Kafka's Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic by Anne Jamison

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kafka's Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic by Anne Jamison Veronika Tuckerova Kafka's Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic. Anne Jamison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. Pp. 222. $99.95 (cloth); $34.95 (paper); $34.95 (eBook). The title of Anne Jamison's book evokes an omission in Kafka scholarship in English. Kafka has mostly been studied in the context of the small Prague German minority, German literature in Prague, and German literature in general. The titular "other Prague" refers to Kafka's less commonly studied Czech linguistic, cultural, and historical context. Kafka wrote about Czech literature in a 1911 diary entry, on which Deleuze and Guattari based their concept of minor literature; but their work obscured rather than clarified Kafka's Czech social and cultural context. Scott Spector, an important source for Jamison, used a territorial metaphor and focused on the lesser known authors of Max Brod's "Prague Circle."1 Jamison gives the Czech language and literature its due. She argues that Czech writing played an increasingly important role in Kafka's later life and works. Following the foundation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Czech (or rather the non-existent Czechoslovak) became the main official language and the name Franz turned into František. Kafka worked for a Czech insurance company where his fluent but non-native Czech had been tested; he met the writer Milena Jesenská, who, at his request, wrote to him in Czech and who was his first translator to the "other" language. The relationship with Jesenská profoundly unsettled Kafka's notions of relations, languages, and gender, and that dynamic was "replicated […] at the level of structure" of The Castle (128). Jamison observes a divide between Kafka's earlier and later writings; engagement with Czech language and culture more generally influenced Kafka's late works. Czech was now "foregrounded"; it ceased to be a "background noise" as it was in the earlier letters to Felice Bauer (31, 33). External changes effected profound shifts in Kafka's writing. Jamison relies on some Czech sources to explore this in depth: the linguist Jan Mukařovský and his 1940 essay on architectural space, Marek Nekula's recent studies of Kafka's languages, the art historian Josef Kroutvor who wrote on Kafka and cubism, and the literary historian Josef Čermák. The editorial decision to include the Czech originals of some of the important quotations in the footnotes shows respect for this context. Jamison's investigation encompasses the broader Czech and Czech German milieu Kafka was part of. She not only examines Czech journals and newspapers that Kafka read or subscribed to, including the small but key avant-garde journal Kmen that published his work since 1920 and the newspaper Tribuna, but also the German language Prager Presse, a state-sponsored newspaper founded by Tomáš Masaryk in 1921 and published for the Czech German audience. Brod worked for the paper as a critic; Kafka's works were published there (43). Jamison gives these periodicals the attention they deserve, and also notes Kafka's interest in Czech visual art. Kafka would have been familiar with Czech culture, art, and myth simply by walking the city streets; the striving for Czech culture was inscribed into the city's architecture and landmarks, and Kafka commented on the newly erected Jan Hus monument. Jamison initiates a "conversation" between Kafka's texts, Czech, and Czech Jewish writers such as František and Jiří Langer, Jaroslav Hašek, Ladislav Klíma, Karel Čapek, and, most importantly, Božena Němcová, a nineteenth-century writer whose work Kafka knew from school and whose letters he read during his stay in the west Bohemian village of Zürau. Kafka's familiarity with Němcová (and, for example, Vladislav Vančura or Jaroslav Vrchlický) is one of the demonstrably direct links to Czech literature. Kafka's familiarity with other writers and their work is in the realm of possibility. In this category, the philosopher and writer Ladislav Klíma whom Kafka may have read on the pages of Tribuna is a striking example. Klíma's eccentric life shows surprising [End Page 410] external similarities with Kafka's, but it is their...