Word: samsa
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...creation, the cosmopolitan, eccentric lecturer: authoritarian but also authoritative, alternately mock-stern and mischievous (he sometimes started over in mid-lecture, to see how long it would take the class to notice), arrogant yet never harsh, in fact downright kindly at times. After explaining that the transformed Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis was not a cockroach but a beetle, and that beneath his carapace he possessed unsuspected wings, Nabokov told his students: "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that...
...Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...
With this sentence, Franz Kafka begins The Metamorphosis, a novelette filled with the Czech author's own terrified and terrifying sense of life. Gregor Samsa, a timid, unsuccessful salesman slaving for his family feels rejected and unwanted. At the end, he hears his sister say of his insect-self, "We must try to get rid of it." The Metamorphosis appears, with 43 other Kafka stories and "short pieces," in The Penal Colony, a collection recently published in the U.S. Like the more famous novels, The Trial and The Castle (TIME, April 28, 1947), all the stories are marked with...