Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the
timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his
double, a more brazen, confident and socially successful version of
himself, who abuses and victimizes the original. As he is increasingly
persecuted, Golyadkin finds his social, romantic and professional life
unravelling, in a spiral that leads to a catastrophic denouement.
The Double, Dostoevsky's second published work of fiction, which
foreshadows in its themes many of his mature novels, is the surreal and
hallucinatory tale of an unfortunate anti-hero, at once chilling in its
depiction of the dark sides of human nature and exuberantly comical.