If Kafka and Dostoevsky shared a pen

What happens when a man wakes up as a bug in Prague, and another watches the world fall apart from a prison cell in Siberia? You don’t just get stories; you get two of the deepest, darkest, and most devastating portraits of the human soul ever written.

Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky never met, but the idea of the two sharing a table, talking through ideas, and shaping a book together cannot be ruled out. Both are giants of literature, but they lived in different times. Dostoevsky was born in Russia in 1821 and died in 1881 while Franz Kafka was born later, in 1883, in Prague, and died in 1924. The lives of both the stalwarts didn’t overlap but their writing often touches the similar themes of guilt, fear, the strange feeling of existence, and the way common people get trapped in systems bigger than themselves.

Dostoevsky’s world was 19^th century Russia, full of poverty, political turmoil, and deep religious questions. His characters were intense, emotional, and often broken, murderers, gamblers and seekers of faith. Novels like “Crime and Punishment” and “The Brothers Karamazov” asked what is to sin, to suffer, and to search for redemption. Dostoevsky gave us unforgettable figures like Raskolnikov, who can’t escape the guilt of murder, or Ivan Karamazov, who argues with God even while needing Him. His people are complex and alive.

On the other hand, Kafka, writing decades later in 20^th century Prague, lived in a world of bureaucracy and alienation. In “The Trial” and “The Metamorphosis”, his characters were crushed not only by visible enemies but by strange, impersonal systems. A man is prosecuted without knowing his crime, another wakes up as a giant insect. Both carried the same weight- the pressure of existence. A burden on their loved ones, who are unable to fulfil their responsibilities due to illness or accidents. Picture a person who doesn’t know whether he is guilty before the law, guilty before the God, or guilty in his own conscience. He faces judges who double as priests, clerks who act like executioners and a court that feels like both a church and a nightmare. Kafka would remind us that the system rarely offers any.

Dostoevsky’s heroes and the faceless battles of Kafka’s protagonists. Someone who suffers deeply on the inside while also being ground down by forces inside. Imagine a courtroom that doubles as a church, where judges ask you to pray and priests hand you legal papers. It would be claustrophobic, surreal and yet strangely familiar to anyone who is ever felt trapped between guilt and rules they don’t understand. We still live with both kinds of pressure: the inners battles of conscience and the outer weight of systems we don’t control. Dostoevsky speaks to our need for meaning, forgiveness, and truth. Kafka speaks to our frustration with faceless systems. Together, they’d capture the exact jinx of personal and structural struggle so many people feel today.

The writings of these two misfits - not the cool, rebellious kind - the real ones, the ones who didn’t fit because the world cracked them open, and they oozed something uncomfortable; guilt, shame, or just sheer absurdity, made a huge impact on my life until recently. I thought of them as heavy, distant, perhaps too intellectual for everyday life. But when I finally read them closely, they shifted the way I think about growing up and what it means to live in this world. I imagined life was a straightforward affair, there is no hard and fast rule, make the right choices, work hard, and things would fall into place. Literature was to me just about stories. But these two writers shook me awake. They made me see that life is not simple at all – it is layered, often confusing and full of contradictions we cannot escape.

Dostoevsky taught me that the real battles are fought inside. When I read ‘Crime and Punishment’ I saw how Raskolnikov’s guilt was heavier than any punishment the law could give him. It made me realise how powerful the conscience is- that sometimes we punish ourselves more harshly than anyone else ever could. His work made me stop and ponder; what do I really owe to others? Is forgiveness something I can give myself or does it come from somewhere beyond me.

Kafka on the other hand showed me, how the outside world can trap us in ways we barely understand. In ‘The Trial’, Joseph K. faces a court that never explains his crime. Reading it, I remembered moments where I felt utterly lost. Kafka gave me a language for that kind of rage- the suffocating sense that you are caught in quagmire where nothing adds up, but you still have to keep going.

Together they gave me a new way of seeing adulthood. It isn’t about reaching a point where everything becomes clear. It’s about learning to live with uncertainty, with guilt, with systems that don’t care about you, and still finding meaning in the struggle. Through their words I have realized that maturity isn’t about having answers- it’s about carrying the weight of questions. This has made me more patient, not just with myself but with others too. Everyone is carrying something, fighting battles inside their conscience and outside in the world. Dostoevsky gave me the language of the soul. Kafka gave me the language of the system. Together, they helped me see life as it really is; hard, absurd, and yet still meaningful.

A Kafka-Dostoevsky novel would not be light reading at all. It would probably be one of the most intense books ever written, part nightmares, part prayer, part confession and part paperwork. In their different ways both men captured what it feels to be human when life feels too heavy, too strange, and too hard to explain. Both the giants lived in different era’s , never shared a pen - not in one book but in the way their separate works keep speaking to each other, and to us wherein one gave us redemption through suffering. The other told us that the trial never ends. Both captured what it truly means to grow up human. Pick your pain wisely.!