Kafka Vs Dostoevsky

Read MDM's assessment on his change in thoughts on how he started finding Kafka more relavant than Dostoevsky. While I understand what he says, I think I differ a little.

I read both 'The Trial' ( in Tamil ) in college and 'Crime and Punishment' ( in English) a little later. Took me multiple readings of ' The trial ' to make sense out of it. Kafka remains relevant because the societal norms that we have are always absurd. The way he describes the trial process , the judges , the advocates and finally the judgement for a crime he never get to know all talk about the farcical nature of the society we create and follow and the need to be able to look at this absurdity and understand how it demeans and destroys the innate human nature.

The night I read ' Crime and Punishment' , I did not sleep. Strangely , the mental struggles of Raskalnikov was too close to be able to discern. The book juxtaposes the crime versus the punishment and without criticizing the system which imposes such , looks into the inner battles of a criminal towards redemption as the reasoning for existence. The Christian tenets of sin and sacrifice are in and Dostoevsky takes a long class on redemption through self and the removal of sins through acceptance and repenting. The individual struggle finds a way to resolution.

The resolution Dostoevsky comes up with ( in almost all his novels) is pretty much the same. While he is focused on the individual's life in a society, Kafka focuses on the society's absurdness in the individual's life. Kafka's show of absurdity came to life with the larger than life pageants of the Nazi Germany and the way it squashed the individual with its absurd notions of superiority and is more than relevant in today's world. The struggles of the individual as Dostoevsky portrayed is more relevant in an alienated world which has discounted redemption as a solution.

So , who is better? To me, they represent a piece of the world I would've struggled to understand on my own. Kafka helps me to pass the absurdities of life as it presents before me with a smile (sometimes , terror) and Dostoevsky has this more intricate hold on my values and forces me to look into that often before becoming a prey to the absurd world of Kafka.