Gustav Janouch Peter Porter Enright (1 results)

Original Wraps. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, as Issued. First Edition. Very good in magenta and yellow card wrappers with flat spine. Covers nice and clean, with just some light marks and creasing commensurate with age and handling. Contents very good and clean. 255mm x 185mm. 96 pages plus two pages of adverts on the inside covers. ***This issue includes first publication of extracts from the revised edition of 'Conversations with Kafka' by Gustav Janouch, as well as 'Going Into Europe - Again - A Symposium Part III', an article about Britain's possible entry into the E.E.C., and new verse by Peter Porter, D. J. Enright, Gavin Ewart, Elizabeth Jennings. ***'The first - and incomplete - edition of Gustav Janouch's memoir of Kafka was published in 1951, and it immediately took its place as a valuable and fascinating source-book for literary research. Yet for many years the author was unhappy with the version, the fragmentation of which he thought was the fault of Max Brod to whom the original manuscript had been sent. But in this he was mistaken. As it turned out, a large part of the original text - which was based on Janouch's youthful diaries and his manuscript "Treasury of Ideas" - had never been sent off to Brod for publication. Janouch was at the time (1947) under arrest in a Prague prison; and although he was innocent, his wife had burned his papers during the year-long interrogations. As Janouch writes in a post-script to a new edition(shortly to be published by Andre Deutsch in London, and New Directions in New York), "The mutilated book became a spiritual torment to me. I was an important witness who refused to testify." Luckily enough, a missing copy of his old "Treasury of Ideas" (originally put together two years after the death of Kafka in 1924) did turn up in a dilapidated old cardboard box on the bookshelves of the lavatory of Janouch's old house in Prague's Nationalstrasse. These papers included the missing sections of his "Conversations with Kafka" --- "Max Brod had not wilfully bowdlerised my book. He had not omitted or supressed a single paragraph. I had been unjust to him for years." The following extracts (translated by Goronwy Rees) are from this new, and previously missing, material. The self-caricature (on p.19) and the other drawings in the text are from Kafka's own notebooks.' [Taken from notes accompanying the article] ***'Encounter was a literary magazine founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and journalist Irving Kristol. It was a largely Anglo-American intellectual and cultural journal, originally associated with the anti-Stalinist left. The magazine received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency, after the CIA and MI6 discussed the founding of an "Anglo-American left-of-centre publication" intended to counter the idea of cold war neutralism. The magazine was rarely critical of American foreign policy and generally shaped its content to support the geopolitical interests of the United States government. The launch of Encounter was sponsored by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was an organization of largely centre-left artists and intellectuals founded in 1950. It was dedicated, in line with its title, to countering on behalf of the non-communist West the overtures and influence in culture of the Soviet Union, still under the Communist Party rule of Joseph Stalin until 1953. Encounter celebrated its greatest years in terms of readership and influence during the 1960s, under Melvin J. Lasky, who succeeded Kristol in 1958, and would serve as the main editor until the magazine ceased publication in 1991. [Wiki] ***A very good copy of this famous literary magazine, which includes the first publication of extracts from the revised edition of 'Conversations with Kafka' by Gustav Janouch'. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.