Franz Kafka was an Austrian writer, the founder of literary “absurdism.” “The Castle” is one of the cult books of the 20th century, captivating with its strange intertwining of reality and fiction. The novel’s plot is simple on the surface and at the same time extremely complex—allegorical, symbolically many-layered. The work can be interpreted both as a brilliant satire of a bureaucratic society, and as an absurdist treatise, and as a religious parable. But all these interpretations are meaningless until a person immerses themselves in Kafka’s “surreal” world.