Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...awed reviewer in the New York Times, with just a tongue-tip in cheek: "We should not be surprised to hear . . . that the intellectuals had discovered Mr. Capp's opera, and that words like dichotomy, plangent and ambivalent were being thrown at him, wrapped in pages from Kafka and Dostoevski . . . The Life & Times of the Shmoo is a cultural event of enormous significance...
...also a year in which literary figures were allowed to speak for themselves: Andre Gide's Journal, Vol. 2, rich with evidence of the creative mind's way of work; Franz Kafka's morbid Diaries; Anton Chekhov's plain, warm Private Papers; Edwin Arlington Robinson's letters in Untriangulated Stars which told the painful story of an American poet's struggle for survival...
Revolt by Half. All of Kafka's anxieties were crystallized in his relationship to his stolid and conventional middle-class father, who exerted "the bewildering effect that all tyrants have whose might is founded not on reason, but on their own person." The elder Kafka thrust all his massive sarcasm and scorn on his son in order to turn him into a successful businessman. Had he merely rebelled and broken from his father, Kafka might have gained endurance and maturity. His tragedy was that he could neither completely acquiesce nor completely rebel...
Fragments of Parable. Strewn through the diaries are numerous fragments of stories, beginnings of the books now recognized as profound parables of modern life. Here the reader, observing Kafka's imagination at work, can understand why so many conflicting interpretations have been offered of his writing...
...revealing critical remark about Kafka was made by French Novelist Albert Camus: "It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of this work to offer us everything and to confirm nothing...