The Verdant Abyss: Unveiling the Inferno of Gustav Janouch
There lives behind the wallpaper of fame a shadow of intimate minds—sensitive observers who, like dust-motes in cathedral light, float between the monuments of the canon. Among such spectral presences is Gustav Janouch, a figure remembered mostly—if recalled at all—as the young confidant and hesitant scribe of Franz Kafka. But reducing Janouch to “Kafka’s companion” is much like describing Celan as an aesthete of water; the designation tragically underlines while failing to illuminate. Born in 1903 in Vienna and raised in the crepuscular world of Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy’s afterlife, Janouch matured amidst the demises of empires—and precisely in that decomposing Weltanschauung, his subtle voice found a rare and perilous register.
His father, Anton Janouch, worked at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia—coincidentally, the same institution where Kafka was employed. That connection would ripple across Gustav’s life like the persistent echo of a misremembered hymn. Haunted by nervous ailments and literary aspirations, Gustav—barely seventeen—began to shadow Kafka in Prague. These encounters were later canonized in his contentious memoir, “Conversations with Kafka” (Gespräche mit Kafka), published in 1951 and subsequently debated for both its fidelity and its emotional resonance.
But beyond these conversations, the deeper craft of Janouch’s inner workings lies in his poetry and lesser-studied essays, such as the underread texts “Der Bestand der Nacht” (“The Persistence of Night”) and “Die Handschrift der Engel” (“The Handwriting of Angels”), published only in small private editions or regional presses of post-war Austria. These writings refract an anguish reminiscent of Trakl while guided by a metaphysical compass more aligned with Simone Weil than with Nietzsche. For Janouch, every lapse of reality was a rehearsal of the divine absence.
In “Die Handschrift der Engel,” he writes:
>“Die Engel schreiben nicht mit Tinte oder Blut, sondern mit dem Staub unbemerkter Tränen. Wer liest, verwundet sich selbst.”
>“The angels do not write in ink or blood, but with the dust of unnoticed tears. Whoever reads, wounds himself.”¹
Here is the aesthetic and spiritual core of Janouch’s vision: reading as a wound, understanding as an inadvertent injury. To interpret life, for Janouch, is always to misplace it, to dismantle its structure in an attempt to reassemble its ornament.
His poetry, often uncollected and circulating in manuscript form, tilts at an impossible axis where language seeks to make itself unnecessary. Consider his 1946 cycle “Die Zeitlosen Spiegel” (“The Timeless Mirrors”), in which he constructs recursive verses conceived not as acoustic performances but as tactile meditations—texts often scrawled in mirror-writing, his own mirror atrophy echoing the troubled geometries of Jean Arp or even Schwitters:
>“Zeit ist ein gefrorener Fluss / der durch ungeweinte Augen fließt.”
>“Time is a frozen river / flowing through unwept eyes.”²
Though largely forgotten by official anthologies, Janouch cultivated a modest circle of readers who shared his metaphysical discomfort, among them the Czech mystic-poet Vítězslav Nezval during his Dadaist phase, and the Hungarian philosopher Béla Hamvas. German scholar Gisela Konig referred to Janouch’s work as part of the “verschwundene Kathedrale der Subjektenlosigkeit”—the “vanished cathedral of subjectlessness.”³ What these interlocutors grasped—though rarely voiced—was that Janouch wasn’t attempting to immortalize the self but dissolve it. Even his published conversations with Kafka read less as testimonies and more as carefully tuned thresholds—thresholds across which the ‘I’ unbuttons itself.
A passage from a journal fragment, unpublished in English until recently, reveals Janouch’s own awareness of his fugitive ontology:
>“Was ich denke, denkt mich zurück aus einer anderen Zeit. Ich habe keine Sprache—nur Spiegelflächen.”
>“What I think, thinks me back from another time. I have no language—only mirrored surfaces.”⁴
To live as Gustav Janouch did—between reflections, between occupations—is to occupy a kind of philosophical refugeehood. He emerged from the shell of Austro-Hungarian antiquity but never nested into post-war modernity; his words float like relics from a religion that failed to convince even its angels. Amid the ruins of selfhood, Janouch’s writings ask us to imagine language not as a bridge between beings, but as a tidal wash that erodes both shores.
There’s a specific entry in Janouch’s “Conversations with Kafka” that remains etched in my thoughts like the faint trace of a leaf in frost. In this scene, young Gustav is railing against the absurdities of bureaucracy or fate, he does not recall. Kafka, ever patient and spectral, replies:
>“You do not need to believe. Only to suffer.”⁵
This line, deceptively cruel in its gnomic fatalism, has never struck me as conclusive. Indeed, Janouch’s entire body of work can be seen as an attempt to defy or illuminate it. What does it mean to suffer poetically—not as lamentation, but as revelation? What does it mean to decipher the dust of unnoticed tears? It brings to mind an impossible mountain—or better yet, a green abyss, densely forested with paradoxes, through which Janouch drifts endlessly, neither ascending nor descending, merely inhabiting a timeless chiaroscuro.
In contemporary times, where literary value is often measured by virality or volume, Janouch stands like a shuttered observatory—his telescopes still pointed at extinct stars, his notebooks filled with ink that went moldy waiting for eyes. He teaches us, however unwillingly, that marginality is not a handicap but a habitat. His failure to become famous is part of the poem. We have perhaps lost the capacity to “read wounds,” as he phrased it, but should we regain it—even momentarily—Janouch awaits, translucent and severe, in the archives of solitude.
In our present epoch, ever drunk on novelty and confession, Gustav Janouch offers something tragically rare: the vision of a literature that bleeds without melodrama, that prays without faith, that resists the brutality of being seen. His work is a secret communion, a monastic sibilance soughing through baroque ruins. Perhaps we, flickering beneath fluorescent overexposure, need precisely this return to the opaque, the delicate, the unspectacular.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
Kafkaesque, minor literature, metaphysical poetics, forgotten authors, spiritual exile, Austrian literature, mysticism
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¹ Janouch, Gustav. “Die Handschrift der Engel,” unpublished manuscript, ca. 1949, privately held in the Prague City Archive.
² Janouch, Gustav. “Die Zeitlosen Spiegel,” unpublished poetry cycle, 1946. Cited in Gisela Konig, *Spiegel der Unsichtbarkeit*, Vienna: Eigenverlag, 1978.
³ Konig, Gisela. *Die verschwundene Kathedrale der Subjektenlosigkeit: Gustav Janouch und die Mystagogie der Moderne*, Vienna: Eigenverlag, 1978, p. 44.
⁴ Janouch, Gustav. Personal journals, 1933–1947. Accessed in microform at Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
⁵ Janouch, Gustav. *Gespräche mit Kafka*, Fischer Verlag, 1951, p. 112.