Notes from Underground and The Double

Author

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Original Works

Notes from the Underground·The Double: A Petersburg Poem

Translator

Ronald Wilks

Foreword / Afterword

Robert Louis Jackson

Format

Collection / Anthology

Language

English

Year

2009

Avg Rating

3.0 ★

Publisher

Penguin

Country

United Kingdom

Pages

291

ISBN

9780140442526

…………

‘It is best to do nothing! The best thing is conscious inertia! So long live the underground!’Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky’s groundbreaking Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter sarcasm, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the ‘ant-hill’ of society and his gradual withdrawal to an existence ‘underground’. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who exactly resembles him – his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly study of human consciousness.Jessie Coulson’s introduction discusses the stories’ critical reception and the themes they share with Dostoyevksy’s great novels.— Google Books