A Country Doctor
Jan 1982 · The Complete Works of Franz Kafka Book 16 · Continental Press
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About this eBook
A Country Doctor emerged from one of Kafka's most fertile creative periods, written in 1917 during a stay at his sister's house in Zürau where he retreated after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. The collection was published by Kurt Wolff in 1920, gathering fourteen short stories that blur the line between fever dream and reality. The title story's snowy nightmare landscape reflects Kafka's own isolation during this period of illness, while its themes of medical futility echo his growing awareness of his own mortality. The stories share a dreamlike logic where time and space bend unpredictably. In the title story, a country doctor makes an impossible journey through a blizzard, aided by mysterious groom figures who might be demons. Called to treat a young patient, he discovers a fatal wound that simultaneously exists and doesn't exist - a paradox that captures the doctor's helplessness before death. Kafka drew from his experiences with various doctors and sanatoriums, transforming medical authority into a kind of dark comedy where healers prove powerless to heal themselves. The doctor's professional obligations trap him in an endless circuit of futile house calls, suggesting how social duty becomes a form of imprisonment. The collection's other stories expand on these themes of duty, failure, and inescapable guilt. Kafka wrote many of them during sleepless nights, and they maintain the disjointed logic of insomnia where one scene bleeds into another without clear transitions. Rural settings become unreal spaces where the laws of nature stop working properly - horses appear from nowhere, wounds speak, and distances stretch or contract at will. This destabilization of reality serves Kafka's larger project of exposing the absurdity hiding within ordinary life. The doctor's predicament - trapped between professional obligation and personal helplessness - speaks to anyone caught in systems they can neither escape nor fully comprehend. Reading these stories feels like entering a dream you've had before but can't quite remember, where familiar objects and situations turn threatening in ways you can't explain. This modern translation from the original German is a fresh, accessible and beautifully rendered text that brings to life Kafka's great literary work. This edition contains extra amplifying material including an illuminating afterword, a timeline of Kafka's life and works alongside of the historical events which shaped his art, and a short biography, to place this work in its socio-historical context.
About the author
A Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, Kafka's work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. His writings, such as "The Metamorphosis" and "The Trial," explore themes of alienation, existential anxiety, and guilt, and are influential in modernist literature.
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