This essay compares The Trial, by Franz Kafka, and Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Both novels have had a profound effect on our understanding of human consciousness. The Trial deals with a man, Joseph K., accused of ‘guilt’, and brought before the mysterious Court. Crime and Punishment is the story of Raskolnikov: a law student crippled by poverty, who murders a pawnbroker to enable him to satisfy his ‘extraordinary’ existence.

Dostoevsky was born in Moscow, in 1821. He was sentenced to death for being a revolutionary, but the Tsar commuted his sentence to four years hard labour in Siberia. Prison life greatly changed his political beliefs, and by the time of his release in 1854, he was nationalistic and deeply religious. Dostoevsky was a compulsive gambler, and ran up huge debts. By 1865 he owed 30,000 roubles. Plagued by creditors, Dostoevsky was forced to make the ultimate gamble. He signed a deal with Stellovsky, a double-dealing publisher, giving away the copyrights to all his past novels, and promising to deliver him a new novel by the 1st November, 1866. If he failed to finish this novel in time, Stellovsky automatically gained the copyrights to all of Dostoevsky’s novels, published and unpublished. Ironically, he called his new novella The Gambler. He wrote this book simultaneously with Crime and Punishment, working on one in the morning, and the other in the evening. Unfortunately, Dostoevsky continued his gambling, and lost all his money on the roulette table. By the end of 1865, Dostoevsky was penniless, and still no further with The Gambler. He started writing the novel three weeks before the deadline, and, with the help of a stenographer, managed to finish it by the 31st October 1866. During this period, Dostoevsky, like Raskolnikov, faced poverty and starvation. As Dostoevsky sat writing late into the night, he may have even wondered whether he himself was ‘extraordinary’. Crime and Punishment was published in monthly instalments in the Russian Messenger, and Dostoevsky was so hard up, that he started publishing the beginning of it before he had written the end.

Raskolnikov, a former law student, lived in the slums of St Petersburg. He was forced to accept money from his mother and sister, who both worked to support him. Living as a recluse in near starvation, and tormented by the shame of his family’s sacrifice, he slowly began to develop a distorted view of morality. He believed that he had the right to take life because he was ‘extraordinary’. He decided to murder an old pawnbroker, who lived off the misfortunes of other people, and use her money for the benefit of mankind. After a month of preparation, he visited the pawnbroker. But even as he entered her lodgings, he had no confidence in his plan, and reflected that "…it happened completely by accident". He murdered the pawnbroker with an axe, but his plan fell through. The old woman’s sister, Lizaveta, came home and he was forced to kill her as well. Raskolnikov escaped with the stolen money, and hid it under a stone without even counting it. Raskolnikov developed a serious nervous illness and almost died. His sanity was brought into question, and Dr Zossimov diagnosed monomania (a singular obsession). Even though there was no material evidence, the police became suspicious of him for his self-incriminating behaviour. For example, he became obsessed with the crime, and read all the newspaper articles on it; he returned to the pawnbrokers flat, and challenged the residents to arrest him, and when the crime was discussed in the police station, he fainted. Raskolnikov lived in constant terror of being caught. He contemplated suicide but decided that the humiliation of a trial was better than dying. He gave himself up and was sentenced to eight years in Siberia. The Epilogue hints at Raskolnikov’s spiritual re-birth in prison.

Raskolnikov is a very complex character. The word ‘Raskolnikov’ derives from the Russian for schismatic, or split, and his split-personality is very obvious. Raskolnikov swings between good and evil throughout the novel. In self-imposed isolation, Raskolnikov’s reasoning became warped and he lost the ability to interact with people. He was alienated from society, and his superman theory was a direct result of this reclusive existence. He felt driven to commit murder to test his theory. In Raskolnikov’s philosophy, it was possible to justify murder. He argued: "I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound… to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity." In his view, he was simply overstepping the pawnbroker who preyed on the poor and contributed nothing to society. Raskolnikov compared himself to Napoleon (in that they were both extraordinary people) and saw it his duty to rid humanity of this parasite. "Extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary." He was not bound by conventional morality or civil law because he was intellectually superior, and acted altruistically. There are many obvious flaws to this philosophy. Porfiry, the inspector, points out: "But don’t you think they ought, for instance, to introduce a special uniform, wear some special badges or marks of identity, or be branded in some way? For you must admit that if any misunderstanding should arise and a member of one category imagines that he really belongs to the other and begins to ‘eliminate all obstacles’…" This argument was summarised in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: "It may have been well for the preacher of the petty people to suffer and be burdened by men's sin. I, however, rejoice in great sin as my great consolation. Such things, however, are not said for long ears. Every word, also, is not suited for every mouth." Raskolnikov’s superman theory was paralleled with his desire to do good. He gave all his money away to a poor family, and refused to allow his sister to sacrifice herself by marrying a rich and callous man.

