Letters to Milena

In 1920 Milena Jesenská became the first person to translate “The Metamorphosis” into Czech, and she wrote to Kafka for permission. Out of that correspondence grew a compressed and strange love affair, most of which took place on paper. “Letters to Milena” is a document of love and, at the same time, a document of fear: on the same pages where Kafka wants Milena, he runs from himself and from the future.

These letters cannot be read like a novel. They are one side of a conversation; the other side survives only in replies and silences. Here Kafka is at his most explicit about the body, illness, jealousy, writing and the possibility of happiness. Some sentences are so sharp that they still hurt a hundred years later.

The relationship became strained in 1920 and quietly collapsed in 1921. Milena later died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The letters remain: one of the great love documents of the twentieth century, and at the same time one of Kafka's most honest confessions about his inability to live with another person.