The Diaries
Tagebücher 1910–1923
Thirteen years of private notebooks: fears, dreams, unfinished sentences and the workshop in which Kafka practised writing every night. The most candid record of his inner life.
- Published
- 1948
- Written
- 1910
- pages
- 512
- Persian translator
- فرامرز بهزاد
“The Diaries” is not a book Kafka wrote for publication. These are private notebooks kept between 1910 and 1923: drafts of stories, dreams, daily complaints, unfinished sentences and precise records of work, illness and family. And yet Kafka is nowhere more himself.
In these pages you can watch the writer's workshop. An idea is rewritten several times, a short sentence becomes a full scene, and then the scene is abandoned. The diaries are also the primary document of Kafka's relationship with writing: not a career but the only way of enduring the day. In one of the earliest entries he promises that he will not leave the diary again, that here he will hold fast to himself.
The editions differ in important ways. Max Brod published the first version in 1937 and an expanded version in 1948–49; later scholarly editions restored passages Brod had cut or altered. Read alongside the stories — especially “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis” — the diaries show the room from which those stories came.
Kafka kept diaries from 1910 to 1923. Max Brod published a first edition in 1937 and an expanded one in 1948–49; later editions restored passages he had removed.
Themes
From the text
“I will not leave the diary again. Here I will hold fast to myself.”
“I am writing this quite certainly out of despair over my body and over the future with this body.”
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