[Essay][Literature] Following Kafka (9) The Eccentric Dostoevsky and Kafka: Reading "Letters to Milena"

After all, that may have been the primary concern. I was investigating the passages in Franz Kafka's (1883–1924) diaries and letters where he mentions Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81). The most well-known and frequently cited one is likely the following passage from a 1913 letter to his then-fiancée, Felice Bauer. It reveals that he felt a special affinity for Dostoevsky.

There is also a long mention in a 1920 letter to his lover, Milena Jesenská (1896–1944). He touches upon the "literary historical event" that every Dostoevsky biography invariably recounts: the 24-year-old unknown literary youth being spectacularly welcomed into the St. Petersburg literary scene as a "new Gogol" with his debut work, "Poor Folk" (1846). The budding writer Grigorovich and the poet Nekrasov, deeply moved after reading "Poor Folk," suddenly visit Dostoevsky's room at three in the morning. Grigorovich and Nekrasov embrace and kiss Dostoevsky as if they are about to burst into tears. They talk passionately about the work until dawn, finally leaving the room. It was the happiest night of Dostoevsky's life. Seeing them off, he is overcome with tears. What wonderful people! Compared to them, how vulgar I am—I have been thinking for a long time about what Kafka, who goes on and on about this all-too-familiar episode, was intending to convey to Milena, even if unconsciously.

Milena Jesenská was a Czech journalist living in Vienna at the time. She was a woman like a bundle of passion, often compared to the heroines of Stendhal's works, and she lived a very dramatic life. I would need to change the subject to describe it in detail. In later years, she participated in the resistance in Nazi-occupied Prague and was captured by the Gestapo. She lost her life in a concentration camp.
She is known for recognizing Kafka early on and translating his work from German into Czech. It is said to be the first translation of Kafka's work. Above all, she was a good reader of Kafka and deeply understood his true value. Upon Kafka's death in 1924, just three days later, she contributed the following moving obituary to a newspaper.

A hundred years after his death, she answers accurately and concisely at this point the questions that fans and researchers would argue about heatedly: why the protagonists of Kafka's novels always perish, and what their stylistic appeal is.
At the time of their relationship, Milena had a Jewish banker husband, and Kafka had a fiancée. It was a forbidden love. Milena could not bring herself to divorce her husband, and the two would eventually break up, but reading the vast number of letters, contrary to the intense words, I begin to doubt whether Kafka himself really intended to be with Milena.
To jump to a conclusion, isn't "Letters to Milena" a document about "recognition"? Of course, broadly speaking, it is an enthusiastic love letter from a 37-year-old middle-aged man, Kafka, to a young, talented woman 13 years his junior, Milena. However, the problem of "recognition," which occupies a not-insignificant part of every romance—or perhaps could be called its essence in the depths—seems to be brought into focus with grotesque high definition. For a writer who has not achieved success, a good reader or someone who understands them is more than just a welcome rain after a drought. The lonely writer was seeking a Grigorovich, a Nekrasov, or a Belinsky within the passionate soul of a woman named Milena, whom he even called a "savior"—.

Having written so much useless rambling up to this point, I am suddenly possessed by a strange thought."Poor Folk" and "Letters to Milena"—aren't they similar?To be precise, I mean, aren't the fictional character created by Dostoevsky in his epistolary novel, the self-conscious protagonist Makar Devushkin, and the "flesh-and-blood" Kafka, who bares himself nakedly in private letters and seems to drown in self-consciousness, similar? Including that peculiar style of self-deprecation. Above all, the strange aftertaste they share—.
"Poor Folk" is a tragic love story set in the dark backstreets of St. Petersburg, consisting of an exchange of letters between Makar Devushkin, a poor, middle-aged low-ranking official in his mid-forties, and Varvara, an unfortunate orphan twenty years his junior. It closes with Varvara choosing a loveless marriage to a middle-aged, vulgar, wealthy landowner and leaving Devushkin.
Even though they are both civil servants, the social circumstances of the lowly clerk Devushkin and Kafka, a doctor of law who was steadily advancing in his career as a "capable man," are vastly different. Also, the similarity of a middle-aged man's sticky obsession with a young, beautiful woman, which everyone feels and which even looks comical from the outside, would be somewhat superficial to make a point of. Nevertheless, even just thinking about it, I believe the following commonalities can be pointed out. "Poor Folk" is an important and special book for me, and I feel like I won't be able to stop once I start talking about it, so I want to write as concisely as possible.

