Milena Jesenská was a Czech journalist and translator born in Prague in 1896. She is known as the author of articles in Czech newspapers and magazines and as the addressee of letters from Franz Kafka.[1]
Early life
Her childhood was marked by the death of her mother, who died when her daughter was sixteen. Her relationship with her father, the university professor Jan Jesenský, was not easy. In 1915 she graduated from the Minerva girls' grammar school in Prague and, at her father's wish, studied medicine for several semesters.[1] She was drawn to the intellectual bohemian circles and met writers in cafés, among them Max Brod and also Franz Werfel. She married the man of letters Ernst Pollak, and in March 1918 the two moved to Vienna.[1]
Journalist in Vienna
She was the main earner of the household. She wrote for fashion magazines, gave Czech lessons and gradually built a reputation as a journalist. After the founding of Czechoslovakia she sent contributions from Vienna to Prague newspapers and magazines as their correspondent there. Her texts give a picture of Austria in the first years after the war.[1]
Franz Kafka
She decided to translate a short story by Franz Kafka, which led to cooperation and later to a correspondence of love letters. They met during her brief visit to Prague in the autumn of 1919, saw each other twice and afterwards only wrote to each other.[1] Kafka wrote to Max Brod that she was for him a "living fire" of a kind he had never known, and Brod described their letters as some of the most beautiful love letters he had read.[1] The correspondence was ended in 1923 by Kafka himself. Besides his fear of the friendship slipping into an erotic realm, his worsening health is also offered as an explanation; he died in June 1924.[1]
After her return to Prague
Her marriage to Pollak fell apart. She left with Franz Xaver Schaffgotsch for a village near Dresden, where she published in left-leaning magazines. In 1925 she returned to Prague, and in 1927 she married for the second time, to the architect Jaromír Krejcar. A daughter was born to them in 1928.[1] She eased her health problems with morphine, became dependent on it and underwent a withdrawal cure.[1] She belonged to the Prague literary scene and contributed to the daily Tribuna, to Národní listy and to Lidové noviny. At the end of the 1920s she briefly worked as an editor at the weekly Pestrý týden.[1]
The article "Ďábel u krbu"
In one of her best-known articles, Ďábel u krbu ("The Devil by the Fireplace"), she wrote that two people have only one sensible reason to marry: that they cannot help marrying.[1]