Notes from Underground and the Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Description

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 Doublewhen 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.