Description

"The Double: A Petersburg Poem" is a novella written by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The novella was first published in 1846. "The Double" deals with the internal psychological struggle of its main character, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin. The motif of the novella is a doppelgänger.

The story is told in great detail with a style intensely saturated by phonetic and rhythmical expressiveness. The novella centers on a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. D. S. Mirsky characterized the story as a "painful, almost intolerable reading."

The cruelty of the story is marked by Nikolay Mikhaylovsky and his madness. With convincing literary power, Dostoevsky depicts the sufferings of Mr. Golyadkin's humiliated human dignity.

In "The Double," the narrative 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 claim the position of both his public life in the Russian bureaucracy and within the social circle inhabited by "Golyadkin" Senior (the author's "original Golyadkin, our hero").