Kafka and Milena wrote to each other for years, and yet they spent only five days together, the rest of their relationship existing solely on paper. Letters to Milena is a collection of Franz Kafka’s surviving letters to Milena Jesenská, the Czech journalist and translator he came to know after she began translating his work from German into Czech in 1920. She was living in Vienna with her husband, Ernst Pollak, while Kafka remained in Prague, already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him four years later. This is a book that is utterly epistolary, not just because it is made of letters, but because a majority of their relationship is the letters sent between them both. They met only twice: spending four days together in Vienna in June 1920, and one day in Gmünd, on the Austrian-Czech border that August. 

This whole book, really, is about the ache of wanting to be understood. Kafka is very honest about himself and about all of his turmoil, but that same honesty is also quite relentlessly relayed. He writes as someone that is full of fear and exhaustion, his illness being a central part of that. In the letters he sends, Kafka can give Milena so much of himself, all of his words and descriptions of his days. But in real life, he is ill and afraid, unable to do as much as he would like to do, and unable to give Milena the life he wants to give. 

Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love most—you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love.¹

Still, I found myself becoming irritated with Kafka. I felt as though every emotion or thought Milena had, or might have had, was being re-centred around his life or perception of himself. If he worried for her, we would read pages of what that worry did to him. If he didn't hear from her for a single day, we would read what he painfully endured while waiting for her letters. Milena had to understand all of his many and ever-changing emotions over and over again. Kafka seemingly wanted something impossible from Milena: to be known so completely that he would never need to explain himself again, whilst also continuing to explain himself without end. Because of this, the book felt very emotionally intense and quite exhausting to read at times. 

This is why Milena’s missing letters bothered me more as the book progressed. At first, Kafka’s voice is so consuming that you slightly forget how one-sided this surviving collection is. But then her absence does become impossible to ignore. We know that she must have replied, argued with him, comforted him, and sometimes would not have given him the answers he asked for, but we can only understand those responses through Kafka’s account of them. Milena is absolutely everywhere within this book because every letter is addressed to her, but she is also withheld from us as readers of this ‘correspondence’ at the same time (it is quite strange to call it a correspondence when only one side of it survives). We know her through Kafka’s perception of her, but I desperately wanted to hear her actual voice. The painful irony here is how a collection so committed to ‘being understood’ leaves one of its two central people almost entirely unknown.

Isn’t one letter enough, isn’t one knowing enough? Of course it is, but nevertheless I am tilting my head way back, drinking the letters, aware only that I don’t want to stop drinking. Explain that, teacher Milena!²

Milena was much more than the woman Kafka loved. She was a journalist, translator, and later a resistance worker who was arrested by the Gestapo and died in Ravensbrück in 1944. This was a woman who lived a complicated and vibrant life, and yet here she is placed in the position of the receiver. She receives all of his fear, his admiration for her, and his need to be known. I finished the collection just wanting to know her.

Letters are often romanticised, especially now, when we are used to receiving messages instantly and having them vanish just as quickly. There is sometimes a temptation to imagine correspondence as a slower, more beautiful, more meaningful form of communication and love. They definitely can be, but Letters to Milena shows how exhausting this medium can become. Letters can give you a remnant of the writer, but they also remind the recipient of that person's physical absence; you only have their words because they are not actually there. Kafka can only really send himself to Milena in pieces – through explanations, apologies, worries, and declarations. None of it can actually become the physical presence between them that the letters seem to yearn for, even as they fight that reunion every step of the way. They write constantly about being together, but whenever that possibility becomes real, something always seems to pull them back into the safety of their letters.

With you in my heart I can bear everything, and even if I did write that the days without letters were horrifying, it’s not true; they were just horribly difficult—the boat was heavy and it’s draught was horribly deep, but on your tide it floated nonetheless.³

I have only read one Kafka book before this, The Metamorphosis, so I was not coming into Letters to Milena as someone with a huge, impressive understanding of all his work. I was, instead, reading the collection with The Metamorphosis still vaguely sitting in the back of my mind. Because of that, Kafka’s illness in these letters felt even harder to separate from his letter writing. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor transforms into an insect while remaining unchanged internally, though his new body makes it impossible for his family to recognise him. He wants to speak, reassure his family, and return to his ordinary life, but he cannot communicate anymore. His body suddenly becomes this strange, burdensome, and increasingly difficult thing for everyone around him to bear. I found myself thinking about this a lot while reading Kafka’s letters. His tuberculosis did not make him unrecognisable in the same literal way as Gregor, but it seemed to affect almost every part of how he imagined a life with Milena. His physical self may be weak and unable to cross the distance between Prague and Vienna as often as he wishes, but his written self can reach her constantly.

The physical details of the letters also stood out to me so much more because of this. There were words crossed out and writing in the margins of the pages. It reminded me that these were actual pieces of paper, written by a man with a pen, changing his mind as he wrote. Kafka is so often reduced to the word ‘Kafkaesque’, as though he has become more of a mood or an atmosphere than an actual person. But here he is, complicated and human, correcting his thoughts on the page, longing to be loved whilst feeling fundamentally difficult to live with.

All in all, I would not call Letters to Milena a comforting read, nor always an enjoyable one, but I do think it is a book worth sitting with. Anyone looking for a sweeping, romantic collection of love letters may be disappointed, but if you are interested in Kafka, or in epistolary relationships specifically, then I think this is absolutely worth reading.