“The original sin, the ancient wrong that man has committed, consists in the accusation, which man makes, and from which he does not desist, that a wrong has been done to him, that the original sin was committed against him.”
— Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, trans. Philip Boehm
Milena Jesenská was the second great love of Kafka’s life, according to the Kafka Museum, which also posits that she went on "to achieve world fame due to the letters they exchanged" — a statement that is precisely what one might expect of an institution devoted to maintaining the Kafka Industry.
Jan Jesenský, Milena’s father, was an established professor of dentistry in Prague, where he was known as a member of high society. Since Milena’s mother died when she was thirteen, her father played a large role in her upbringing, and enrolled her in the first private Czech high school for girls, the Minerva School, that is credited with shaping the “the first emancipated women intellectuals championing a new, freethinking lifestyle.” According to the Kafka Museum:
Erratic family circumstances and the emancipatory views of the Czech-German Prague intelligentsia brought this vivacious, energetic and flighty young woman who had a taste for risk into open conflict with society. In 1917, as a result of her lax behaviour and moral misconduct, her father had her confined for nine months in the Veleslavín insane asylum on the grounds of ‘moral insanity’. At the time she was having an affair with Ernst Pollak, a bank clerk from the provincial town of Jičín, well-versed in music and literature, whom she married when she came of age at 21 and left with him for Vienna.
According to the Kafka Museum:
Ernst Pollak, dubbed ‘Kenner (wise guy) Pollak’ was a member of Franz Werfel’s circle at the Arco Café in Prague that Kafka would occasionally join. It was most likely there that Kafka first met Milena, although it was only a passing acquaintance. In Vienna, Pollak dominated the table of the regular clients at the Herrenhof Café, where even leading Austrian literati such as Hermann Broch sought him out for advice and assistance. In Vienna, Pollak also publicized the work of the then little-known Prague writer, Franz Kafka. It was he who brought Kafka to the attention of Milena Jesenská. By then her German was good enough for her to try her hand at translating shorter German texts and German translations of non-German authors into Czech. She started to send her translations to Czech newspapers and magazines, where a number of her friend worked as journalists.
Kafka’s story The Stoker was not the first work by a German author she had tried translating. As she was wont to do, she made written contact with the author about the translation of The Stoker, and their correspondence developed into an ‘epistolary novel’. Kafka also had marital designs on Milena.
Throughout 1920 letters streamed back and forth between the north Italian spa of Merano, where Kafka was convalescing, and Vienna, where Milena was living in a less than happy marriage. On two occasions they met in person. Their first meeting, in Vienna, was happy and full of promise, their second, in the frontier town of Gmünd, culminated with a lapse on Kafka’s part and marked a hiatus in their relationship. On the one hand, they were poorly matched temperamentally, and on the other, Milena was unwilling to abandon Ernst Pollak, whom she loved in spite of their marital difficulties. Kafka’s relationship with Milena ended like the two previous ones. Out of it came Kafka’s Letters to Milena, an outstanding feat of letter writing, and Milena’s translations of Kafka, the first ever into a foreign language.
AUGUST 26, 1920: ‘THE SONG OF ANGELS IN THEIR MUSIC’
On August 26, 1920, Franz Kafka writes to Milena from Prague, expressing relief that her letters "provide irrefutable proof for your being the you I carry sealed in my innermost self." Insisting that this You is true— that this You he holds of her on paper is reliable— Kafka says he will be loyal to it, even "if it should testify against me to the highest authorities." He continues:
"I am dirty, Milena, infinitely dirty, this is why I scream so much about purity. No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell – what we take to be the song of angels in their music."
The writer is lost in his encounter of Milena on paper, lost in her words and worlds, standing upon the threshold she symbolizes.
In another letter written on the same day, Kafka tells her that he did nothing except listen to “a very late pain working in the temples" as he pondered her letters “in agony, and love, and worry, and in an entirely indefinite fear of the indefinite," which he described as the thing “infinitely beyond” his own strength. He reads her letters in pieces, responding feverishly, feeling an affinity to her “silent laments," the the ones she doesn’t commit to paper, the ones which resemble his own. "It’s the strangest thing that even here in the darkness, we are so much of one mind,” he muses.
Kafka describes feeling enervated, raw, stung by the constant awareness of being alive. This aliveness, for him, is accompanied by dread, or the awareness that feeling alive—like being alive—ends. And he ends this train of thought by posing a question to himself, and to her: "Why can’t we accept the fact that the right thing to do is live inside this very special tension which keeps suicide suspended?"
AUGUST 30, 1920: ‘REDEEM THE WORLD’
On August 30, Kafka asks Milena (again) not to write to him every day – he fears her letters, he fears being lost and tossed on the sea of them. Yet, he cannot abstain from writing to her the next day, elucidating his belief that all humans are good, lamenting how his body refuses to accept what his mind believes, straining against his flesh which "would rather crawl slowly up the wall, then await this trial, which really would— in the sense— redeem the world."
SEPTEMBER 2 & 4 1920: ‘A WORM’
"Treating the problem of guilt seriously is one of the most senseless things on the planet," Kafka tells Milena on 2 September 1920, revisiting the reproaches her husband could hold against her, or the reproaches that others in their circle of friends might sense.
