Marija Peričić - The Lost Pages

www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 76029 686 5

eISBN 978 1 92557 696 2

Cover design: Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

In the manuscripts Franz Kafka appears as ‘F.K.’ or ‘F-’; we have replaced this with his first name in the interest of consistency.

This sentence is crossed out in the manuscript.

In the space below the text there are several small pencil sketches of a woman’s head in profile.

This word is unclear: it has been crossed out and written over.

This sentence is followed by several others that have been heavily crossed out and are illegible.

This last paragraph was written in different ink, which has been verified as dating from the 1960s at the earliest. This suggests that Brod reviewed the material shortly before his death.

Pencil sketches in a spare, cartoonish style appear in the margins of the manuscript here. They depict a male human figure and have been partially erased.

These facing pages are stained with the imprint of a pressed flower. The flower has not been retained.

This diary has not been recovered among the Kafka papers.

The letter has been located among the papers, but water damage has rendered it illegible.

The Metamorphosis

The preceding three paragraphs were uncovered from beneath a scrap of lined paper, on which the following three paragraphs appear. The scrap has been fixed over the notebook paper with adhesive. The glue has partially dissolved the ink in some areas, and the meaning has been approximated from the context.

This paragraph has been crossed out.

A copy of the 1905 Austria–Hungary Baedeker guidebook was also found among the manuscripts.

Blank postcards of Karlsbad and train schedules were found between these pages of the manuscript.

These notes were located among the manuscripts. They are unremarkable, and written in a shorthand style. Their content mostly paraphrases the information that appears in the 1905 Baedeker.

Two pages have been torn out of the notebook and have not been recovered. The first part of this sentence is an approximation.

There is a newspaper clipping included here, measuring approximately five by seven centimetres, which on one side contains part of a photograph of an unknown face, and on the other an advertisement for Gottlieb coffee.

The birthday ‘magazine’ to which Brod refers has been located among the manuscripts, and will be made available online.

The following pages were written on blank writing paper torn from a different notebook and clipped to the pages of the exercise book. The writing is written in a small hand, and is in several places barely legible. The following section contains a number of unclear words, which have been approximated and are indicated in SMALL CAPS.

This may also read ‘reflection’.

This may also read ‘regular’.

The description of the room is an addition to the text given in the margins. The ink is the same as that used throughout the text.

This may read ‘myself’.

‘The other’ is crossed out, and ‘F’s’ is written in the space above it.

‘Anja, Anja, Anja’ is repeated here for four lines in Brod’s writing. This had been omitted in the interest of fluency and coherence.

This line has been crossed out with several strokes, but is still easily legible.

‘Body’ appears underneath the word ‘writing’, but is clearly legible.

This sentence has been crossed out and then written again beside the crossing-out.

This section is followed by several pages of illegible text: heavily crossed-out writing with some pages torn and missing.

The following sections are written in a smaller notebook, which has some water damage, but the text is still legible.

This section of the manuscript is written on unlined letter paper. The pages were folded and found in the centre of the booklet containing the previous section.

Professor Wilhelm Herrmann, Dr Helene Barbere-Flores, Professor Axel Stifter, Professor Eric Goldbaum and Dr Ben Staub.