The Double (1846) and Notes from Underground (1864)

Abstract

If Poor Folk concerned the pains of want of status and money, The Double is about the pains of identity itself. Dostoevsky did not, of course, invent the theme of doubleness. It haunts nineteenth-century literature, from E. T. Hoffmann’s tales — for example, ‘The Devil’s Elixirs’ — to R. L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Dostoevsky had read Hoffmann, where the theme is treated as lurid melodrama and associated with ‘animal magnetism’. His immediate source, however, was Gogol’s heartlessly whimsical and funny stories ‘The Nose’ and ‘Diary of a Madman’. In the latter a poor clerk and quill-sharpener, Poprishkin, falls in love with the daughter of his office chief, and goes mad when she is wholly unregarding. He decides he is the King of Spain, and his asylum a court. In ‘The Nose’ the Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov’s nose plays truant, and goes about town in the uniform of a more exalted rank, taking carriages and praying in the cathedral, before returning to its owner as mysteriously as it first departed. Ambition in a stagnant society has no sane outlet, seems to be the message. The Double combines the themes of the splitting of one person (as in ‘The Nose’) and of ambition punished by madness (as in ‘The Diary of a Madman’).