Franz Kafka's novels, rife with self-doubt, paranoia, and existential anguish, have carried generations of readers on "the descent into the cold abyss of oneself," as the author put it.

However, a collection of 150 drawings unearthed from a Swiss bank vault in 2019 after years of legal battle and made public for the first time on Thursday gives a more cheery meaning of the word "Kafkaesque."

The previously unseen drawings and doodles portray a guy with a cheery imagination, with long-limbed clowns executing goofy walks, Chaplin-like figures with bowler hats, and slapstick horse-riding catastrophes.

In an editorial for the German daily Die Zeit, German author Daniel Kehlmann stated, "It's hard to imagine the saint-like being who created these weightless drawings as an unhappy man."

The paintings demonstrate Kafka to be a guy of substantial draftsmanship and aesthetic aspiration, rather than just doodling. "We discovered that Kafka used to be very interested in visual art," said Andreas Kilcher, editor of a collection of Kafka drawings that will be published by CH Beck in Germany on November 2 and Yale University Press in the United States and the United Kingdom next spring.

"His classmates at school and at university had a strong interest in art, which Kafka not only shared but actively pursued," Kilcher added. "It was clearly more than a side issue for him."

From 1901 until 1906, Kafka studied law at the University of Prague, where he grew up in the German-speaking minority of Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. According to Kilcher, Kafka's love in art was so intense that a fellow student who would later ensure his posthumous recognition only recognized him as an illustrator at first.

Max Brod, Kafka's friend and ultimate executor, used to pluck what he dismissed as "scribbles" from waste-paper bins or snip them from the margins of legal text volumes. When a tuberculosis-stricken Kafka told Brod that he should burn his unread manuscripts after his death, he specifically specified these paintings.

Brod rejected Kafka's pleas after his death in 1924 and released the novels, short stories, and diaries to increasing critical acclaim. A collection of 40 drawings was also made public, emphasizing the darker aspects of the writing: since the 1950s, books such as Metamorphosis and The Trial have often been depicted with stickmen in a condition of apparent existential dread. For decades, the remainder would be kept secret from the public eye.

Brod fled Czechoslovakia following the Nazi takeover in 1939, taking with him Kafka's manuscripts and paintings to Palestine. He handed the documents to his secretary, Esther Hoffe, before his death in 1968, with orders to send them to the "Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv municipal library, or another organization in Israel or abroad."

The Hoffe family kept Kafka's writings locked up in bank safety deposit boxes in Israel and Switzerland until Israel's top court determined in 2016 that the manuscripts belonged to the National Library of Israel. Since June, the contents of the last cache of documents have been available on the National Library of Israel's website.

The 52 individual pieces of paper discovered in 2019, including one complete sketch book and several loose cuttings, not only defy Kafka's reputation as a gloomy and perpetually anguished existentialist, but they also share a feature with the paintings described in several of Kafka's novels and short stories: inhabited by men riding flying buckets, singing mice, and creatures made of household detritus, the dream-like tales often seem to defy the visual imagination of his r

The philosopher Judith Butler writes in an afterword to the German version of the drawings that the more detail Kafka reveals, the more difficult it is to visualize his inventions. The narrator of the novella "The Cares of a Family Man" describes a creature that dwells in his house as looking "like a flat star-shaped spool for thread."

Odradek, the beast, is "described in detail, but that description yields no fixed image," according to Butler's text. “Readers have tried in vain to draw Odradek, its spool, crossbar, star, and rod, as well as its bits of multicolored thread.”

"Kafka's drawings are far from realistic representations," Kilcher observed. "They're usually abstract, and they're rarely spatial but always dynamic," says the author.

Kafka might come out as deliberately opposed to visual art at times, such as when he objected to his publisher's intentions to illustrate his short tale The Stoker with a woodcut of New York harbor and begged his editor never to visualize his most renowned work. In a 1915 letter concerning the cover of Metamorphosis, he said, "The insect is not to be drawn." "It's not even visible at a distance."

Kilcher did not believe Kafka's dislike of visual art meant he had abandoned his creative ambitions. "I don't believe Kafka fell out of love with art in the traditional sense," he stated. "He valued drawing and writing as separate art forms."

Thanks to Philip Oltermann at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.