Our Notes & References

One of the most influential novels of the 20th century, here as illegal home-made ‘edition’: a very rare case of a Kafka samizdat, as we couldn’t find any other example of his works in samizdat.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) became widely known in Europe after the posthumous publications of Amerika, The Trial and The Castle in 1925-1927; his name however was almost never mentioned in the Soviet press up until the early 1950s. Soviet intellectuals could read his works in the original or in other translations, like Anna Akhmatova who received an English edition from Pasternak and since then regarded Kafka “her favourite writer after Dostoevsky and ranked him above Joyce and Proust” (Zhuk).

Yet the absolute majority of the Soviets was not familiar with Kafka’s work until the mid-1960s. When the young Gabriel García Márquez, during his visit to the Soviet Union for the VI World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957, learnt that no one in the USSR had read Kafka’s books because they had not yet been translated into Russian, he famously said: “I think he could be the best biographer of Stalin”.

Soviet literary delegations abroad and in the USSR during international events often faced awkward situations, such as described by Viktor Nekrasov in 1960: “I remember how embarrassing it was for us, Soviet writers, when in Leningrad, a year and a half ago, Alberto Moravia asked us something about Kafka. We looked at each other, we had never heard that name before”. Franz Kafka took so long to reach Soviet readers “not only because his novels and short stories were read as metaphorical depictions of the totalitarian system […] The greatest danger of Kafka’s work for the authoritarian system is that it, as Lev Kopelev said, ‘contradicts all notions of ‘useful’ art – that is, art that is moralistic, ideological, party, religious, educational'” (Zhuk).

Finally in 1964, the short stories The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and ten prose miniatures appeared in the January issue of the magazine Inostrannaia literatura [Foreign Literature], and in 1965, Roman. Novelly. Pritchi [Novel. Novellas. Parables] was published in Moscow: it was a 600-page volume of Kafka’s works including his chef-d’oeuvre The Trial. However, according to the translator of Kafka’s diaries Evgeniia Katseva, most of the print run was sent to the countries of the Eastern Bloc. Besides, all Kafka’s publications had also to be accompanied by ideological explanations by Soviet literary critics; without these prolegomena, the publication of Kafka’s legacy in the USSR was impossible.

After the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968, Kafka was declared “the spiritual father of the Prague Spring” and publications of his works were suspended until the late 1980s.

The present samizdat is therefore interesting from various angles. It doesn’t contain any Soviet introduction; curiously even, this Russian text is a translation from a Polish edition (using most likely the 1974 Polish translation) and the afterword includes a phrase addressing the Polish reader. This would mean that it was made after Kafka’s works were banned in the USSR. The copy is also in very appealing condition, showing that it most likely did not circulate broadly and was made for strictly personal use.

Bibliography

Maksim Zhuk, “Pisatel-dekadent v lagere makhrovoi reaktsii. Prikliucheniia Frantsa Kafki v Rossii”, Gorky. Media, 2023.