The Double: A Petersburg Poem
Encyclopedia
The Double deals with the internal psychological struggle of its main character, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin. The motif of the novella is a doppelgänger
Doppelgänger
In fiction and folklore, a doppelgänger is a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune...
, known throughout the world in various guises such as the fetch
Fetch (folklore)
A fetch is a supernatural double or apparition of a living person in Irish folklore. It is largely akin to the doppelgänger. Francis Grose associated the term with Northern England in his 1787 Provincial Glossary, but otherwise it seems to have been in popular use only in Ireland...
.
The Double is the most Gogolesque of Dostoyevsky's works; its subtitle "A Petersburg Poem" echoes that of Gogol's Dead Souls
Dead Souls
Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an "epic poem in prose", and within the book as a "novel in verse". Despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part, Gogol...
. Vladimir Nabokov called it a parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
of "The Overcoat
The Overcoat
"The Overcoat" is the title of a short story by Ukrainian-born Russian author Nikolai Gogol, published in 1842. The story and its author have had great influence on Russian literature, thus spawning Fyodor Dostoyevsky's famous quote: "We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'." The story has been...
". 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. Dostoyevsky 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
Mr. Prokharchin
Mr. Prokharchin is a short story written in 1846 by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It appeared among others in the volume "Poor folk and other stories". It is inspired by a true story....
(1846), also by Dostoyevsky. 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").
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
Free association (psychology)
Free association is a technique used in psychoanalysis which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and coworker, Josef Breuer....
. 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.