The Double

Rating:
Summary: Achieved anxiety
Review: In The Double, the hero Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is a rather insecure and troubled mid-level bureaucrat. His situation deteriorates completely throughout the book as his double, with the same appearance and name, assumes a position in the same department and goes on to bring Golyadkin into disrepute and devastate his romantic and social ambition. The rambling indecisiveness and misdirected courage of the main character creates a notion of inevitable tragic failure, leaving the reader frustrated and angstridden throughout. If great literature is achieved anxiety, as Harold Bloom has put it, then this certainly is a masterpiece. I will never forgive Bloom for leaving Dostoyevsky out of his Western Canon... can anyone explain?

Rating:
Summary: Hoisted like a Drunken Hammock
Review: Mr Golyadkin is something of an odd fish. He hires a carriage to take himself to a party he has not been invited to, only to retreat from an attack of nerves before he is even halfway there. Following an abortive trip to his doctor (who doesn't appear to like him very much), he goes shopping. Or at least he attempts to create the impression of shopping (in that he enters several shops, makes a lot of noise and invariably leaves without having made a transaction). You learn one or two things about Golyadkin pretty quickly. He appears to have enemies. Or at least, he refers to his enemies (and thinks about his enemies) quite a lot. There is also a woman somewhere thereabouts in the shadows who may or may not believe that Golyadkin has wronged her.

Way before any double appears on the scene, you understand that (a) Golyadkin is an odd fish and (b) you should not quite trust everything he tells you. There is something more than a little neurotic about Golyadkin, and that sense of unease only increases as you read.

It is like you find yourself in the middle of a crowd (and it is like you have been asleep), and there are people all around. There are so many people that you cannot see beyond them. You do not know where you are. You just know that you are in the midst of people. Next thing, they have their hands on you. There are hands on your arms and hands on your legs and feet. You find yourself hoisted off the ground as the people around you start to swing your body as if they thought you were a hammock. You have no control over anything. They swing you backward and forward, each arc hoisting you just that bity higher. When you think you cannot go any higher, they let you go and you fly, out over the top of the crowd and into the sea. It isn't until you hit the sea that you realise you cannot swim.

That feeling (the tension, the lack of control, the blank incomprehension) sits on your shoulder like an enormous black bird all the time you are reading "The Double."

Golyadkin sneaks into the party he was not invited to, and finds himself rather rudely ejected. Wandering through a stormy night (a storm akin to the fog that opens "Bleak House"), he sees another version of himself and gives chase. The phantom Golyadkin appears again at work the following morning. Only it is not a phantom. It is another man. Just because the man shares his face and his name, just because the man happens to have been born in the same place. There is no need to worry. It is all just coincidence. (You can hear Golyadkin reassuring himself.) Only it seems he does have reason to worry. His job is under threat. People look at him oddly. He does not understand what it going on (and we, as readers, share the puzzle with him: why is everybody behaving so oddly?).

This is an oddly contemporary nightmare, the story of a man lost in the fog of the modern world. Whatever your expectations of this book (or for that matter Dostoyevsky), you will be surprised. Where books like "Crime and Punishment" or "The Brothers Karamazov" share a direct novelistic lineage with the great novels of Dickens, "The Double" is more at home in the company of Kafka or Sartre (specifically "Nausea"). The ground beneath your feet is never sure, the peculiarities you are faced with mount up, the book is like extreme drunkenness.

There may well be a great tradition of doppelganger fiction, but I guarantee you: nothing is quite like this.

Rating:
Summary: Hoisted like a Drunken Hammock
Review: Mr Golyadkin is something of an odd fish. He hires a carriage to take himself to a party he has not been invited to, only to retreat from an attack of nerves before he is even halfway there. Following an abortive trip to his doctor (who doesn't appear to like him very much), he goes shopping. Or at least he attempts to create the impression of shopping (in that he enters several shops, makes a lot of noise and invariably leaves without having made a transaction). You learn one or two things about Golyadkin pretty quickly. He appears to have enemies. Or at least, he refers to his enemies (and thinks about his enemies) quite a lot. There is also a woman somewhere thereabouts in the shadows who may or may not believe that Golyadkin has wronged her.

Way before any double appears on the scene, you understand that (a) Golyadkin is an odd fish and (b) you should not quite trust everything he tells you. There is something more than a little neurotic about Golyadkin, and that sense of unease only increases as you read.

It is like you find yourself in the middle of a crowd (and it is like you have been asleep), and there are people all around. There are so many people that you cannot see beyond them. You do not know where you are. You just know that you are in the midst of people. Next thing, they have their hands on you. There are hands on your arms and hands on your legs and feet. You find yourself hoisted off the ground as the people around you start to swing your body as if they thought you were a hammock. You have no control over anything. They swing you backward and forward, each arc hoisting you just that bity higher. When you think you cannot go any higher, they let you go and you fly, out over the top of the crowd and into the sea. It isn't until you hit the sea that you realise you cannot swim.

That feeling (the tension, the lack of control, the blank incomprehension) sits on your shoulder like an enormous black bird all the time you are reading "The Double."

Golyadkin sneaks into the party he was not invited to, and finds himself rather rudely ejected. Wandering through a stormy night (a storm akin to the fog that opens "Bleak House"), he sees another version of himself and gives chase. The phantom Golyadkin appears again at work the following morning. Only it is not a phantom. It is another man. Just because the man shares his face and his name, just because the man happens to have been born in the same place. There is no need to worry. It is all just coincidence. (You can hear Golyadkin reassuring himself.) Only it seems he does have reason to worry. His job is under threat. People look at him oddly. He does not understand what it going on (and we, as readers, share the puzzle with him: why is everybody behaving so oddly?).

