The Trial is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.
Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter which appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending.
After Kafka's death in 1924 his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany.
The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.
Even though it's a novel its structure was perfectly suitable to adapt for theater play and the white curtain as a matter of fact it has been staged many times in various national theaters all around the world and adapted to cinema several times as well.
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer based in Prague, who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature.
His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity.
His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and the novels The Trial and The Castle.
The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.
Kafka was born into a middle-class German-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today the capital of the Czech Republic).
He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time by an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died in obscurity in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.
Kafka was a prolific writer, spending most of his free time writing, often late in the night. He burned an estimated 90 percent of his total work due to his persistent struggles with self-doubt. Much of the remaining 10 percent is lost or otherwise unpublished.
Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime: the story collections Contemplation and A Country Doctor, and individual stories (such as his novella The Metamorphosis) were published in literary magazines but received little public attention.
In his will, Kafka instructed his close friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, but Brod ignored these instructions and had much of his work published.
Kafka's writings became famous in German-speaking countries after World War II, influencing their literature, and their influence spread elsewhere in the world in the 1960s. It has also influenced artists, composers, and philosophers.
This one here is the 2014 Russian independent cinematic adaptation version of the novel by Konstantin Seliverstov.
Director of Photography by Alexander Karnakov
Music by Viktor Sobolenko
Cast: Anton Shwartz, Elena Shvareva, Willie Semenov, Igor Golovin. Andrey Shimko, Natalia Shamina, Alexander Anisimov.
This movie participated in "Festival of Festivals", a Saint-Petersburg international film festival. The international premiere took place in London in October 2014.
At the International Film Festival "12 Months Film Festival" (Romania) Konstantin Seliverstov was awarded in the nomination "Best Editing".
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