Notes from Underground and the Double

'That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka, to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work' Malcolm Bradbury

Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter irony, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the 'anthill' and his gradual withdrawal from society. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who looks exactly like him - his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground , this is a masterly tragi-comic study of human consciousness.

Translated by Ronald Wilks with an Introduction by Robert Louis Jackson

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Classic fiction (pre c 1945), Fiction in translation

Published on 29 Jan 2009 by Penguin Books Ltd.