This is an oddly contemporary nightmare, the story of a man lost in the fog of the modern world. Whatever your expectations of this book (or for that matter Dostoyevsky), you will be surprised. Where books like "Crime and Punishment" or "The Brothers Karamazov" share a direct novelistic lineage with the great novels of Dickens, "The Double" is more at home in the company of Kafka or Sartre (specifically "Nausea"). The ground beneath your feet is never sure, the peculiarities you are faced with mount up, the book is like extreme drunkenness.

There may well be a great tradition of doppelganger fiction, but I guarantee you: nothing is quite like this.

Rating:
Summary: Little gem by the Russian master
Review: Once again Fyodor Dostoyevsky has reminded me of why he is one of my favorite authors. The Double, his second published work, is a short but entirely Dostoyevskian tale of confusion, helplessness, and just plain strange characters. The latter is among my favorite features of Dostoyevsky, although the level of strangeness here is not nearly as high as in his later works.

The story starts with our hapless protagonist in the state of falling away from society. The opening portions, as is often the case for this author, is a bit confused and hard to read. I do have to point out that this can be a major drawback in a story of only one hundred thirty five pages. Nonetheless, we meet Golyadkin as he feels himself cut off from the world around him. Things start to get interesting when he meets up with his exact double, who also shares his name and works in the same government office.

When I first came across this story, I thought it might be the case that the double was an illusion, and that no one but Golyadkin could see him. Fortunately, Dostoyevsky is cleverer than that, and despite a pleasant first encounter between the two identical men, the other Golyadkin begins to ingratiate himself at work, and relentless persecuting our poor hero. Dostoyevsky does this sort of thing very well. How, we the readers might ask, does a sane man react to such affronts without himself appearing childish, weak, or petty? The other Golyadkin steal credit for his own work, buys things on Golyadkin's credit, makes himself the fun man in the office, and apparently conspires to give our man the boot. And it is clear that the real Golyadkin, a reserved and withdrawn man of no special merit, is powerless to prevent it. The descent into madness is sure to follow.

With enough hints, clues, and false leads to keep us enthralled, we watch in empathy and horror as our man continues his ultimately hopeless downward spiral. By the end we know what tragedy awaits him and can only read it out to the final, bitter end. This is the sort of story that gives Russian literature its incredible power over us; the power to suck us into a world of neuroses and chaos on the very edge of sanity.

Rating:
Summary: A novel way ahead of its time
Review: The Double was Dostoyevskys second book. The author thought it was his greatest work yet, but to the literary critics, who considered it weird and insane, it was a disappointment. This was not strange, because D. had really started to explore new territories of the human mind. The language and style was close to that of Gogol, but what D. wrote here was simply revolutionary! He describes insanity from within, a person who is followed by a double through the cold streets of StPetersburg. It's no wonder this book amazed Freud and the psycho-analysts of the 20th century. You can also clearly see who Kafka learned from... However, this is a great book and it is invaluable if you want to get further into the genius of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Rating:
Summary: Paranoia before the USSR
Review: This being Dostoevskys second book doesnt really achieve the peak use of language he would later attain. However this is a fascinating book for its paranoid overtures and glimpse into the roots of psychosis. There is much in this book which goes unexplained which I feel lends to the overall feel of the book. After all, how much of neurosis and psychosis is following normal reason? One does come to feel a certain pity for one Yakov Petrovitch Golyadkin. One certainly doesnt want him to be committed. (the apparent but unknown conclusion.) It creates a creepiness and eeriness that makes most modern horror flicks seem amateurish and groping.

Rating:
Summary: a bit different
Review: this is a little bit different from anything else i have written by the author. it is kind of surreal. a man meets his double. at first they are the best of friends, then the double becomes his challenger in everything. does the double exists? what is true? nothing is certain here, but it is consise, plot-driven, based coolly on reality, not a far out "madness story". it is one of his psychological works.

Rating:
Summary: A solid, short Dostoyevsky
Review: This short Dostoyevsky novel, his second published work, is a classic of psychological realism and also paved the way for some of his later work. The tradition of the doppelganger story in literature is far from an original one, but Dostoyevsky deals with it here in a unique new way. Rather than focusing on the supernatural or fantastic aspects of the story, Dostoyevsky here explores the human mind, laying down, for the first time, the mastery of psychological realism which he would come to perfect in his later, more ambitious works. One of the things that really makes the book work is that it is told in the first-person. We hear the story of the man who meets his double in his own words, and we get to watch his mind as it continually unravels. This book epitomizes the concept of the "unreliable narrator": Golyadkin's speech becomes increasingly feverish, paranoiac, and less credible as the story winds along. It is fascinating to watch the disintegration of his mind. His rambling, incoherent speeches, characterized by incomplete thoughts and repetition, is drawn out by Dostoyevsky to almost comic levels, foreshadowing his masterful use of comically divergent dialogue in his later novel Demons. The story is told in a very fast-paced, fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants manner, with the narrator's mind racing along at a feverish pitch, which his words seem scarcely able to keep up with. His rambling narrative leaves a lot of things in doubt, and the reader is left to ponder certain questions which are never fully resolved: does the double actually exist? just what happens at the end? While this ambiguity might be slightly frustrating on a superficial level, it actually adds to the overall feel of the book -- it is narrated, after all, by a crazy man -- and helps to give the book its distinctively paranoiac, schizophrenic feel. Dostoyevsky herein explores such fascinatingly elusive psychological concepts as paranoia, insanity, jealousy, and mystery. A great classic that clearly both fascinated and influenced everyone from Freud to Kafka to Philip K. Dick, The Double is a great treat for the Dostoyevsky reader.