1. A large group of letters in a short period
The story time of "Poor Folk" is less than half a year. The total number of letters between Devushkin and Varvara during this time is 55. There are various theories about how to count the "Letters to Milena" that Kafka sent between 1920 and 1923, but there are generally 130, and most of them are concentrated in the three months when their love was at its peak. It is a record of love that flared up and burned out in a very short time. Even taking into account that letters were the email or social media of the time, and that everyone wrote many letters in an era when telephones were not common, why were such high-density letters exchanged in such a short period?

2. Excessive desire for recognition
I mentioned earlier that "Letters to Milena" might be a document about "recognition," and I think the same can be said for "Poor Folk." What Devushkin repeatedly tells Varvara is that he wants her to understand what a good-hearted person he is, despite being oppressed and isolated at the bottom of society. The letters move away from their original role of conveying information and become a medium for proving his own worth. The obsession with "oneself in the other's consciousness" becomes greater than the romance itself, and the self multiplies like an infinite mirror of self-consciousness, thus resulting in a large number of letters. A similar structure can be seen in modern email and social media. The breakup of the romance between Devushkin and Kafka seems to have been inevitable not so much due to external circumstances, but from the impossibility of the internal factor itself: betting one's "recognition" on another person.

3. The dilemma of distance
Furthermore, wasn't it a "romance by correspondence" in the first place? Even though Devushkin and Kafka repeat "I want to see you, I want to see you," they rarely meet. Perhaps to emphasize this dilemma, the setting is that Devushkin and Varvara live in rooms facing each other across the courtyard of the same building, right under each other's noses. Although they seem to see each other at church sometimes, Devushkin avoids going to see her because he is abnormally concerned about the eyes of those around him, and there is only one description of what looks like a date. In the case of Kafka and Milena, while it is a long-distance relationship between Prague and Vienna, it is not a distance that should be a major barrier. The two met only twice during their relationship. The four-day rendezvous in Vienna is likely the climax, but it is said that it was by no means a happy union. Devushkin was too timid to take the step of living with Varvara as a poor, old man. It is hard to believe that Kafka, who was engaged to the same woman twice and broke it off twice, was seriously thinking about marrying the married woman Milena. The avoidance of realistic involvement with others is likely two sides of the same coin as maintaining an imaginary relationship through the medium of letters. In fact, even when Varvara is about to marry the landowner, Devushkin is only worried about how to continue their correspondence.

4. Literary human beings
Through the "written word" of letters, they both become imaginary literary beings. A mental structure that lives in words, conscious of the experience as a story, rather than living the reality of love. It goes without saying that Kafka turned his back on married life and worldly happiness and devoted his life to literature. Devushkin, a literature lover who is moved by Pushkin's "The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin" and outraged by Gogol's "The Overcoat," frequently visits writers' gatherings, and the more he denies it, the more his secret and dreamy literary ambitions peek through. If you shift your perspective slightly, I think "Poor Folk" is an extremely ambitious debut work. Since Belinsky, it has been regarded as a social realist novel, and a break from his later major works is sometimes pointed out, but Devushkin can be said to be a precursor to the "Dostoevskian humans" who would develop and increase in seriousness in later years—the strange group of characters obsessed with self-consciousness, the literary humans who could be called the changelings of modern literature.

It feels like a literary manifesto of the young Dostoevsky.

In fact, while reading "Poor Folk" and "Letters to Milena" alternately, there were moments when I lost track of which was which. Devushkin becomes penniless and supports the sickly Varvara mentally and physically even by going into debt. Kafka is constantly concerned about Milena, who has become impoverished and ill due to the breakdown of her marriage, and generously provides her with money. Both go around in circles in the same place and continue to worry about the same things.

When I read passages like this, I truly think, ah, what a wonderful love letter. Though Kafka surely would never have wanted it to be made public. The sense of isolation born of being strange, the sorrow of the misfit who is always on the side of being weeded out, the trembling delicacy of a weak heart, suffering humanity, a noble soul glowing from within... ah, I still haven't said enough, and the story doesn't seem like it will come together at all. I would like to write about "Poor Folk" again someday.