Kafka, love and courage

by Mary Hockaday

Milena Jesenska is best known as the recipient of Kafka's Letters to Milena. This compelling biography fleshes out Kafka's muse, a radical-thinking, thoroughly independent woman and journalist in her own right who lived at the center of cosmopolitan Prague before the war. Always a breaker of conventions, she advocated free love, simple fashions and female independence. She experimented with Bohemianism, cafe society, sex and drugs, had passionate friendships with other women and shoplifted occasionally. She also translated Gorky, Stendahl, Flaubert, Stevenson - and Kafka. The two met when Milena approached Kafka, asking for permission to translate his work, and the two were soon engaged in a deeply intimate correspondence. As a journalist, Milena left a vivid record of the times, writing on diverse subjects, from the latest fashions, modern architecture and interior design to contemporary politics and, in time, the Munich crisis and Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia. When the Second