Notes from Underground and the Double
As Malcolm Bradbury once observed, that creeping sense of existential futility running through so much twentieth-century literature, from Conrad and Kafka to Beckett and beyond, finds its true origins in Dostoyevsky's fiction. This volume brings together two of his most psychologically acute works, and it's a pairing that rewards the reader handsomely. In Notes from Underground, an unnamed narrator recounts his wretched inner life with a caustic, self-lacerating wit. Convinced of his own irrelevance, he rejects the busy, purposeful world around him, refusing to become just another cog in society's great machine. What emerges is a portrait of a man at war with himself, and the result is quietly devastating. The Double takes a different route to a similarly unsettling destination. A St Petersburg clerk, outwardly unremarkable, comes face to face with someone who appears to be his exact copy. Whether this figure is a genuine apparition or a manifestation of the clerk's own fractured psyche, Dostoyevsky leaves tantalisingly open. The city itself begins to feel warped and oppressive, familiar streets turning strange. Both stories work as tragi-comic investigations into the nature of human consciousness, and together they form a compelling whole. Ronald Wilks's translation keeps things crisp and readable, whilst Robert Louis Jackson's introduction provides useful context for anyone coming to these works afresh.
- Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Publisher: Penguin
- Genre: Classic Literature
- ISBN: 978-0140455120
- Pages: 352 pages