Kafka is considered one of the most important of all Prague German writers, and he has become a symbol and an endless source of an inspiration for many people. Yet it is still the case that many uninitiated readers consider him a prose-writer who is hard to read and interpret. Our book provides more than just biographical data from Kafka´s life and work. Its main aim is to give readers the chance to better understand Kafka´s writings on the basis of information and matters of interest from Kafka´s life that are reflected in his works. The book contains extensive information about Kafka´s private and working life, friends and family, his relationships with women, and his health; this is interspersed with quotations from his prose, diaries and correspondence to introduce mutual connections to the reader. The book also contains hundreds of photographs from Kafka´s life, together with drawings by the author, extracs from his manuscripts and correspondence and other rare documents, including reproductions of covers and headings of first editions of his books. The luxury box contains both the publication and the cardboard case containing genuine materials relating to Kafka´s life - from his years as a student, through his life at the office, to extracts from his manuscripts and correspondence with his sister from his private and business trips and also letters to his family that he sent from several sanatoriums, where he stayed in the closing years of his life suffering from bituminosis. In the enclosed materials readers will find Kafka´s last, twice-unfinished letter, which crowns his literary life in a symbolic way.
Contents
About the author
Ph.D. Josef Čermák
is a literary historian and translator from German, French, Italian and Spanish. He studied Czech studies, Romance studies and Comparative Literary History at Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University in Prague.
Career:
1952-1990 Having finished his studies with doctor´s degree, he entered publishing house Odeon (till 1965 called National Publishing House of Fiction and Art) and worked there for almost four decades as editor, editor-in-chief and later as main lector.
1956-69 Throughout this period he did lectures on the history of world literature on the Faculty of Pedagogy.
1968-1969 His lectures were held on Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University, Department of Comparative Literary History chaired by Václav Černý.
1990-1991 He worked as the editor-in-chief in the publishing house Foreign Literature
1991-92 He undertook the same function in publishing house Aventinum
1992-1997 He worked in the publishing house Grafoprint Neubert for five years, at first as the editor-in-chief and lately as a director.
Since 1997 he led the author´s team of the 10-volume encyclopedia Universum in the publishig house Euromedia.
Kafkologist:
He is one of the founder members of the Franz Kafka Society and long-standing member of its committee. As a literary historian he deals with the Prague German literature (F. Kafka, F. Werfel, M. Brod) and its reception in the Czech culture and also with the Czech-German litetary relations.
Author of books:
Kafka und Prague (1971) title was published in German and also in English under the title Kafka and Prague. He published the English edition under a pseudonym Johann Bauer for political reasons
Kafka´s Letters to Parents from years 1922-1924 he put together with Martin Svatos from letters found in Prague. This book was also published in German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Finish and Japanese.
Translation of the literary work (1969) is a memorial volume of studies in translatology that he edited and co-ordinated together with Aloys Skoumal and Bohuslav Ilk
Portrets and Studies (1978) is edited litery-science legacy of Vojtěch Jirát
Other activities:
He is the author of several studies on the authors of German, Austrian, French, Spanish, Italian and Anglo-American literature. He prepared, annotated and partly translated the voluminous 2-volume collection from Prospera Mériméé (1954,1960). He did many lectures (mainly on Kafka, Prague German literature and Czech-German relationships) in various countries, for example in Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Holland or Norway. He is the author of books of words for itinerant exhibitions of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic called Franz Kafka lived in Prague and CD-ROM bearing the same name (in Cyech, German and English version, 1999).
He translated more than 30 books from the field of fiction, science, aesthetics and history.