The Double

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Overview

The story revolves around a government employee who begins to encounter someone who looks exactly like him, but who possesses a completely dissimilar personality to the weak and introverted main character. The narrative deals primarily with the internal psychological struggle of the protagonist as he seemingly descends into madness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781528786195
Publisher:	Read Books Ltd.
Publication date:	02/08/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	212
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is considered one of the greatest writers of all times. His works include such seminal novels as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Karamazov Brothers.

Table of Contents

	Foreword	vii
	Introduction	xi
	The Double	1
	Notes	161
	Biographical note	163

Editorial Reviews

Not one of the author's better-known works, this 1846 novel introduces Golyadkin, a man who one day meets his exact double. The double is not only physically identical but has the same name and background. Golyadkin's happy life spirals downward into paranoia and neurosis as his friends begin to abandon him for the doppelganger. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In The Double, Dostoevsky’s method and his love for psychological analysis are revealed in all their fullness and originality. In this work he has penetrated so deep into the human soul, has gazed so fearlessly and feelingly into the innermost workings of human emotions, thoughts, and affairs that the impression produced by reading The Double may be compared only with the experience of a man of inquiring mind who has penetrated into the chemical composition of matter.”

Russian literary critic and publicist Valerian Maikov

The Double is the classic doppelganger tale, the story of a Russian bureaucrat who arrives at work one day to discover that a literal facsimile of himself has begun working there…An extremely dark and disturbing work of psychological horror, though the story also offers the potential for comedy.”

Guardian (London)

It’s the very complexity of ideas that the notion of a Double throws up that make this short novel so engaging and ultimately still so pertinent.”

English screenwriter Jeremy Dyson

The real nineteenth-century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.” - Albert Camus

“The most impressive thing about The Double is how pertinent it feels today . . . like all the best fiction, The Double reinvents and rewrites itself for the current age” - Jeremy Dyson

From the Publisher