The Double: A Petersburg Poem

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Cover of The Double: A Petersburg Poem

The Double: A Petersburg Poem is a novella written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and first published in 1848. The novella deals with the internal psychological struggle of its main character, to whom Dostoevsky refers as "our hero", Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin. The novella's motif is the doppelgänger, otherwise known throughout the world in various guises, such as the fetch.

The Double is the most Gogolesque of Dostoevsky's works; its subtitle "The Poem" duplicates that of the Dead Souls. Nabokov called it a parody of "The Overcoat". It is a story, told in great detail and in a style intensely saturated with phonetic and rhythmical expressiveness, of a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. D.S. Mirsky classed the story as "painful, almost intolerable reading".^[1]

With the cruelty later on marked by Nikolay Mikhaylovsky as his characteristic feature, Dostoevsky dwells with convincing power on the sufferings of the humiliated human dignity of Mr. Golyadkin. Closely connected with it is "the still stranger and madder" (as D.S. Mirsky termed it) Mr. Prokharchin (1846), the story, in places deliberately obscure and unintelligible, of the death of a miser who had accumulated a fortune while living in abject filth in a wretched slum.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The narrator's 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 to claim his position within both his public life in the Russian bureaucracy and within the social circle inhabited by "Golyadkin" Senior (the author's term for the "original Golyadkin, our hero").

As one continues to read the novella and piece together the various clues - it becomes fairly obvious to the reader that the Golyadkin Junior character is merely a schizophrenic manifestation of the actual Golyadkin's less desirable characteristics (a forerunner to the Shadow later proposed by Carl Jung), the classic "it's all in his head" twist. As such, the novella can be viewed as one of a series of Dostoevsky's critiques of the self-possessed nature of modernity, in this particular work it is also a critique of the machinations and maneuvering of the middle class in its socio-economic strivings.

It may, however, be viewed simply as the documenting of a schizophrenic break from reality, following all of his mental degenerations including broken speech patterns and free association. The most obvious example is of course the hallucination of seeing himself everywhere he goes, especially in socially awkward situations. The man's quick downfall is characteristic of the disease, and one wonders if a close friend or acquaintance of Dostoevsky may not have fallen to the affliction, so accurate are the depictions of it.