Milena: much more than a love story with Kafka

Monika Zgustova could have written a standard biography or addressed the centenary of Kafka's death, which falls in 2024, with a thousand different approaches.

But the Czech author living in Barcelona has chosen the most laborious, risky and original path.

Based on the correspondence and articles left by Milena Jesenská (born in Prague in 1896 and died in the Ravensbrük concentration camp, Germany, in 1944), Zgustova has created an entire voice, that of this woman who fought and raised resistance against all the corsets of the time.

As a woman, as an intellectual, as a free spirit.

In a first person crafted with a firm hand, Monika Zgustova (Prague, 67 years old) chooses the genre, the tone and succeeds in remaining faithful to a bet chiseled with as much historical material as security and precision.

There is no tremor in Milena's voice.

There are no cracks.

There are no cracks.

There are no tricks or shortcuts to accentuate moments that could have been more popular (the passion with Kafka) or dramatic (the concentration camp), and which nevertheless gain in intensity due to the austerity of the story.

The writer advances at all times with the reins under control to offer us on a plate the overwhelming personality of a woman who was much more than Kafka's friend or lover.

And it is in all that extraordinary material in which that Czech woman who shone in Vienna and Prague at the beginning of the 20th century, who fought to write, translate, abandon her husband, love whoever she wanted, be a journalist or save her friends Jews while she could win us over with the help of this other great Czech author of the present, Monika Zgustova, who has written about her.

Milena Jesenská moved in that Vienna in which Freud had already imposed a new erotic and sexual discourse.

Insecure, exploited and not well treated by her husband, the young Czech woman managed to make her way into the literary circles of the Austrian capital, begin translating Kafka and send columns to the press in her native Prague.

Meeting the author of

The Process

was the beginning of his liberation, his confidence and his self-esteem until he began to forge his own world that, however, was not going to be closed to him.

Independence was his flag.

“I needed freedom like the air I breathed and living someone else's life [Kafka's] was not for me.

"I couldn't and didn't want to live as if I were in a cell looking for a window, that opening to the outdoors," Milena is going to tell us.

That is why Kafka is not the center of his life.

What he will be is the visionary who was able to foresee the arrival of totalitarianism, as he intuited in his books and is well recognized in

I Am Milena from Prague.

Nazism and Stalinism hit Czechoslovakia equally, as they hit Milena and the intellectual elites to their destruction.

We will see the intense energy of a country that was born with enthusiasm after the Austro-Hungarian collapse;

We will see the disappointment with communism that was experienced among intellectuals who were able to know the USSR;

We will see the Jews flee and suffer while the Nazis deprave the country that is sinking in their hands and that – today we know – could not begin to rise until the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The merit of Zgustova, who already dazzled with

Dressed for a Dance in the Snow,

is to weave that entire story through a single woman, Milena, also crossed by the feminist struggle and her status as a full intellectual.

With the tools of the pen and research.

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