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

• Format
• paperback

• Pages
• 352

• Publisher
• Penguin Classics

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 978-0-14-045512-0

• EAN
• 9780140455120

• Release date
• 2009