Five hundred of his letters survive and were posthumously published in the intensely rewarding and revelatory Letters to Felice ( public library). During that period, Kafka produced his most significant work, including The Metamorphosis.
Over the five-year course of their turbulent, mostly epistolary relationship, they were engaged twice, even though they met in person only a few times. Young Franz and Felice immediately began a correspondence of escalating intensity, with Kafka frequently exasperated - as was Vladimir Nabokov at the start of his lifelong romance with Véra - over his beloved’s infrequent and insufficiently romantic response. The discomfort of this wildly disorienting bidirectional pull is what 29-year-old Franz Kafka articulated in a beautiful and heartbreaking letter to Felice Bauer, a marketing rep for a dictation machine company whom the young author had met at the home of his friend and future biographer Max Brod in August of 1912. “Relationships are probably our greatest learning experiences,” a wise woman once said, echoing Rilke’s memorable proclamation that love is “perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.” When we fall in love, we are asked to rise to this task - a polarizing pull that stretches the psyche in opposite directions as we crave surrender and safety in equal measure.
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