7 - The letters and diaries

Summary

The letters complete the oeuvre, like a map makes the world complete. We, the unbelievers, who are not satisfied with miracles and need tangible explanations, look for clues and logical reasons.

Milena Jesenská

Letters can cheer me up, move me, or arouse my admiration, but they used to mean much more to me, too much for me to see in them now an essential form of life. I have not been deceived by letters but I deceived myself through them; for years I warmed myself in the warmth they would produce when the whole lot got thrown on to the fire.

Kafka to Robert Klopstock (January 1922; B1: 369)

For long bursts of his intensively creative life, from the autumn of 1912 until his death less than twelve years later, Kafka appears to have written every single day. He had been busy before this 'breakthrough', though much writing in the forms of both diaries and fiction he apparently destroyed. His last piece of writing is a letter - to his parents on the subject of his various ailments - which he composed less than twenty-four hours before his death in the hospital at Klosterneuburg on the edge of Vienna. Typically, he wants to put off a proposed visit by them, arguing that he is in an unfit state to be seen; typically too for his last years, he downplays the seriousness of his condition with self-deprecating humour. There are other familiar stylistic characteristics and thematic preoccupations: he straightaway gets down to the point, dispensing with preliminaries, as he invariably does in letters and postcards, though there is perhaps a weariness to the businesslike 'now about the visits'.