Kafka

In the legacy of Walter Benjamin, exceptionally sensitive to all manifestations of the contemporary world around him, there are many works about writers of the first half of the 20th century. Important among them are the texts dedicated to Franz Kafka. Several articles about Kafka never coalesced into the book envisioned by Benjamin, but they themselves are a valuable document of the early reception of the novels, stories, and parables of the Prague writer, who found in Benjamin, his younger contemporary, a very perceptive reader, whose complex fate and capricious thought are not devoid of echoes with the modus vivendi of Kafka's heroes. This publication presents, in Russian translation, all the completed works of Benjamin on Kafka, as well as related notes and letters that allow us to judge the development of the idea of the unrealized book in the late 1920s - 1930s and the German thinker's polemic with other interpreters of Kafka's prose - Gershom Scholem, Werner Kraft, Theodor Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht.