Dr. Maxim Zhuk, Associate Professor, Department of Romance and Germanic Philology, Far Eastern Federal University (Vladivostok, Russia)
Friday 25 February 2022 @ 4:00p
Franz Kafka is a superstar of 20th-century literature and culture. His face can be seen on stamps, postcards, badges, t-shirts, graffiti, and tattoos. The name Kafka is used for all kinds of cafés, bars, restaurants, literary clubs, and bookstores. Films, performances, operas, ballets, and even computer games are based on the plots of Kafkaesque novels and short stories. Such close attention to the work of a rather difficult writer, who died almost a hundred years ago, shows that there are important universal meanings in his prose that our culture still cannot exhaust. We will talk about Franz Kafka and his story, The Metamorphosis, one of the most important fables of 20th-century literature, which uses the language of symbols and metaphors to tell us about authority, loneliness, detachment, the death of God, and other existential problems of the 20th and 21st centuries.