Crime and Punishment was a precursor to existentialism, and influenced many writers including Kafka, Sartre and Camus. Dostoevsky was one of the first authors to use stream of consciousness, a technique which was later adopted by James Joyce, and used to great effect in Ulysses. Dostoevsky is sometimes considered the first modern novelist. His Notes from Underground, written in 1864, is generally considered the first existentialist novel. It is written in the form of a confession by a self-loathing man who is alienated from society. He describes how he "could not even be an insect." Kafka may have been influenced by this when writing Metamorphosis.

Kafka, born in 1883, was a Czechoslovakian Jew. Unrecognised in his lifetime, he is now generally considered one of the greatest exponents of existentialism. He suffered from chronic self-loathing and depression. He burned most of his work because he considered it ‘substandard’, and only published a few short stories during his lifetime. Kafka was sensitive to the anti-Semitic propaganda circulating in Czechoslovakia at that time, and felt like an outsider. In Metamorphosis, published in 1915, Kafka wrote of a man, Gregor Samsa, who transformed into a cockroach. Gregor is alienated from society, and even his own family treat him with disgust. At first he is an object of hate, but gradually he is ignored until he is left to die of starvation. There are many parallels between Gregor and Kafka. Kafka was also withdrawn from society, and, like Gregor, had problems controlling his own body. Gregor’s father is based on Kafka’s father, an insensitive and unintelligent man who didn’t understand Kafka’s talent, and prevented him from writing by confiscating his pens. Kafka expanded on this theme of alienation in The Trial. The Trial was saved from the flames by Kafka’s close friend, Max Brod. Brod edited and published the book after Kafka’s death.

The Trial is the story of Joseph K., a bank clerk who, on his thirtieth birthday, is arrested for an unspecified crime. K. is subsequently summoned before the mysterious Court. As the story develops, the stability of K.'s life becomes increasingly threatened by the nature of a labyrinthine ‘legal’ process. To reach the high court, K. must deal with a hierarchy of judges. The Court organisation inhabits a complex building with endless decaying corridors. Petty officials occupy cramped offices which double up as washrooms. The Court cannot be challenged since, quite conveniently, nobody knows anything about K.’s case. As the Inspector explains to K., "These gentlemen here and myself have no standing whatever in this affair of yours, indeed we know hardly anything about it. We might wear the most official uniforms and your case would not be a penny the worse." K. can only scratch the exterior of the Court; he has no way of reaching any authority because he must first deal with the bureaucrats, who make life as difficult as possible for him. There are three alternatives open to K. He must decide between definite acquittal, ostensible acquittal, or indefinite postponement. As one official admits: "I have never encountered one case of definite acquittal." The other possibilities are equally unfavourable. Ostensible acquittal relies on writing an affidavit stating K.’s innocence. The affidavit is shown to the Judge, who may offer ostensible acquittal. "The Charge is lifted from your shoulders for the time being, but it continues to hover above you and can, as soon as an order comes from on high, be laid upon you again…It is possible for the acquitted man to go straight home from the Court and find officers already waiting to arrest him again." The final possibility, indefinite postponement, "consists in preventing the case from ever getting any further than its first stages." But, as an official points out: "… it amounts to a formal recognition of your status as an accused man." In short, it is possible for K. to escape sentence, but it is not possible to disprove his guilt. "My innocence doesn’t make the matter any simpler. I have to fight against countless subtleties in which the Court is likely to lose itself. And in the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up." The Court does not acknowledge K.’s rights as a human being. He is refused his choice of clothes: the Wardens insist "It must be a black coat." K.’s name is always abbreviated, as though it were a statistic or an algebraic unknown. The use of anonymous crowds in the courtroom depersonalizes K.’s case. K. becomes the embodiment of Kafka’s paranoia.

