- Publisher : Penguin (29 January 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0140455124
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140455120
- Item Weight : 250 g
- Dimensions : 19.7 x 12.9 x 2.12 cm
hat 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 BradburyAlienated 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
