The Double Book

Nabokov considered this "Dostoyevsky's best work," but, then again, Nabokov didn't like Dostoyevsky: he also called the novella "an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose." "The Double" is indeed a great work, though far from Dostoyevsky's greatest (too full of repetitions, verbal and structural, too often willfully obscure), and'I would argue'it is great precisely because of the manner in which it obviously and shamelessly imitates Gogol.

In "The Double," the twenty-five year old Dostoyevsky sought to discover his own path as a writer by imitating'to the point of parody'the style and themes of Gogol, a writer he dearly loved. He took Gogol's typical protagonist'a middle class bureaucrat of the rank of "titular councillor'and speculated: how would a Gogol hero like this'a lonely egoist obsessed with rank, humiliated by slights, isolated in suspicion and near poverty'react if he encountered a man who looked and acted exactly like himself and who began, little by little, to take over his life, his apartment, his acquaintances, even his duties as titular councillor? Dostoyevsky concluded such a man would certainly go mad, and decided to document'from the protagonist's point of view'his agonized descent into delusion.

In his exaggerated imitation of Gogol, Dostoevsky so thoroughly identifies with the councillor's point of view that his "parody" becomes an implied criticism. Gogol'as he did in "The Overcoat," "The Nose," and "The Diary of a Madman"'would have abased his hero, ridiculed him, exploited him as a figure of fun and as an excuse for violent shifts in tone and mood, all the psychological insight he possessed subordinate to satiric intent and dramatic effect.

Dostoyevsky however was too compassionate a writer, too empathetic a man, to objectify his hero in this way. Instead, he identifies with him thoroughly, creates an experience so immediate and so real that the reader is forced to experience the consciousness of a madman, alternately consumed by shame and filled with elation, disoriented and alienated in a hostile and ambiguous world.

Where Gogol would have presented the reader with an absurd situation, a philosophical dilemma, Dostoevsky instead immerses him in a psychological crisis. And this psychological crisis, for those familiar with Dostoevsky's later work, hints at the existential and theological crises yet to come.