SOURCE: “Kafka's Life,” in Scrutiny, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1938, pp. 86-9.

In the following review, Wellek praises Brod's biography of Franz Kafka as a worthy addition to Kafka scholarship.

Franz Kafka's work seems at first sight almost timeless and placeless. It hovers in a rarefied atmosphere of metaphysical horror. In his whole work there is not a single allusion to Bohemia except the scene in St. Vitus Cathedral in the Trial, nor anything which would show any interest in the problems which moved the many contemporary German writers who came from Prague. Rilke at least in his early poems and stories is preoccupied with the fascination of his home town and country, Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Gustav Meyrinck and others of less importance seem to think of little else than the Jewish question and the relation of Germans and Czechs. Kafka, though also a German Jew from Prague, seems a...