Kafka, Franz. – Ein Landarzt.

First edition. – Franz Kafka’s short story. A Country Doctor is about an exhausted doctor who is called to a terminally ill boy at night, but finds himself caught up in a Kafkaesque nightmare of absurd demands, guilt, and the struggle against the impossible when his own horse dies, a stranger reluctantly lends him a team of horses, and he flees from a grotesquely real wound in the patient’s body and his own feelings of powerlessness. The story is a profound examination of duty, failure, instinct, and the alienation of the individual, often interpreted as an allegory of human existence, the father-son conflict, or the difficulty of acting in life. The emergency call: An unnamed, elderly country doctor is called to a seriously ill child on a freezing winter night. The horse: His faithful horse has died of exhaustion, and he desperately searches for a replacement while the maid Rosa looks for a horse in the village. An unknown, rough farmhand appears with two horses and offers the doctor his help, but demands the maid Rosa as payment. The doctor initially refuses, but is eventually forced into the carriage against his will, while the farmhand assaults Rosa—an act of violence that the doctor is forced to endure. Copy with the rare original wrappers. – Binding carefully restored, first and last leaves with some stains, paper as always a bit browned.