There is a photograph still extant of Franz Kafka arriving in Spindelmühle, the winter resort where on the same evening of January 27, 1922, he began writing The Castle. Like the country doctor of his own incomparable story or like the formidable Klamm in The Castle itself, Kafka made the trip rather laboriously by horse-drawn sleigh; in the photo he stands, pinched and shy, by the rear runners, his ordinary street shoes heaped with snow. A faint smile appears to play upon his lips, but it is difficult to tell for the print is blurred. It is evening; snow is falling. Drifting snowflakes speckle the flanks of the two black horses that pull his sleigh. Kafka arrived in this north Bohemian town near the source of the Elbe just as K. himself, the truculent surveyor of The Castle, arrived. “It was late evening when K. arrived,” the novel begins in the new translation by Mark Harman, “the village lay under deep snow.”¹ Like Kafka’s own writings, the photograph has the mysterious force of those dimly recovered instants in which a fateful occurrence takes shape, though masked by the inconspicuous trappings of the quotidian. The photograph is itself elusive. It is reproduced in the second edition of Klaus Wagenbach’s Franz Kafka: Bilder aus seinem Leben (Berlin, 1989) but was not available for the first edition of 1983; since it was this earlier edition that was translated into English the following year and published by Pantheon, the image