KAFKA, Frans; Willi HAAS [Ed.]; Tania and James STERN [Trans.] ~ Letters to Milena.

FIRST UK PRINTING. Secker & Warburg, London: 1953.

8vo., blue cloth, backstrip lettered in gilt; red and blue printed dustwrapper (unclipped, 18s. net to front flap); THE BOOK very good, spotted to the fore-edge and prelims with contemporary ownership inscription to the front paste-down, a little darkened to the backstrip and lightly pushed to spine tips; THE WRAPPER also very good, a little darkened, particualrly along folds, with some overal nicking and rubbing and a few light brown spots. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. FIRST UK EDITION. A wonderful and deeply insightful collection of letters, chronicling a remarkable love story. It was in 1920 that Kafka began an intense relationship with Milena Jesenská, a Czech journalist and writer who was non-Jewish and who was married, but whose marriage, when she met Kafka, was described at the time as a "sham". Jesenská had discovered a short story (The Stoker) by Kafka in 1919, and had written to him asking for permission to translate it from German to Czech. The pair commenced an intense and passionate correspondance, and only met twice - four days in Vienna together and later a day in Gmünd - before Kafka broke off the relationship, partly because Jesenská was unable to leave her husband. Their almost daily communication ceased abruptly in November 1920. Many of the present letters were written while Kafka was interred at a sanatorium. Jesenská died in 1944, as a political prisoner in a concentration camp. "These letters, written to a married woman who was herself a writer, tell of one of the most moving and disturbing love stories ever recorded in literature or autobiography", states the dustwrapper.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Very Good
JACKET: Very Good