Kafka Meets Monty Python. 3 minute read. TIME. October 20, 2002 12:00 AM EDT. H e was Central Europe’s answer to Leonardo da Vinci, a genius who left his mark on virtually every area of culture.

The stories of Franz Kafka have long since passed into the proverbial, the kind of work you need not have read in order to know. Just as we speak of high-stakes intrigues as “Shakespearean ...