Kafka Himself Gets a Metamorphosis
New York Times, Jenny Lyn Bader, 08.17.2008
Oh, yes, and smut. A bit of a provocateur, Mr. Hawes, whose book is titled “Excavating Kafka” in its British edition, explores a hitherto uncelebrated “porn” stash kept in a locked bookshelf by the great writer. No, the magazines in question haven’t been hiding in a Prague garret. As academics already knew, they’re archived at the British Library and the Bodleian Library at Oxford. But no one mined them for publication until Mr. Hawes chose to now — which probably says more about who we are today than it does about who Kafka was. (…)
Clearly, Kafka wasn’t reading Hustler. The journal in question — Amethyst (1905-1906), later retitled Opals (1907) — was more avant-garde than that: without photos and with a decadent, aesthetic sensibility. Privately published, it was available only via subscription in numbered, limited editions. It included reprints of material by Goethe, illustrations by artists like Aubrey Beardsley, and reprinted and newly translated erotic prose from old and recent Turkish, Indian, French, English and Italian texts, including writing by Casanova, Wilde, Rimbaud, Keats and the symbolist poet Verlaine. There was also cutting-edge fiction, like the debut of a seminal Expressionist novel, “Bebuquin” by Carl Einstein.