There are many interpretations of The Trial. It can be read as a protest against the decadence of Bureaucracy; as an account of the persecution of the Jews; or as a psychological portrait of a psychotic. The story begins: "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." Kafka understood very well what it was like to be slandered. He must have empathised with K. when the anti-Semites claimed that Jews used the blood of children to make Matzos. In fact, throughout Europe, Jews were used as scapegoats for any particularly nasty problems. Dreyfus, a Jew in the French army, was framed by the French government and accused of treason. This sparked a rising of anti-Semitism in Europe. In The Trial, a Court official says: "These are the accused men, all of them are accused of guilt." It was generally considered that Jews were guilty of being Jews, and that was crime enough. Nationalists likened Jews to animals. Kafka wrote many stories which centred around animals and their alienation from human society. Investigations of a Dog is the tale of a lonely canine; Report To The Academy takes the strange form of a lecture delivered by an assimilated ape; Metamorphosis documents Gregor Samsa’s transformation, and his exclusion from family life; and The Burrow is a confused narrative given by a mole-like creature. In each of these stories the protagonist is distanced from both animal and human communities. In The Trial, K.’s dying words are: "like a dog…" It is notable that Kafka made an entry into his diary which reads: "My future is not rosy and I will surely - this much I can foresee - die like a dog."

The Trial established many of the archetypal existentialist scenarios. For example, the idea of a self-trial was later used by Camus in The Outsider. Kafka also borrowed ideas from other authors. He was influenced by Dickens, and used Dickensian names to label characters according to their personality. In German, Huld means benevolent, and the Advocate, Dr Huld, is K.’s closest ally. Block, a fellow accused, is a simpleton. Kafka was also greatly influenced by Dostoevsky. In The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1881, a man is wrongly accused of killing his father. Like K., Dmitri Karamazov finds it impossible to convince the court of his innocence. Dmitri is notorious for being violent and impulsive, and the evidence against him seems irrefutable. The Trial and The Brothers Karamazov show how much society is influenced by its preconceptions of people.

There are several fundamental similarities between The Trial and Crime and Punishment. The self-trial is a feature in both books. With K., it becomes apparent that the trial is raging inside his head rather than outside. The Court is a figment of K.’s overactive imagination. The description of the Court building is dreamlike, reminiscent of a painting by Escher, where a staircase leads back to where it started. The details become increasingly exaggerated: the rooms get bigger, the Judges more fantastic, and the Court more powerful. In the end, everybody is employed by the Court. "The girls belong to the Court too…You see, everything belongs to the Court." At K.’s first interrogation, he sums up the situation: "…there can be no doubt that behind all the actions of this court of justice, there is a great organisation at work. An organisation which not only employs corrupt warders, stupid inspectors and Examining Magistrates of whom the best can be said is that they recognise their own limitations, with an indispensable and numerous retinue of servants, clerks, police and other assistants, perhaps even hangmen." The priest indicates the internal nature of the trial in his final speech: "The Court makes no claims on you. It receives you when you come and relinquishes you when you go." K. was the judge, the jury and, ultimately, the executioner. Raskolnikov had similar problems to K. He was suspicious of everyone, even his sister. He hung on people’s words and turned them against himself. Raskolnikov believed the police were on to him, and when they didn’t arrest him, he became outraged: "Come, strike me openly, don’t play with me like a cat with a mouse. It’s hardly civil, Porfiry Petrovich, but perhaps I won’t allow it! I shall get up and throw the whole truth in your ugly faces, and you’ll see how I despise you." Raskolnikov could not tolerate the continual torture of being suspected. In the end, he confessed, to lessen the burden of guilt. He chose a civil sentence in preference to psychological punishment.

K.’s crime is challenging the authority. Unlike the other defendants, who submit to the Court and admit their guilt, K. is determined to stand up for himself. Ironically, the other defendants escape sentence by acknowledging their guilt. K., who resolutely protests his innocence, is given the death-penalty. Before the murder, Raskolnikov is convinced that executing the pawnbroker is not a crime, but an essential step in the development of mankind. Raskolnikov persists in this belief after the murder, but with less conviction. He is tortured by the guilt, and unconsciously tries to alert the authorities by incriminating himself. He does not find relief until he acknowledges he has committed a crime, and accepts the civil punishment. For both Raskolnikov and K., the only way out was an admission of guilt.

By Raf, 1997.