I haven’t read many love letters, but even with my limited reading experience, I can confidently say: Letters to Milena is the most extraordinary collection of love letters. It’s achingly emotional that I can feel Kafka’s longing on every page.
The story behind this correspondence is just as compelling as the letters themselves. In 1920, Milena Jesenská, a young Czech journalist and writer, reached out to Franz Kafka to ask for permission to translate his short story The Stoker (which would later become the first chapter of Amerika) into Czech. What began as a professional exchange quickly turned into something much more personal. Kafka, then 38 and seriously ill, fell deeply in love with Milena, who was 24 and married.
From March to December of that year, Kafka wrote to her relentlessly, sometimes several times a day. In total, he sent 149 letters and postcards, most of them within that ten-month span, and a few more between 1921 and 1923. These are the letters we have today, entrusted by Milena to a mutual friend, Willy Haas. Sadly, Milena’s replies have been lost to time.
Reading these letters is like witnessing the unraveling of Kafka’s heart. His words are full of yearning, doubt, and vulnerability. He writes with urgency, sometimes with poetic beauty, and other times with the edge of despair. Despite the geographical and emotional distance between them, Kafka clings to this connection with Milena. You can sense how much he needs her presence, even if it’s just through her letters.
Letters to Milena is a portrait of an impossible love, one that’s too intense, too fragile, and perhaps too real for the world outside the page.
My Favorite Bits
- You see, my brain was no longer able to bear the pain and anxiety with which it had been burdened. It said: “I’m giving up; but if anyone else here cares about keeping the whole intact, then he should share the load and things will run a little longer.”
- When will this crazy world finally be straightened out a little? I wander around with a burned-out head by day—there are such beautiful ruins everywhere in the mountains here, they make me think I have to become that beautiful myself (..).
- When I don’t write, I’m merely tired, sad, heavy; when I do write I am torn by fear and anxiety.
- Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most – you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love. This, my dear, is love.
- I’m not saying goodbye. There isn’t any goodbye, unless gravity, which is lying in wait for me, pulls me down entirely. But how could it, since you are alive.
- So since I cannot say anything about the present, there’s even less for me to say about the future.
- The thought of death makes you anxious? I’m just terribly afraid of pain. That’s a bad sign. To want death but not pain is a bad sign. Otherwise one can risk death.
- I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.
- I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.
- Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.
- My world is collapsing, my world is rebuilding itself; wait and see how you (meaning me) survive it all. I’m not lamenting the falling apart, it was already in a state of collapse, what I’m lamenting is the rebuilding, I lament my waning strength, I lament being born, I lament the light of the sun.
Author: Franz Kafka
First published: 1 January 1952
Number of pages: 298 pages
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