In 1928, four years after Kafka’s death, Brod publishes a novel, The Enchanted Kingdom of Love, which includes a character named Richard Garta—a “saint of our day,” a fervent Zionist. Brod is very open about basing this character on Kafka. Nine years later, when Brod writes the actual Kafka biography, he draws, again very openly, from the descriptions of this saintly fictional character, Richard Garta. He describes Kafka as someone who is, if not literally a saint, then on the way to becoming one. So, unsurprisingly, Brod’s critics say: “This isn’t biography, it’s hagiography.” Brod is seen as gauche, tendentious, vulgar. He’s accused of turning Kafka’s works, which are SO multivalent—if there’s one defining feature, it’s plurality of meaning—into a mouthpiece for his own political agenda.
One critic who expresses this critique very emphatically is Milan Kundera. Here we see Kundera’s book titled, in Czech, “The Castrating Shadow of Saint Garta.” Ironically, that title is itself “castrated” by the TLS, where it becomes “In Saint Garta’s shadow.” (Later, the same essay is republished in an English-language collection with an even more tasteful title: Testaments Betrayed.) Kundera’s goal in this essay is to “rescue Kafka from Brod.” Kundera does grant Brod many fine qualities. Brod is brilliant, selfless, loyal—but he doesn’t, according to Kundera, understand Kafka. This is because Brod is a man of ideas—fundamentally anti-literary, anti-artistic.
Characteristically, Kundera is particularly outraged that Brod deletes the passages in Kafka’s diary about visits to prostitutes. He says that “Kafkologists,” following Brod, make Kafka “hysterical,” “the patron saint of anorexics.” (OK he doesn’t say “effeminate,” but I mean, he does say “castrating.”) Again, this is kind of a special Kundera take. But the more general sentiment—“I will never get to the bottom of the Brod mystery”—is widely shared.
Elif Batuman, Kafka and Brod, originally presented at the Transatlantic Kafka: American and European Perspectives on Kafka’s Work conference in 2024
