With his characteristic humor, Scliar tells the story of a young Russian who leaves his village in 1916 to carry out a revolutionary mission at the behest of Trotsky. By mistake, he receives a text by Kafka, which he understands to be an encrypted message. The Kafkaesque situation that is created will play out until the time of Brazil’s military coup.
In Kafka’s Leopards, Scliar tells the story of Benjamin Kantarovich, a young man who, in the dramatic year of 1916, on the eve of the Russian Revolution, the “ten days that shook the world,” leaves his Jewish village in the Russian countryside and goes to Prague to carry out a revolutionary mission planned by none other than Leon Trotsky.
Benjamin is certain that he will go down in history. The problem is, before he’s a revolutionary, he is a mess. He loses an envelope containing the name of the agent he is to contact, and by mistake it reaches Kafka, who also inadvertently contributes to the confusion: mistaking him for someone else, he hands him a text entitled “Leopards in the Temple.” The series of misunderstandings will also unfold in Brazil – where Benjamin will emigrate – at the time of the 1964 coup. The young Russian revolutionary would find himself at odds with Brazilian repression.
With his characteristic humor, Moacyr Scliar shows us in Kafka’s Leopards that things are more tragic or comic than they seem. His text creates a form of illusionism that is constantly undone; this “art of denial” serves to affirm, with remarkable originality, the link between literature and life.
Kafka’s Leopards is the fifth volume of his “Literature or Death” collection. At the time, Scliar had just received the 2000 Jabuti Award for A mulher que escreveu a Bíblia (The woman who wrote the Bible) in the Novel category.
