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Justin Hew

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Letters to Milena

by Franz Kafka

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Reading for the 2nd time

read in August 2021

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Justin Hew said: " Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena reads less like a tidy bundle of correspondence than an unfiltered current of feeling, tugging the reader into the feverish intimacy between two sharp, restless minds. What begins, in 1920, as a translator’s polite inq Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena reads less like a tidy bundle of correspondence than an unfiltered current of feeling, tugging the reader into the feverish intimacy between two sharp, restless minds. What begins, in 1920, as a translator’s polite inquiry—Milena Jesenská asking permission to put Kafka’s stories into Czech—quickly flares into a storm of devotion sustained almost entirely on paper. Their bodies meet only twice; the real embrace happens in ink, in sentences that sprint, circle back, repent, and try again, as if the act of writing could bring them close enough to breathe the same air.

Kafka, often mythologised as the sample case of loneliness, appears here in incandescent contradiction. His letters veer from playful sketches of Prague street life to dizzy professions of love, then plummet into self-indictments over tuberculosis, sexual anxiety, and the sense that any lasting closeness might destroy them both. He treats the postal system as both miracle and menace: he imagines each sheet fighting through “dragons” of delay, yet trusts it more than his courage to stand in front of Milena and speak aloud. One feels the language itself sweating—German stretched to its elastic limit—because plain statements never seem sufficient for the stakes at hand.

Milena, whose own letters survive only in fragments, nevertheless shines through the negative space of Kafka’s replies. He addresses her not as a muse or confessor but as an intellectual equal who can parry his abstractions with brisk common sense. She teases him out of spirals, coaxes him to eat, urges him to keep faith with the messy, physical world he half-distrusts. Their partnership around translation—she is the first to render his work for a Slavic readership—becomes a metaphor for the whole relationship: each tries to carry the other across a border where nuance might be lost, yet where new meanings lurk.

Illness shadows it all. Kafka’s tubercular lungs measure every plan; sanatorium timetables intrude on passion. Yet even the medical minutiae gather poetic charge, because the letters become a daily wager against mortality: write quickly, love faster, before the cough interrupts. That urgency makes the repetitions—his worry about marriage, his dread of contagion—feel like the pulse of a live conversation rather than mere neurotic loops.

Reading these pages, one realises why so many critics rank them above his more famous Letters to Felice. Freed from bourgeois courtship formalities, Kafka sounds raw, occasionally unguarded, never merely literary. He invents metaphors on the run, scolds himself for melodrama, then apologises for the apology. The cumulative effect is strangely liberating: to witness genius refusing its pedestal, insisting on fallibility, desperate to be understood by exactly one person.

That we know Milena will later die in Ravensbrück for smuggling letters of another kind casts a retrospective shadow—but it also clarifies what matters about the book. Letters to Milena is not a monument of literary ephemera; it is a testament to the fierce, provisional beauty human beings can exchange in words when time and distance conspire against them. However uneven, however one-sided, the correspondence leaves the reader shaken by its candour and oddly heartened to discover that even Kafka, apostle of alienation, could write himself so ablaze with love. ...more "

Jun 16, 2025 02:46AM · see review

Justin Hew is currently reading

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

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Apr 20, 2025 11:51PM

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Beyond Good and Evil

by Friedrich Nietzsche

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Jun 25, 2024 08:45AM

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Justin’s Quotes

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf

tags: women

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“She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.”
― Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?

tags: doubt, indecision, relationship

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“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you―on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck―even then. And afterwards―perhaps most of all afterwards―I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B... without looking, or, without lifting the pencil... or in some other way... we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

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“But does it really help if a person doesn't realize what he lacks, or, if he does, he insists that he doesn't need it at all? That's an illusion, a fantasy. Human nature is stifled by reason, circumstances, and pride. It keeps silent and doesn't make itself known to one's consciousness, all the while silently doing its work of undermining life.”
― Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?

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