'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
- ISBN10 0140455124
- ISBN13 9780140455120
- Publish Date 29 January 2009 (first published 1 January 2008)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Imprint Penguin Classics
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 352
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780140455120