Autograph Envelope, signed ("Dr Kafka"), addressed to Rudolf Fuchs, Wien I, Kantgasse 1, postmarked Budapest

1 vols. 4-1/8 x 7-1/8 inches. Envelope sent Express from Budapest, to Rudolf Fuchs, by author Franz Kafka, who was writing from the Hotel Imperial, Budapest. Signed in the third person, Dr. Kafka, on the back flap. Rudolf Fuchs (1890-1942), poet and social critic, was a member of Kafka's literary circle in Prague. He knew Kafka since 1912. In an article in Zeitschrift für Germanistik, scholar Ilse Seehase discusses three wartime communications from Kafka to Fuchs. The second of these, dated 14 July 1917, was "probably" written in Budapest and looked ahead to a meeting in Vienna (Seehase, p. 179). This autograph envelope (postmarked 14 July) confirms that Kafka was indeed in Budapest when he wrote Fuchs: he had just become engaged, for the second time, to Felice Bauer. On 16 July 1917, Kafka held a conversation with Otto Groß, Anton Kuh, and Rudolf Fuchs at a café in Vienna. In August of that year, Kafka was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would later kill him. Fuchs published an early obituary of Kafka on 4 June 1924. Fuchs described the effect of his writing: "He perceived as no other the romance of the quotidian and the poetry of familiar things. The effect of just one of his short observations is magical. As in a dream, a dense, realistic dream. All that he puts into words is so vital, and yet an experience one hasn't seen before and even his simple phrasing has the grace of utter strangeness." Fuchs escaped the Nazis to London, where he composed his Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka. A posthumous collection, Ein wissender Soldat. Gedichte und Schriften aus dem Nachlass von Rudolf Fuchs was published there in 1943. Kafka autograph material is rare. Cf. Ilse Seehase, Drei Mitteilungen Kafkas und ihr Umfeld, pp. 178-83, in: Zeitschrift für Germanistik 8:2 (1987) Matted in double glazed frame. Fine.…