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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2023
IT WILL BE HELPFUL, as a preliminary step in considering the various texts of Kafka currently available, to divide his writings into two principal categories: (A) works published by Kafka during his lifetime; and (B) everything else he wrote.
The total contents of (A) is surprisingly sparse, comprising all in all under five hundred pages printed in large format. It includes the following:
(1) Seven publications in book form
(a) Betrachtung (a collection of eighteen short pieces)
(b) Das Urteil
(c) Der Heizer (part of a manuscript fragment Brod would later publish as the novel Amerika)
(d) Die Verwandlung
(e) In der Strafkolonie
(f) Ein Landarzt (fourteen stories, including the one from which the volume takes its title)
(g) Ein Hungerkünstler (four stories, including the one named in the title)
(2) Ten items, all relatively brief, that appeared in various periodicals (among these are such things as the “Gespräch mit dem Beter” and the “Gespräch mit dem Betrunkenen,” excepted from larger projects that Kafka never completed to his satisfaction).
The works belonging to this (A) category are relatively unproblematic and require little discussion, since we can safely assume that Kafka meant these works to be read in the form in which he published them. Like the works of any important and widely studied writer, these texts can be compared to the manuscript materials available to us, and we can make note of changes and occasional errors. In some cases, the materials from Kafka’s literary estate offer a larger context in which these published texts can perhaps be better understood. But the texts as published set a safe norm against which we can read the variants revealed by study of archival materials and can reasonably be taken to represent a firm authorial intention. A thoroughly reliable critical edition is available in Fischer Verlag’s two-volume Drucke zu Lebzeiten.
The (B) category presents a very different picture, though some of it presents fewer problems than the rest.
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