VINTAGE CLASSICS : LETTERS TO MILENA PB B

You are the knife I turn inside myself Franz Kafka s letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska – an intimate window into the desires and hopes of the twentieth-century s most prophetic and important writer Kafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was translating his early short prose into Czech. Their relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so, laid bare his heart and his conscience. While at times Milena s genius for living gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In 1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving record of their relationship.