Word: janouch
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...Kafka of Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka is much different, and to a surprising extent, separate from his writings. In his postscript, Janouch claims that he has been much too close to Kafka to bring himself to read the novels and diaries. The Kafka he knew was closer to the Kafka who worked eight or ten hours a day in the Workman's Accident Insurance Association in Prague than to the one who returned to his parent's home at night to write. It is not that Janouch knew only the superficial side of the man, for Kafka speaks...
...Janouch's Kafka is a man of almost forty, a father-confessor whom the author meets in his office at the Insurance Association or on long walks through the streets of Prague. Neat and quiet, with "great grey eyes" and an expressive brown face, this Kafka ponders the problems of modern life as he walks beside his young friend, finally rising to some statement like "the dream reveals the reality, which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life--the terror of art. But now I must go home." And he strides away, tall and urbane, across the cobbles...
MEETINGS of this pattern are repeated again and again, and if the effect is sometimes artificial, the figure of the writer which emerges is a rich and full one seen through the particular filter of an intense young poet in Prague in the early twenties. Gustav Janouch's father worked with Kafka at the Insurance Association and asked him to advise the son on his poetry. The resulting introduction, in March of 1920, led to several years of close friendship and to the manuscript which became the Conversations. The jottings which Janouch assembled were first published in 1951 with...
Kafka in 1920 is already living under the shadow of the tuberculosis which is to kill him four years later. He is a man, he tells Janouch, in rebellion against himself, caught in the "I", "a cage from the past." Visited by the "ever-recurrent sin of despair," he sees the disintegration of individual and society all around him. In his own double life at his writing and at the office he illustrates the modern dichotomy between what Heidegger called the "I", the real self, and the "one", the anonymous, social self, the role. Trained as a lawyer, Kafka speaks...
...TIMES the book seems to show a much too serious Kafka. He advances an occasional word-play, but more often cuts off Janouch's little jokes with the admonition that "one should take everything seriously"--he dislikes humor at the expense of others. Although he laughs frequently, he admits that for him laughter is "a concrete wall" behind which to hide...