Knapsack Kafka, a Prague Jew who wrote in German, almost never published his works during his lifetime, only excerpts from the novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) and a few short stories. The most remarkable of his short stories, The Metamorphosis, was written in the fall of 1912 and published in 1915.

The hero of the “Metamorphosis” Gregor Samsa is the son of the poor inhabitants of Prague, people with purely materialistic needs. About five years ago, his father went bankrupt, and Gregor entered the service of one of his father’s creditors, became a traveling salesman, a cloth merchant. Since then, the whole family – his father, his mother suffering from asthma, his younger beloved sister Greta – rely entirely on Gregor, financially completely depend on him. Gregor is constantly on the road, but at the beginning of the story, he spends the night at home between two business trips, and then something terrible happens to him.

This is the beginning of the transformation of a kind, sensitive, sacrificial person into a disgusting beetle. Kafka describes in great detail the new structure of Gregor’s body, the inconveniences he is now experiencing and new pleasures, new tastes. In the chitinous shell, the process of loss of the human is taking place: first, Gregor loses speech, and then one after another, and many of his spiritual properties, which he was proud of, but at the same time, in his new, frighteningly disgusting appearance, he remains a person to a greater extent than members of his family … Yes, a terrible misfortune fell upon them, their son and brother turned into an insect, but the reaction of the Samsa family to the transformation of Gregor is truly amazing in this novel. With tremendous psychology, Kafka draws the bourgeoisie in whom (at least in women) natural feelings and Christian impulses for some time struggle with disgust and hatred of the one who, by their transformation, destroyed their modest wealth, forced them to look for work, rent a room to tenants, and the main thing is to hide a terrible family secret. Something happened to the Samsa family that has never happened in any family they know, so the shame for the transformation is added to the annoyance at Gregor.

The story is based on the subtlest depiction of changes in feelings within the family. As the mother and sister lose hope of Gregor’s reverse transformation, his father’s hatred of him grows. In one scene, the father pushes Gregor into his room, throwing red apples at him; one of these solid projectiles gets stuck in Gregor’s back and causes his death. His death is a release for the family, which in the meantime has improved their affairs: everyone found a job, a sister blossomed, now they can finally change the apartment to a cheaper and more comfortable one (while Gregor was alive, it was impossible to move anywhere) – in the last scene they are all together take a tram on a country trip and plan a new life.