Franz Kafka, “The Burrow,” Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Schocken, 1971), 340, 342. Unless otherwise noted all quotes from the story come from this edition.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 355.
Stanley Corngold’s translation is more accurate: “but everything remained unchanged, the * * *. (Here the story breaks off.)” Kafka, “The Burrow,” in Kafka’s Selected Stories, trans. Stanley Corngold (W.W. Norton, 2007), 189.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 331.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 333.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 333.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 334.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 334.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 334.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 335.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 335.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 335.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” in Investigations of a Dog and other creatures, trans. Michael Hoffman (New Directions, 2017), 212; “The Burrow,” in Kafka’s Selected Stories, trans. Stanley Corngold, 171; “The Burrow,” in Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, trans. Peter Wortsman (Archipelago Books, 2016), 346–347.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 336. He sums up his life in the neighboring hole: “I creep into my hole, close it after me, wait patiently, keep vigil for long or short spells, and at various hours of the day, then fling off the moss, issue from my hole, and summarize my observations.”
Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. Alexander Dru (Harper and Brothers, 1959), 98.
Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton University Press, 2014), 22.
Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. and trans. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 260.
Kafka, “Burrow,” 346.
Kafka, “Burrow,” 346. Emphasis added.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 343.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 348–349.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 357.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 343.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 347.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 352.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 339.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 353.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 353.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 351. A study of Kafka’s noise complaints, on par with, if not exceeding Proust’s, would be a worthwhile endeavor in its own right. To give a characteristic sample: “How I longed for silence yesterday—complete, impenetrable silence! Do you think I shall ever achieve it as long as I have ears to hear with and a head producing within itself a profusion of the inevitable clamor of life? Silence, I believe, avoids me, as water on the beach avoids stranded fish.” Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (Schocken, 1973), 496; postcard dated September 8, 1916.
See Mladen Dolar, “The Burrow of Sound,” differences 22, no. 2–3 (2011).
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 357.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 338.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 350–351.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 356.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 356.
This topological reversal is what interested Jacques Lacan in “The Burrow”; in his words, “man is a burrow animal.” See Lacan, Seminar IX L’identification (unpublished), session from March 21, 1962. Mladen Dolar comments on this in A Voice and Nothing More (MIT Press, 2006), 166–167.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 338.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 338.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 359.
Lorenzo Chiesa made this point in his “The Trojan Castle: Lacan and Kafka on Knowledge, Enjoyment, and the Big Other,” Crisis and Critique 6, no. 1 (April 2019), 34–35.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 358.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 337.
Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (Exact Change, 1991), 22.
See Peter Szendy, All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage, trans. Roland Végső (Fordham University Press, 2017), 55.
See Max Brod, “Nachtworte des Herausgebers,” in Franz Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes: Novellen, Skizzen, Aphorismen aus dem Nachlass (S. Fischer Verlag, 1980), 259.
Richard T. Gray, Ruth V. Gross, Rolf J. Goebel, and Clayton Koelb, A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, 2005), 27.
Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., trans. Idra Novey (Penguin, 2012), 183.
Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., 186.