Kafka Letters Auctioned for $605,000

Austrian-Czech novelist Franz Kafka’s letters to his fiancee, Felice Bauer, were sold at Sotheby’s gallery Thursday for $605,000, a record price for a literary manuscript sold at public auction.

The letters, dated 1912 to 1917, were sold to a telephone bidder, identified by the gallery only as a European private collector.

The previous auction record for a manuscript was $412,500 for a notebook of Irish poet William Butler Yeats when it was sold in London in 1985, a gallery official said.

The 327 autographed Kafka letters, 15 typed letters, 145 autographed postcards and 33 typed postcards were consigned to sale by Schocken Books, which published the letters in English translation in 1973.

Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, a Kafka expert, described the Kafka-Bauer letters as “the most precise and exacting history of a human relationship that exists.”

“The potency of their (the letters) influence, direct and indirect, on Kafka’s own stories and novels and thus on the literary and philosophic production of an infinitude of subsequent writers and thinkers is beyond measure,” said Prof. Arthur Wensinger of Wesleyan University.