This is Dostoyevsky's second work, before his conviction for treason, near escape from execution and years of forced labour.

I enjoyed this short book, which portrays the decline of Golyadkin, an office worker whose life is thrown into confusion and disaster by the actions of his exact double.

The storyline is confusing at times, as it appears that the most likely cause for 'the hero's" decline is a mental breakdown, and the story is narrated from his perspective.

My overall impression of the protagonist is that he has an initial manic phase (hyperactivity, mulitiple shopping experiences, mental overactivity), and becomes increasingly confused, with fragmented thinking and paranoia.

The arrival of his double 'in all ways' , perhaps signals his psychotic break - even though it appears that other characters acknowledge this double. This fact could be explained by the altered perception of Golyadkin, as the story is told from his perspective.

Golyadkin continues to act in agitated, explosive and unexplainable ways, unable to interpret the actions of people around him, with fragmented thoughts and irrationality. The mind of a psychotic or manic depressive with psychosis?

It fittingly ends with Golyadkin being forcibly taken away by the doctor, Ivanovitch. As he is driven away in the carriage, Golyadin expresses horror at his perceived transformation of this medic:

"Suddenly he almost swooned: two fiery eyes were staring at him in the darkness, and those two eyes were glittering with malignant, hellish glee. :That is not Krestyan Ivanovitch! Who is it? Or is it he? It is! It is Krestyan Ivanovitch, but not the old Krestyan Ivanovitch, It's another Krestyan Ivanovitch. It's a terrible Krestyan Ivanovitch!.." ( )

Should I blame Borges ("The Other"), Conrad ("The Secret Sharer"), Gogol ("The Nose") or Poe ("William Wilson")? I honestly don't know. All I can say is that the short works of these authors, all four of them, will stay with me far, far longer than Dostoyevsky's The Double. ( )

The Double (1846: Dostoevsky’s second published work) features Mr Golyadkin, a man who is finally victimised by his consciousness. The text is fractured by ellipses, repetitious material, dialogue that is almost Beckettian in its revolving miscommunications. A subplot involving letters and former lodgings is very shakily sketched and we are never sure we have understood the details correctly.
Golyadkin encounters his double for the first time on a deserted Petersburg street in a freezing storm in the middle of the night, and this powerful scene raises shivers. Dostoevsky was indebted to Houseman’s Unheimliche Gast for the basic premise of his story (Conrad also was influenced by this tale in his story The Secret Sharer) and the text is full of interpretative difficulty: does the double/sharer really exist, or is he only a figment of the protagonist’s feverish and fevered imagination? He appears to be visible to other characters in the story -in fact he usurps Mr Golyadkin’s position at his office- but the close conjunction between the 3rd person narrator and the thoughts of Mr G himself, still make it impossible for us to decide once and for all whether the double exists outside Mr G’s consciousness....

Read the full review on The Lectern:

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2008/0... ( )

This is my first foray into the world of Dostoevsky, and appropriate as it so differs from his later period of writing (after hard labour). While I accept this work as a psychological study, it seems to me this book has many other levels to it also.
This is a 'fantastic' novella. The fantastic 'is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event' (Todorov, 1975). It is through this genre that the unexplained supernatural is never explained, and left to the reader to decipher, which is most often impossible. It lies between the marvelous and the uncanny.
This novella is a clear example of it because of (in my opinion one of the more interesting aspects of the book) the unreliable narrator. I see his as yet another double of the main character, Goliadkin senior, with 'our hero' meaning the narrator's and self's hero. To the reader, we do not see any sense of a real hero. He even begins to adopt Goliadkin's speech patterns towards the end.
The narrator is so unreliable that we are never given a real witness to the existence of goliadkin junior, nor is the reader denied that existence. The novella is puzzling, and difficult to decipher at times.
Though he was hailed as a new critical voice in the realist veign, this novella proved dostoevskii could not be so easily pigeon-holed, and displayed his true genius. The first half reads a bit slowly, but the second half flies by (after the supernatural begins). I highly recommend this book as a light introduction to Dostoevskii. ( )

This early novel about a dual personality is a pioneer example of modern psychological fantasy. The theme of The Double has haunted many writers, particularly in the present century when exploration of the "other self" which lives in all of us has become commonplace.

Wikipedia: The Double: A Petersburg Poem is a novella written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and first published in 1846. The novella deals with the internal psychological struggle of its main character, to whom Dostoevsky refers as "our hero", Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, the name Golyadkin roughly translating to "naked" or "insignificant". The novella's motif is the doppelgänger, otherwise known throughout the world in various guises, such as the fetch.
The narrator's tone depicts a man whose life is on the verge of destruction due to the sudden appearance of a literal facsimile of his self. This double attempts to destroy the protagonist's good name and to claim his position within both his public life in the Russian bureaucracy and within the social circle inhabited by "Golyadkin" Senior (the author's term for the "original Golyadkin, our hero").
As one continues to read the novella and piece together the various clues - it becomes fairly obvious that the Golyadkin Junior character is merely a schizophrenic manifestation of the actual Golyadkin's less desirable characteristics (a forerunner to the Shadow later proposed by Carl Jung), the classic "it's all in his head" twist. As such, the novella can be viewed as one of a series of Dostoevsky's critiques of the self-possessed nature of modernity, in this particular work it is also a critique of the machinations and maneuvering of the middle class in its socio-economic strivings.
It may, however, be viewed simply as the documenting of a schizophrenic break from reality, following all of his mental degenerations including broken speech patterns and free association. The most obvious example is of course the hallucination of seeing himself everywhere he goes, especially in socially awkward situations. The man's quick downfall are characteristic of the disease and one wonders if a close friend or acquaintance of Dostoevsky may not have fallen to the affliction so accurate are the depictions of it.