What Kafka Saw: Drawings and Diaries
Image: Franz Kafka ca.1903 | Museum of Literature, Prague
MARCH 12 | 6.30 PM | At the Bohemian National Hall
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE
What Kafka Saw: Drawings and Diaries brings together translators, art historians and authors for a moderated conversation exploring Franz Kafka’s extraordinary sensitivity to his visual world. Moving through early 20th-century Prague (its cafés, theaters, galleries, cinemas, and evolving urban landscape), Kafka cultivated distinct ways of seeing that shaped both his literary work and the drawings he created throughout his life, many of which have only recently been rediscovered. Through images and discussion, the speakers will examine what drew Kafka’s attention, how he observed people, places, and objects, and how these visual practices resonate across his diaries, drawings, and writings. The conversation offers new perspectives on the relationship between image and language in Kafka’s work and situates his visual imagination within the cultural and artistic contexts of Central European modernism.
Participants
Marie Rakušanová is an art historian and Head of the Department of Art History at Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on modern art and visual culture, particularly the relationship between image and language in early 20th-century Central Europe. She is lead author and co-editor of Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language (KANT) and editor of Degrees of Separation: Bohumil Kubišta and the European Avant-Garde (University of Chicago Press).
Nicholas Sawicki is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art, Architecture, and Design at Lehigh University. He specializes in early 20th-century Central European modernism, with a focus on Jewish artists, writers, and Prague’s visual culture. He is the author of monographs on the group “the Eight” and on painter-printmaker Friedrich Feigl, and has held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, and the Leo Baeck Institute.
Ross Benjamin is an acclaimed writer and award-winning translator of German-language literature. He translated the new, uncensored edition of The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Schocken Books, 2023), praised by The New York Times as “essential… a revelation upon revelation.” His work has received the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.