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Mark Blair's avatar

I can't wait to read this story! I found a PDF of it online after you mentioned it on the podcast a few weeks ago. As a huge fan of Kafka's work, I couldn't help but wonder if he was partially inspired by it when writing "The Metamorphosis" due to the similarly absurd circumstance discovered upon waking.

I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that Kafka "considered Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustav Flaubert, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Grillparzer, and Heinrich von Kleist to be his 'true blood brothers'". So, I'm thinking 'yes'.

I'm in the middle of reading an interesting piece that contrasts the two of them here: https://thirdtriumvirate.wordpress.com/2018/08/24/on-gogol-and-kafka/

It thought this quote from R. Karst that is discussed in the piece to be an interesting way to contrast their approaches:

"The basic difference is that Kafka makes illusion real while Gogol makes reality illusory—the former depicts the reality of the absurd, the latter the absurdity of the real”

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Elizabeth Sowden's avatar

When I studied in Moscow, we went to an opera based on “The Nose.” It was pretty amazing.

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