"Even the most beautiful ones always contain a worm," Kafka says correspondence on September 4, 1920, as the correspondence with Milena thickens.
SEPTEMBER 5, 1920: ‘NOT EVEN MY NAME’
On September 5th of 1920, Franz Kafka lays out his Kierkegaardian either/or, comparing himself to Robinson Crusoe, who signed on to the voyage that cost him everything, who undertook the journey that ended in shipwreck, yet retained a few things, namely, his island, his Friday, his fantasy of a world, and his name. Although Crusoe had his fictional name, Franz would have nothing. "I wouldn’t have a thing, not even my name, since I have given that to you as well," he writes, in the throes of his Kierkegaardian trance, unable to imagine an independence in relation to this "dependency [that] transcends all bounds."
One can almost hear Franz look at up the window, and draw in his breath while writing the following words to Milena:
SEPTEMBER 10-20, 1920: ‘YOU ARE THE KNIFE’
On September 10, 1920, Kafka writes to Milena:
Nothing else is possible, for we are living in misunderstandings; our questions are rendered worthless by our replies. Now we have to stop writing one another, and leave the future to the future.
Sept. 14, 1920, Kafka to Milena again:
Aren’t our eyes made to be torn out, and our hearts for the same purpose? …everything is an exaggeration, the only truth is longing, which cannot be exaggerated. But even the truth of longing is not as much it, our truth; it’s really an expression of everything else, which is a lie.
Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most - you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love.
On Sept. 18, 1920, Kafka condemns himself for making things too hard, acknowledges that his fear made it difficult to keep from catastrophizing - “I was living off your gaze,” he tells her. Milena sees him as he wants to be seen. There is no “solid ground” beneath a divine gaze. One cannot live on earth at the same time.
They had Vienna, and then the failure of the next meeting. Kafka is ill — he lists symptoms, sanatoriums, and exhaustion simmers on the surface of those letters that seem as resigned to death as they are to loss.
Believing yourself loved is not the same as living or inhabiting the difficulty of love, Kafka suggests on the evening of Sept. 20, 1920, when he looks at the speech acts of lovers, adding: “But those aren’t really lovers, they’re just grammarians.”
He dreams that she is on fire and he cannot save her: he is no fireman, and so he waits for the fireman to come and save her, because he cannot do it himself. But the Milena that survives is a wan, lifeless, sort of shadow of the self.
The “nevertheless” - this is what Kafka craves of her marriage to Pollack, the nevertheless which she articulates in her essay as why happiness is a silly goal for marriage.
JANUARY 18, 1923: ‘THE DEVIL AT THE HEARTH’
No pseudonym; no mask: Milena published “The Devil at The Hearth” as Milena Jesenská on 18 January 1923.
And Franz replied to her —-and to the devil — with a letter dated “January-February 1923,” a long letter which ends:
The evil magic of letter writing is setting in and destroying my nights, even more than they are already destroying themselves. I have to stop, I can no longer write. Oh, your insomnia is different from mine. Please let’s not write anymore.
After this —- and until his death in June 1924 —- Kafka sent only two curt postcards (one mentioning his forthcoming death) and two about notes which seem to struggle for breath, for oxygen, for life.
‘NEVERTHELESS’
In her devil piece, Milena argues that marrying for happiness is selfish, frivolous, and stupid. It is the same as marrying for money, for title, for luxury goods. “The only good reason for two people to get married is if it is impossible for them not to. If they simply cannot live without each other. No remorse, sentimentality, tragedy: it happens.”
Pollack cheated on her constantly, despite her having given him her “nevertheless” — her partnership —- that unconditionality that measured what Kafka most craved and refused of the world.
There is no way to know the person one is marrying, Milena argues. The “risks of disappointment” are endemic to the nature of marriage, and accepting them is critical to relationships. Against “the modern hysteria a la Anna Karenina,” she says, we should see each human as a world unto themselves and accept each other in order to affirm “feeling justified in being” one’s truest, least performative self. “Proof that he is loved ‘nevertheless’” - a promise not to let someone go - is more ethical and precise than the vow of romantic love until death.
Milena mocks the “miserable, shabby happiness” of the marriages in which partners sacrifice everything and have every good fortune and still can’t be happy. The vow itself amounts to the “accepting a promise that can’t be kept” and then acting victimized a year later. Because there is “a talent for being happy,” and because some find happiness in less, there is no guarantee of conditions to produce this inexplicable state. “Longing for happiness” is the cupcake of a relationship, and the rot of all teeth.
POSTSCRIPT
By the time of Kafka’s death on June 3, 1924, Milena had broken up with Ernst Pollack.
In 1925, she returned to Prague, and married Jaromir Krejeor a few years later. She joined the CP and wrote for them until 1936 when she broke with the Party after the execution of Zinowiec and Komenev in 1936. She worked to help Jews escape to Poland and was arrested in November 1939, where she was interred among others who “consorted with Jews” and shipped to Ravensbruck. She died there on May 17, 1944.
According to the Kafka Museum, “Milena went on to make her name as a journalist and led a very eventful life alongside a number of remarkable men. . . . “