The honeycomb of Kafka's world

Wherein we take stock and explore Reiner Stach's 'Kafka: The Early Years,' a monumental biography that unveils the man behind the icon and the world that shaped his work.

For today, I’m going to hit the pause button on our chronological journey through Kafka’s life. Let’s step back for a moment and examine one of the primary sources guiding our exploration so far: the first volume of Reiner Stach’s monumental biography, Kafka: The Early Years. This will also allow me to take stock and see how far we’ve come in our Kafka journey.

As I’ve been weaving together the threads of Kafka’s life for you (and me), Stach’s work has been my constant companion, a veritable ‘On the Cheap’ into early 20th-century Prague and the enigmatic mind of its most famous little runt. But it’s high time we gave this tome the spotlight it deserves.

Kafka: The Early Years¹ is the first chronological instalment of Stach’s three-volume biography, though paradoxically, it was the last to be published—Stach wanted to wait until Brod’s literary estate was made available to researchers—a quirk of publication order that seems oddly fitting for Kafka, a man whose own works were largely publi…