"Kafka, Franz - Diaries 1911" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kafka Franz)

recognized too late.


A few days ago Leonie Frippon, cabaret girl, Stadt Wien. Hair dressed in a bound-up mass of curls. Bad girdle, very old dress, but very pretty with tragic gestures,
flutterings of the eyelids, thrusts of the long legs, skillful stretching of the arms along the body, significance of the rigid throat during ambiguous passages. Sang: Button
Collection in the Louvre.

Schiller, as drawn by Schadow in 1804 in Berlin, where he had been greatly honored. One cannot grasp a face more firmly than by this nose. The partition of the nose
is a little pulled down as a result of the habit of pulling on his nose while working. A friendly, somewhat hollow-cheeked person whom the shaven face has probably
made senile.



14 January. Novel, Eheleute (Married People), by Beradt. A lot of bad Jewishness. A sudden, monotonous, coy appearance of the author; for instance: All were
gay, but one was present who was not gay. Or: Here comes a Mr. Stern (whom we already know to the marrow of his novelistic bones). In Hamsun too there is
something like this, but there it is as natural as the knots in wood, here, however, it drips into the plot like a fashionable medicine on to sugar. Odd turns of expression
are clung to interminably, for instance: He was busy about her hair, busy and again busy. Individual characters, without being shown in a new light, are brought out well,
so well that even faults here and there do not matter. Minor characters mostly wretched.



17 January. Max read me the first act of Abschied von der Jugend (Parting of the Young People). How can I, as I am today, come up to this? I should have to
look for a year before I found a true emotion in me, and am supposed, in the face of so great a work, in some way to have a right to remain seated in my chair in the
coffeehouse late in the evening, plagued by the passing flatulence of a digestion which is bad in spite of everything.



19 January. Every day, since I seem to be completely finished-during the last year I did not wake up for more than five minutes at a time-I shall either have to wish
myself off the earth or else, without my being able to see even the most moderate hope in it, I shall have to start afresh like a baby. Externally, this will be easier for me
than before. For in those days I still strove with hardly a suspicion after a description in which every word would be linked to my life, which I would draw to my heart,
and which would transport me out of myself. With what misery (of course, not to be compared with the present) I began! What a chill pursued me all day long out of
what I had written! How great the danger was and how uninterruptedly it worked, that I did not feel that chill at all, which indeed on the whole did not lessen my
misfortune very much.

Once I projected a novel in which two brothers fought each other, one of whom went to America while the other remained in a European prison. I only now and then
began to write a few lines, for it tired me at once. So once I wrote down something about my prison on a Sunday afternoon when we were visiting my grandparents and
had eaten an especially soft kind of bread, spread with butter, that was customary there. It is of course possible that I did it mostly out of vanity, and by shifting the
paper about on the tablecloth, tapping with my pencil, looking around under the lamp, wanted to tempt someone to take what I had written from me, look at it, and admire
me. It was chiefly the corridor of the prison that was described in the few lines, above all its silence and coldness; a sympathetic word was also said about the brother
who was left behind, because he was the good brother. Perhaps I had a momentary feeling of the worthlessness of my description, but before that afternoon I never
paid much attention to such feelings when among relatives to whom I was accustomed (my timidity was so great that the accustomed was enough to make me halfway
happy), I sat at the round table in the familiar room and could not forget that I was young and called to great things out of this present tranquillity. An uncle who liked to
make fun of people finally took the page that I was holding only weakly, looked at it briefly, handed it back to me, even without laughing, and only said to the others who
were following him with their eyes, "The usual stuff," to me he said nothing. To be sure, I remained seated and bent as before over the now useless page of mine, but
with one thrust I had in fact been banished from society, the judgment of my uncle repeated itself in me with what amounted almost to real significance and even within
the feeling of belonging to a family I got an insight into the cold space of our world which I had to warm with a fire that first I wanted to seek out.



19 February. When I wanted to get out of bed this morning I simply folded up. This has a very simple cause, I am completely overworked. Not by the office but my