Imagine giving both of them a piece of writing created by a machine – starting with Dostoevsky because he wouldn’t allow anyone else to speak before himself. He would interpret such writing as a testimony about the state of a soul or, at least, its absence. Kafka, in his turn, would take the same text more calmly; the way a man reads a memo from his own office.
The fear of the underground
It is not difficult to imagine Dostoevsky as the noisiest opponent of the idea. His Underground Man devoted the whole confession to the description of the Crystal Palace; that bright and rational construction in which all desires were anticipated and satisfied and in which a man could be reduced only to a piano key touched by another person. He believed that the people would choose suffering and capriciousness rather than the freedom to have a strong desire. The sentence immediately created and polished without any hesitation would seem to him like the Crystal Palace rewritten into the prose; frictionless, perfect, slightly obscene because of the low price paid for it. However, Dostoevsky never allowed his villains to remain simple. He gave a murderer a chance to come back to life only with the help of the love of a woman. It is not impossible that Dostoevsky would do the same – not for the machine, but for the hand still keeping it, if the hand was able to tremble.
Kafka’s calm acceptance
I think that Kafka wouldn’t feel any fear but would recognize the situation easily. He had already created the verdict pronounced by some distant and unreachable authority, a court that never explains anything, a castle whose officials are never seen but only heard. Such a verdict pronounced by something that could not be questioned wouldn’t seem new for him – just confirmed. In addition, he requested to burn his own papers, being sure that they should not remain in the world after him. The writer who wasn’t sure whether he had a right to be an author would find it funny in a peculiar way of his – a device which doesn’t doubt in its authorship at all. Where Dostoevsky would rage, Kafka would just record the situation and leave the readers to create their own feelings.
Where they would break
Here is where they truly diverge, a true divide, not a matter of character. The objection of Dostoevsky is a moral one and remains an ongoing fear; a belief that comfort corrupts the soul, paired with the stubborn refusal to give up on the idea of redemption as an option always open to anyone willing to fight for it. The one by Kafka is structural and offers no such escape; Josef K. is executed without being told what crime he committed, and K. spends all of The Castle approaching the castle and not making it through its doors. For Dostoevsky, it remains a matter of a position of one’s soul. For Kafka, there was nothing of that sort left anymore in the procedure to appeal to.
The writer of today, working at a machine and having another tab open at all times, stands on exactly this line of division – not sure if they received bread in return for their freedom or just signed a paper before some court that does not owe them an explanation. Dostoevsky, against his own better judgement, might try to argue that it depends on the tremble of the hand at the keyboard. Kafka would most likely just watch, then write about it.
Reading them as instructions
When reading them in parallel and not against each other, however, we get something that is quite helpful. Dostoevsky was never afraid of the tools, only of sleep – it is the comfort that demands nothing from the recipient of it that Dostoevsky truly objects to. Kafka was never afraid of absurdity, but only never tried to disguise it in anything else. Put the two objections side by side, and you get the instructions: treat your machine the same way Kafka did, with precision and no illusions about what it is, and stay in the room the same way Dostoevsky insisted on; awake enough to know the cost of the comfort. This was always good writing advice.
About the writer
Aarushi Singh interned with us for a brief period. She believes there is nothing to say apart from that she is just a person with dreams; dreams of writing through giggles, cries, and even shouts. She has pursued a graduation with English Literature – and when she says words mean the world to her, they really do.
