Art As Religious Commitment: Kafka’s Debt to Kierkegaardian Ideas and their Impact on his Late Stories

Although Kafka’s reception of Kierkegaardian ideas has received much critical attention the critics have so far paid little heed to similarities between Kierke‐gaard’s religious and Kafka’s aesthetic views. My intention in the following is to show that in spite of Kafka’s critical remarks on his philosophy, Kierkegaard’s definition of a religious person influenced his description of the artist’s existence in Erstes Leid (1922), Ein Hungerkünstler (1922) and Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse (1924). In these stories Kafka turns Kierkegaard’s ideas about spiritual inwardness and passionate attitude towards religious life into artistic inwardness and passionate attitude towards art. He also describes how devotion that these artists feel towards their art leads to their solitude and how their lives reflect suffering, doubt and despair which is similar to Kierkegaard’s description of religious suffering. Kafka’s critical remarks on Kierkegaard’s philosophy should therefore be understood as a clear rejection of Kierkegaard’s Protestant theology, although these same ideas gave him inspiration to formulate his views on the artist’s existence.