"The books we need are those that fall like an axe on the frozen sea within us," Kafka wrote to Oscar Pollak a few years before writing "The Metamorphosis," a work that undoubtedly belongs precisely to this category of books. "The Metamorphosis" was written in 1912 and published in 1916 - one of the few works by the Czech author that was published during his lifetime.

The core of the myth of "The Metamorphosis" is as simple as it is inconceivable: Gregor Samsa, an ordinary man, wakes up one morning transformed into an insect. With this premise and through the eyes of the insect-hero, Kafka constructs a purely realistic story, an entirely believable psychological experiment, highlighted by a multitude of painfully accurate details in the description of people and things. Masterfully, Kafka not only unravels the anxieties, guilt, and alienation of modern man, but also manages to translate this dreary and meaningless existence into matter, into physical substance.

Margarita Zachariadou