The riddles this masterpiece allures us with might act as invitations to follow up on the mysteries and secrets of its exceedingly imaginative author, whose contemporaries shaped the reductive image of Proust as the nervous, extremely shy and reclusive hypochondriac hidden in his cork-lined room. Above all, the story is a journey into the monad-like structures our consciousness is trapped in. 

While Kafka emerged as one of the most significant and widely read modern authors in the US and Western Europe right after the Second World War, his works were ostracized and banned throughout the entire domain of the “Real Socialism,” which sprawled out from Moscow to the border of East-Berlin. Until its first publication in Moscow in 1965, Kafka’s Trial was merely a mysterious typescript that was secretly passed around from hand to hand, concealing the author’s name and origin. A typescript with explosive power, as it turned out.