Franz Kafka, Max Brod (editor), Joseph Kresh (translator), Martin Greenberg (translator), Hannah Arendt (translator) · 1910–23 (pub. 1948–49) · EPUB · Calibre ID 3169
Resurfaced in Wrote Nothing Today (2026-10-08).
Role in the triad
Primary source: the blank days both later books diagnose
Why this book
Both Flaherty (ch. 3 epigraph, ch. 4) and Vila-Matas (note 24) quote it; placing it at the centre lets every borrowing be checked against the original. Year-by-year counts show writing discussed most in 1911–12 and almost never in 1922.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- ‘7 June. Bad. Wrote nothing today. Tomorrow no time.’ (7 June 1912)
- ‘This story, ‘The Judgement’, I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd–23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. … as if I were advancing over water.’ (23 Sept 1912)
- ‘Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it, for it disturbs me or delays me, if only because I think it does.’ (21 Aug 1913)
- ‘Yesterday incapable of writing even one word. Today no better. Who will save me?’ (8 April 1914)
- ‘The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing: it is a leap out of murderers’ row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place.’ (27 Jan 1922)
- ‘I SHOULD write the whole night through, so many things occur to me, but all of it rough.’ (Travel diary, Jan–Feb 1911)
Themes
Brod’s edition · diary · Felice · Goethe · night writing · The Judgement · writer’s block