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StillnessQuote

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak (1904)

LiteratureMind

The story behind the card

Kafka wrote this on 27 January 1904, aged twenty, to his schoolfriend Oskar Pollak, who became an art historian and was killed in 1915 on the Italian front in the First World War. Kafka was then a law student in Prague; his first book would not appear for another eight years. The letter sets out an early, uncompromising view of what literature should do: not comfort a reader, but shake one, the way a real loss would.

Türkçe oku
Bir kitap, içimizdeki donmuş denizi kıran bir balta olmalıdır.
Franz Kafka, Oskar Pollak'a mektup (1904)

Kafka bu satırları 27 Ocak 1904'te, yirmi yaşındayken okul arkadaşı Oskar Pollak'a yazdı. Pollak sonradan sanat tarihçisi oldu ve 1915'te Birinci Dünya Savaşı'nda İtalyan cephesinde öldü. Kafka o sırada Prag'da hukuk okuyordu; ilk kitabı ancak sekiz yıl sonra çıkacaktı. Mektupta genç Kafka edebiyattan ne beklediğini açıkça söyler: Kitap okuru avutmamalı, onu sevdiği birini kaybetmiş gibi derinden sarsmalı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Franz Kafka
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