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I will write you of my adventures. When he and the little girl met he read her from these carefully composed letters the imagined adventures of the beloved doll.
The little girl was comforted. When the meetings came to an end Kafka presented her with a doll. She obviously looked different from the original doll. An attached letter explained: Many years later, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll. In summary it said: There are many versions of the story of Kafka and the doll.
Only after many tellings am I able to relay this story without crying.
And I have found that when I tell it to others young or old, my listener is invariably moved, occasionally bursting into tears. When I went online to find confirmation for the story, I found one source that referred to it as a "healing story. Franz Kafka, the story goes, encountered a little girl in the park where he went walking daily. She had lost her doll and was desolate. Kafka offered to help her look for the doll and arranged to meet her the next day at the same spot. Unable to find the doll he composed a letter from the doll and read it to her when they met.
I will write you of my adventures. When he and the little girl met he read her from these carefully composed letters the imagined adventures of the beloved doll.
The little girl was comforted. When the meetings came to an end Kafka presented her with a doll. These two selves are locked in combat, but it is no ordinary fight where two pairs of fists strike out at each other. This is how it is, Felice.
And yet they are locked in combat, and they could both be yours. What this actually means is that you ought to have accepted it all completely, ought to have realized that whatever was happening here was also happening for you, and that everything the work requires for itself, which looks like obstinacy and moodiness, is nothing but an expedient, necessary partly for its own sake and partly forced on me by the circumstances of my life, so utterly hostile to this work.
As a result you were bound to misinterpret everything that my worries over my work, and only my worries over my work, produced in me. Those hours of the day that I consider to be the only ones lived according to my needs, I spend sitting or lying in these three silent rooms, see no one. What were they but dislike of my way of life, as well as indirectly of my intentions, which you could not reconcile with yours, which gave you offense? It was my duty to protect my work, which alone gives me the right to live, and your fears proved, at least made me fear. It shows you agree with the others, not with me.
You must answer, Felice, no matter how much you may object to my letter. Used with permission of Icon Books. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature.
Article continues after advertisement. Eleanor Bass Eleanor Bass is a freelance researcher and writer. Her academic interests include life writing, letter writing, and the writing of wartime.
The child is gone, without having said goodbye, as soon as the narrator turns on a light in his house. Evidently reluctant to remain with the man any longer, the narrator prepares to enter the house, but is detained by the other, who stretches out his arm toward the house and smiles as a mood of silence overtakes them both. And the way toward healing is to look for how love comes back in another form. The Award-Winning Novels of December 17, When he sees the woman, however, his perspective changes. But then the relationship between Felice Bauer, a practical-minded and self-sufficient young woman who worked for a manufacturing firm in Berlin, and her sickly, tormented paramour in Prague was far from conventional.
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