Coinciding with the centenary of the death of Franz Kafkathe Spanish-Czech author Monika Zgustova offers us a fictionalized biography of Milena Jesenskáknown for the Letters to Milena that the Prague writer wrote to him between 1920 and 1923, collected in 1952 for publication. Zgustova enrolls Milena through a almost autobiographical narrating voicethreading together contrasted data, personal motivations and private thoughts.
At first, as the implied author, Zgustova goes into the fog to rescue a woman lost in history who introduces herself like this: “I’m Milena from Prague – she tells me in a low voice. And she tells her story.” Story that Zgustova divides into four large chapters, whose titles denote Jesenská’s fundamental steps through her life: The foreigner, The translator, The journalist and The prisoner. Kafka belongs to the second chapter.
Jesenská was such a notable Czech journalist that her articles were compiled into two books on the fly; She was also a translator. And she, as a political activist, she helped many people flee the Nazi regime before being interned in the Ravensbrück concentration campwhere he died in 1944, at age 48, from kidney disease.
Coming from a wealthy family in Prague, she settled in Vienna with her first husband in the first years of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire. There she experienced the intellectual atmosphere of the cafes, she began journalism and met Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and Franz Werfelamong other important names of the time.
passionate idyll
In 2020 he wrote to Franz Kafka asking permission to translate his story into Czech The stokerand started a epistolary relationship with the author who, although it will only last a couple of years and will only allow them to see each other on two brief occasions, describes what could be a passionate idyll. For Milena, Zgustova quotes, those letters “were my consolation; Kafka always understood me. (…) I learned what love is: to be interested in the other. To be interested in the present, but also in the past. Every little thing related to the other.”
Kafka, although He wanted to have her by his side forever., he doubted, he was afraid of not being able to live up to the relationship, of offering only “a dirty, trembling hand, a hand with claws, volatile and insecure, hot and cold.” When Kafka dies, Milena writes a heartfelt obituary to “a lonely, wise man, terrified by life (…) shy, anxious, kind and good.”
Kafka deadJesenská turns her life around: she separates from her husband, regains her maiden name, moves to Prague and begins her successful career as a journalist. Prague is now the capital of a newly independent state and is in full intellectual boiling“overflows with energy and optimism, originality and innovation”, while Vienna, which had lost the war and, with it, the empire, becomes a “melancholic and depressing” city.
At this stage of her life, Milena remarries, has a daughter, translates several works by Kafka (The process, the sentence and Meditations) and works in the most important newspapers in his city. Although she aspires to direct a cultural section, being a woman only allows her to be in charge of the women’s section: “fashion, healthy living, cooking recipes & mldr;”. The journalist has to accept the only possibility offered to her, but she decides that her column will be “emancipatory, she will fight for women’s equality, and it will reflect society, as well as politics and culture and her needs.” “.
Soon the political vicissitudes of the 1930s dragged Jesenská into the clandestine activism and, eventually, into the hands of the Gestapo. In Ravensbrück he meets Margarete Buber-Neumann, “who had previously been in a Stalinist forced labor camp”, and maintains a special friendship with her. Both women exchange experiences, opinions and happy moments, within their painful circumstances. It will be Buber-Neumann who writes the biography of Jesenská at her express wish, published in 1963 as Milena.
Zgustova does not doubt that the Milena’s relationship with Kafka It was important for both of them at a time when she was suffering from her husband’s continuous rudeness, which caused a constant erosion of self-esteem and a great need for tenderness, and Kafka was coming out of another frustrated relationship. But that platonic love was episodic in the life and work of Jesenská, which deserves to be taken into account, with her name and surname, in itself.
