It did sometimes happen that you had no opinion whatsoever about a matter and as a result all opinions that were at all possible with respect to the matter were necessarily wrong, without exception. Your self-confidence indeed was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all and yet never ceased to be in the right. Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meshugge, not normal. Dickinson and Kafka images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, background bricks image courtesy of Matt Moloney and Stocksnap.io.įranz Kafka wrote a more than a hundred-page-long letter to his father Hermann Kafka, and in it he describes a self-made patriarch who has found his place in a chaotic 19th century world, but did so at the price of becoming a brute, and a brute that was always right.įrom your armchair you ruled the world. Commonality 4 - Both Dickinson and Kafka had a successful, but also domineering, narcissistic and abusive fatherĮdward Dickinson and Hermann Kafka. They both made wills of sound mind, and both had literary executors.Īnd both of them could have destroyed their own correspondences, poems, novellas, novels and everything else.Īnd now, let’s go deeper―to one of the unsavory foundations of both Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka’s upbringing, a connection that is unfortunately all too common in this world―Īn unsavory connection that might be a major pillar of art itself. If Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka really, truly and absolutely wanted their works destroyed, they would have destroyed their works themselves.Īnd neither Dickinson nor Kafka had an entirely unexpected end. There is no evidence of either of them yearning for publishing acceptance―though they probably wouldn’t have minded acceptance in other regards―but there is one undeniable event in both their lives that suggested they wouldn’t mind their current outsized places in the literary canon.Īnd the event, or rather circumstance is this: Commonality 3 - Both Dickinson and Kafka didn’t really want their work to disappear The answer, with one point of circumstantial evidence, is an emphatic no. If they were not connected by similarities of their prose, then they were bound by the threads of how they came to make their prose.Īnd the last common thread might give insight into both the human condition - and the foundation of art itself.įriends Max Brod and Franz Kafka at the beach - photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.īrod refused this one request, and the rest is history.ĭid publishing-contemptuous Emily Dickinson and more-than-publishing-contemptuous Franz Kafka really want to go unnoticed? But there were common threads that bound these two figures Perhaps most importantly, these two writers engender different sentiments in their readers.ĭickinson’s poems bring joy, Kafka’s novellas illustrate alienation and despair―albeit the kind that brings insight to his readers, and perhaps even joy as well. Dickinson lived before Kafka, and there isn’t a great deal of evidence that Kafka read Dickinson, let alone was impacted by her. It also seems that they did not influence one another. They wrote in different formats, addressed different themes, lived in different eras and geographic locations, and it is rare to hear them mentioned in the same breath. They are both influential writers to be sure, but beyond their general impact, the similarities seem to end. Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka - images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, background image courtesy of HD Wallpapers and Stocksnap.io.Īt first, the poet Emily Dickinson and the novelist Franz Kafka might not seem connected.
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