विलास सारंग म्हणतात मराठीतील आघाडीच्या कादंबरीकारांनी (युरोपियन लेखक आणि बंकीम चंद्र यांचा) वास्तव वाद सोडून काफ्का सारखे लिखाण का केले नाही ?
"…मला कधी वाटतं, १८९० साली हरिभाऊनी जरा विचार केला असता: 'आपण कशाला ब्रिटीश वाङमयाचं शेपूट पकडून राहायचं?' आपलं कथाकथन विकसित करायचं. एवढं काही कठीण नाही. काफ्काच्या 'मॅटॅमॉर्फसिसचं पहिल वाक्य घ्या. 'पंचतंत्रातल्या एखाद्या गोष्टीत ते फिट बसलं असतं. एवढी फँट्सी झाली. उरलेल्या कथेत वास्तववाद आहेच…इ. स. १९०० पासून आजवर पाश्च्यात्यांनी आपल्या वाङमयाकडे ढुंकून बघितलेलं आहे का? त्यांना आपल्या कथासाहित्यात वेगळ, नवीन काही आढळल नाही … "
('लिहित्या लेखकाचं वाचन', 2011)
मला त्याचे काही प्रमाणात उत्तर काफ्का यांच्या नवीन पुस्तकात मिळाले....लेखक आणि पुस्तक Karolina Watroba's "Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka"...
पहिल्यांदा पाहू काफ्का यांचे लेखन वास्तववादी लेखनाहून वेगळे कसे वेगळे कसे?
"... But for many readers, like those reading The Metamorphosis to make sense of the coronavirus pandemic, the feeling of disorientation becomes a crucial part of their experience of the text. These are not reassuring stories that order the chaos of human life into coherent plots which either end well or at least follow an intelligible chain of cause and effect. Instead, Kafka’s tales evoke such traditional narrative structures of understanding, but fill them in with strange, chaotic, disorienting events that are difficult to make sense of, and in this way vindicate the anxiety of real life, which rarely lives up to the coherence of realist literature...."
आता पाहू हरिभाऊ कोणत्या काळात, कुठे लेखन करत होते...
“...One reason why Kafka became Kafka is that he happened to be
born in the margins of the German-speaking world, in the provinces of a
decaying, impotent empire which would disappear from the map during his
lifetime, rather than in the powerful German Empire intent on rivalling
Europe’s most belligerent colonial nations....
…One consequence of this dynamic was that the literary education he received at school tended towards the conservative and the nationalistic. In his written school-leaving exam in German, rather than holding forth about any literary works, Kafka had to describe the advantages of Austria’s geopolitical situation: that was the kind of topic that his school education was supposed to teach him about. But literature was covered in the curriculum too, and here Austrian authors were not exactly absent, but decidedly less emphasised than the greats of the traditional German national canon: Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and Kleist.
But let us stop and consider what sort of nation this canon in fact represented. Lessing grew up at the edge of Lusatia, a region which today is split between Germany and Poland and has long been inhabited by Sorbs, a Slavic ethnic group with its own distinctive linguistic and cultural identity. He wrote his famous aesthetic treatise Laocoön while working in Breslau – now Wrocław in Poland, but over the centuries variously under Polish, Czech, Habsburg, Prussian and German rule. Kleist was born and studied in Frankfurt an der Oder, a city whose eastern part became part of Poland after 1945, the river in its name now serving as the national border. Like Lessing and Kleist, Goethe and Schiller wrote their works decades before the unification of Germany in 1871, which simply did not exist as a nation state for most of European history, even if national sentiments were present in some form in the writing of these authors. Strategically selected and appropriately interpreted works of these men were later used to construct a canon that was meant to carefully delineate and police the boundaries between the German nation and its ‘Others’, such as Jews and Slavs, even – or especially – in the face of their close proximity.
No wonder that Kafka found it difficult to embrace the label of an ‘urdeutsch’ writer, as seen in his letter to Bauer. The focus of his German lessons at school was also on poetry and drama, not prose, which had long been seen as an inferior literary mode – but that was precisely the form that he adopted as his. This disconnect between German literature as it was taught to him and as he practised it himself continued at university. Kafka attended lectures by August Sauer, who struck chauvinistic tones in an attempt to assert the superiority of German literature and culture over its Czech, or more generically ‘Slavic’ counterpart. Kafka could not stand it and stopped attending the lectures…”
ज्यावेळी भारतीय स्वातंत्र्याची चळवळ लोकमान्य टिळक यांच्या सारख्या लेखक-नेत्या मुळे चांगलीच तापली होती , तत्कालीन भारतीय साहित्य भारताची पारंपारिक महानता सांगत होते, भारतीय माणसाला वीरश्री देत होते, बंडखोरी करायला सांगत होते, क्रांतिकारी करत होते... ते माणसाला एका रात्रीत किडा कसले करणार...
ह ना आपटेंना काफ्का सारखे वर्ग सोडून जाणे जमले नसते !
