explores the bond between an artist and an audience.

Kafka died on 3 June 1924, a month short of his 41st birthday, and was buried on 11 June in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Žižkov. A Hunger Artist was published by Verlag Die Schmiede several months later. It was the last collection he prepared for publication himself, at a time when he had asked for most of his other unpublished writing to be destroyed.

In 1948 Schocken Books published Willa and Edwin Muir's English translation of the four stories in The Penal Colony, and they later appeared in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. The title story, with its portrait of an artist whose devotion goes unseen, remains among his most widely read works.

Why it matters

Kafka's dedication to his art to the very end left readers some of the most powerful short fiction of the 20th century, including a lasting parable about artists and their audiences.