Franz Kafka and the Problem of Literary Reputation (On the 100th Anniversary of the Writer’s Death)

The article is structured in the form of the author’s reflections on E.G. Etkind’s essay “The Image of Kafka in the Soviet Union” (1980). The theoretical objective of the article is to substantiate the concept of “literary reputation” as applied to a foreign writer. It is proved that the literary and aesthetic discussion of the 1960s about realism and modernism was ideologically colored, and the Soviet reception of Kafka’s modernist work provides an expressive example of the formation of the writer’s reputation under the influence of the socio-political context of the receiving culture. Literary criticism, as well as reader reception, was dominated by the social theme of exposing totalitarian power and the destruction of the individual as its victim, while the metaphysical meaning of Kafka’s mythology of alienation was at best relegated to the background. Kafka’s reputation in the USSR should be seen as a function of one of the competing sociocultural discourses. It was created by the forces of the opposition intelligentsia on the basis of the elimination of metaphysical discourse and its replacement with the liberal-democratic discourse of freedoms, which asserted its dominance in conditions of degradation and decay of Soviet ideology. Today, 100 years after the death of the writer, a new phase of our dialogue with his work begins.