In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into a passionate but doomed epistolary love affair. Kafka’s Czech translator, Milena Jesenska, was a gifted and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka’s complex genius and his even more complex character. For the thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was a living fire, such as I have never seen.
It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping.
The voice of Kafka in Letters to Milena is more personal, more pure, and more painful than in his fiction: a testimony to human existence and to our eternal wait for the impossible. A marvelous new edition of a classic text.
—Jan Kott