Kafka often wrote daily, often several times a day such was his devotion. Such a simple request and formal demand very soon turned into a series of passionate and profound letters that Milena and Franz exchanged from March to December 1920. The correspondence started when Milena wrote to Kafka and asked for a permission to translate his short story “The Stoker” from German to Czech. They stripped the masks of their bourgeois identities and bared their souls. Despite the distance, despite the turbulent sea with insurmountable waves between Kafka in Prague and Milena in Vienna, the two developed an intense and intimate relationship. She recognised Kafka’s writing genius before others did. Kafka is a well-known figure in the world of literature, but who was Milena? Milena was a twenty-three year old aspiring writer and translator who lived in Vienna in a marriage that was slowly falling apart. In 1920, Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenská began a love affair through letters. Kafka wrote to her: “Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.” That, my dear, is love.” – this is what Kafka wrote to the mysterious Milena, and isn’t this sentence alone, with Kafka’s vibrant expressionistic definition of love, enough to lure you into reading the book? “You are the knife I turn inside myself that is love.
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