"Franz_Kafka_-_Letter_To_His_Father" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kafka Franz)

Letter To His Father



DEAREST FATHER,


You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid
of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking.
And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you
and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.


To you the matter always seemed very simple, at least in so far as you talked about it in front of me, and indiscriminately in front of many other people. It looked to you
more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome,
have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected
any gratitude for this, knowing what "children's gratitude" is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy. Instead I have always
hidden from you, in my room, among my books, with crazy friends, or with crackpot ideas. I have never talked to you frankly; I have never come to you when you were
in the synagogue, never visited you at Franzensbad, nor indeed ever shown any family feeling; I have never taken any interest in the business or your other concerns; I
saddled you with the factory and walked off; I encouraged Ottla in her obstinacy, and never lifted a finger for you (never even got you a theater ticket), while I do
everything for my friends. If you sum up your judgment of me, the result you get is that, although you don't charge me with anything downright improper or wicked (with
the exception perhaps of my latest marriage plan), you do charge me with coldness, estrangements and ingratitude. And, what is more, you charge me with it in such a
way as to make it seem my fault, as though I might have been able, with something like a touch on the steering wheel, to make everything quite different, while you
aren't in the slightest to blame, unless it be for having been too good to me.


This, your usual way of representing it, I regard as accurate only in so far as I too believe you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement. But I am equally
entirely blameless. If I could get you to acknowledge this, then what would be possible isЧnot, I think, a new life, we are both much too old for thatЧbut still, a kind of
peace; no cessation, but still, a diminution of your unceasing reproaches.


Oddly enough you have some sort of notion of what I mean. For instance, a short time ago you said to me: "I have always been fond of you, even though outwardly I
didn't act toward you as other fathers generally do, and this precisely because I can't pretend as other people can." Now, Father, on the whole I have never doubted your
goodness toward me, but this remark I consider wrong. You can't pretend, that is true, but merely for that reason to maintain that other fathers pretend is either mere
opinionatedness, and as such beyond discussion, or on the other handЧand this in my view is what it really isЧa veiled expression of the fact that something is wrong in
our relationship and that you have played your part in causing it to be so, but without its being your fault. If you really mean that, then we are in agreement.


I'm not going to say, of course, that I have become what I am only as a result of your influence. That would be very much exaggerated (and I am indeed inclined to this
exaggeration). It is indeed quite possible that even if I had grown up entirely free from your influence I still could not have become a person after your own heart. I
should probably have still become a weakly, timid, hesitant, restless person, neither Robert Kafka nor Karl Hermann, but yet quite different from what I really am, and
we might have got on with each other excellently. I should have been happy to have you as a friend, as a boss, an uncle, a grandfather, even (though rather more
hesitantly) as a father-in-law. Only as a father you have been too strong for me, particularly since my brothers died when they were small and my sisters came along
only much later, so that I alone had to bear the brunt of itЧand for that I was much too weak.


Compare the two of us: I, to put it in a very much abbreviated form, a LЎwy with a certain Kafka component, which, however, is not set in motion by the Kafka will to
life, business, and conquest, but by a LЎwyish spur that impels more secretly, more diffidently, and in another direction, and which often fails to work entirely. You, on
the other hand, a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, knowledge of
human nature, a certain way of doing things on a grand scale, of course also with all the defects and weaknesses that go with these advantages and into which your