“Our hero” is how Dostoevsky sardonically refers to Golyadkin, but this is a hero that undergoes no quest Dostoevsky as the narrator often demurs that he’s not quite Homer or Pushkin, and this is no epic. Golyadkin Sr. is too much of a nothing to even count as an anti-hero. The human is always splitting into two, ( a rather conservative number.) “The Double” is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s second novella, ( after “Poor Folk”) and it’s a noticeable forward leap that uses Nikolai Gogol’s deadpan satires “The Nose” and “The Overcoat” as inspirational springboards. The plot, (easy enough to guess) finds a shy, undistinguished clerk named Golyadkin confronted with an identical, though far more assertive, look-alike (Golyadkin Jr.) whose unexplained presence goes unquestioned by all except by our ineffective hero. The doppelgängers of German folklore the mischievous menaechmi in Plautus, or in Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” the Martin Guerres of “The Two Dianas” the Victorian Jekylls and Hydes. ABOVE: I knew you were double when I met you.
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