The Double: A Petersburg Poem
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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, known throughout the world in various guises such as the fetch.
The Double is the most Gogolesque of Dostoevsky's works; its subtitle "The Poem" duplicates that of the Dead Souls. Vladimir Nabokov called it a parody of "The Overcoat". 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. Closely related to The Double is "the still stranger and madder" (as D.S. Mirsky termed it) Mr. Prokharchin (1846). Also by Dostoevsky, the story, in places deliberately obscure and unintelligible, is about the death of a miser who accumulated a fortune while living in the abject filth of a wretched slum.
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").
As one continues to read the novella and piece together the various clues - it becomes fairly obvious to the reader that the Golyadkin Junior is 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 particular, the work is a critique of the machinations and maneuverings of a striving, struggling middle class in its socio-economic life.
The novella may, however, be viewed simply as the documentation of a schizophrenic break from reality with the realistic description of symptomatic mental degenerations, including broken speech patterns and free association. The most obvious example is the hallucination where the hero of the story sees himself everywhere he goes, especially in socially awkward situations. The man's quick downfall is characteristic of the disease. With the accurateTemplate:Fact depictions of its symptoms, the reader might wonder if a close friend or acquaintance of Dostoevsky had fallen prey to the affliction.
