Theme of the week: Kafka, 90 years later

Riddles of Franz Kafka: an incomprehensible modernist and an unexpected pop symbol

90 years ago, Franz Kafka died. Everyone knows about this writer, the expression “Kafkianism” was included in European languages, but Kafka still remains, on the one hand, the source of all new secrets and riddles, and on the other, the subject of a kind of mini-pulto who made this person who avoided all publicity, part of pop culture and one of the tourist symbols of his hometown-Prague.

What, first of all, were the strange gloomy fantasies of a young employee of one of the Prague insurance companies - a brilliant refraction of his own vital and downs or understanding the wider social and cultural context of the End of the End of the Old World, which collapsed with the First World War? Social or asocial kafka? How and why did he manage to break out of national, cultural, even language frames?

How was the posthumous fate of Franz Kafka? Why "we were born to make the kafka by the past" - namely Kafka, not Proust, Joyce or Borges? Can the mechanisms and technology of power be considered the main theme of Kafka's works? Why did Marxist-Leninz almost made Marxist-Lenin in socialist Czechoslovakia? How did it happen that Russian literature perceived Kafka extremely superficially? Does Kafka harm that he became a character of comics?

About these and other issues related to Franz Kafka and his heritage are reflected in the participants in the project Europe and the guests - the Moscow literary critic and translator Alexander Filippov -Chekhov and the Czech philologist, teacher of Karlov University (Prague) Tomash Glants .

Riddles of Franz Kafka: an incomprehensible modernist and an unexpected pop symbol