From 1901 to 1906 I practised drawing, took drawing classes, attended art history lectures and sought a connection to Prague's artistic circles. I was even more hostile to my drawings than to my writing.
After seeing a Yiddish theatre troupe in October 1911 I immersed myself in Yiddish language and literature for six months. That learning became the inspiration for my first novel, The Man Who Disappeared.
At university in Prague I switched from chemistry to law, took German studies and art history on the side, read Plato and Flaubert in the original with Max Brod, and earned a Doctor of Law on 18 June 1906.
I read widely and critically — Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gogol, Grillparzer and Kleist were my "true blood brothers" — and I judged even Goethe by what his work did to the German language of literature.
I use a German construction — subordinate clauses that push the verb to the end — to build long sentences that deliver their impact just before the full stop. It is a literary craft that makes my work hard to translate.
My literature combines exact, realistic detail with absurdity. I examine small, inconspicuous details with such precision that unforeseen things surface — strange, yet absolutely true.
In Zürau in 1917 I kept diaries and notes in exercise books, then extracted 109 numbered pieces of text onto single slips of paper — one thought per slip.
From 1908 I worked at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, investigating compensation for workers injured by unguarded machinery, handling appeals and writing the institute's annual report.
The Castle is my last novel: K., a land surveyor, struggles for unknown reasons to reach the mysterious authorities who govern a village. I planned it by June 1914 and began writing on 27 January 1922.
In 1914 I began The Trial: a man is arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, and the nature of his crime is revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Its parable Before the Law was in print by 1915.
