Introduction

Abstract

This is a study of Kafka’s reception of Dostoyevsky, principally in the period from 1912 to early 1915. In talking of the shaping of influence I wish to stress two points. First that the relationship under consideration here is significantly a causal one, a relationship of influence. Equally, however, it is essential to see that in a relationship of this kind, as Leszek Kolakowski says, ‘the active partner is not the one who exerts the influence, but the one on whom the influence is exerted’.1 Accordingly, this is principally a book about Kafka and the way he responded to Dostoyevsky, though there is also a sense in which it is a book about Dostoyevsky and the way his world — both real and fictional — cast a spell over Kafka’s imagination. The focus on influence is above all a result of Kafka’s literalness. It is because his writing often takes up earlier models in a quite discernible process of creative restatement, that there is such rich textual evidence of Dostoyevsky’s influence, or rather, of Kafka’s appropriations. In reviewing this evidence, the contours of an underlying affinity emerge and a fascinating narrative unfolds of Kafka’s deepening entanglement in Dostoyevsky’s life and work. In asking in what ways Kafka’s writing might legitimately be said to be Dostoyevskian, I make a purely pragmatic distinction between ‘influence’ and ‘affinity’ in which influence is rather like the tip of an iceberg, highly visible yet resting on something larger whose exact shape and extent is less apparent.