Letters to Milena

Letters to Milena

First edition
Author	Franz Kafka
Original title	Briefe an Milena
Translator	Tania and James Stern (1st edition); Philip Boehm (2nd edition)
Language	German
Genre	Letters
Publisher	Schocken Books
Publication date	1952 (1st), 1986 (2nd)
Published in English	1953 (1st), 1990 (2nd)
Media type	Print, hard and paperback
Pages	298 p.
ISBN	0-8052-0885-2
OCLC	19814322
Dewey Decimal	833/.912 B 19
LC Class	PT2621.A26 Z48613 1990

Letters to Milena is a book collecting some of Franz Kafka's letters to Milena Jesenská from 1920 to 1923. The English translation of the letters states, "Whereas Kafka generally wrote to Milena in German, most of her letters were in her mother tongue" of Czech (p. xvii).

Publication history

The letters were originally published in German in 1952 as Briefe an Milena, edited by Willy Haas, who deleted some passages that he thought might hurt people who were still living at the time. The collection was first published in English by Schocken Books in 1953, translated by Tania and James Stern. A new German edition, restoring the passages Haas had deleted, was published in 1986, followed by a new English translation by Philip Boehm in 1990. This edition includes some of Milena's letters to Max Brod, as well as four essays she wrote and her obituary for Kafka.

Quote

The easy possibility of writing letters must have brought wrack and ruin to the souls of the world. Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts, and by no means just the ghost of the addressee but also with one's own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing. (p. ix)

In popular culture

The historical fiction novel Letters to Kafka by Christine Estima, published by House of Anansi Press, imagines what Milena Jesenská's lost letters to Kafka might have said.^[1][2] The novel works in concert with Letters to Milena.^[3]

References

1. Estima, Christine (9 September 2025). "8 Books That Explore the Love Letters of Literary Icons". Electric Lit. Retrieved 10 September 2025.
2. "50 Canadian fiction books we're excited about this fall". CBC. 21 August 2025.
3. "Book review of Letters to Kafka". Publishers Weekly. 3 July 2025.

• Kafka, Franz. Letters to Milena. Translated by Philip Boehm, New York: Schocken Books, 1990. ISBN 0-8052-0885-2
• Estima, Christine. Letters to Kafka. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2025. ISBN 9781487013318