Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is a respected civil servant. Dostoevsky introduces him in his tidy and modest dwelling on a morning brimming with expectations for our "hero":

the dingy, smoke-grimed greenish walls of his little room, the mahogany chest of drawers, the Turkish-style divan of red oilcloth with greenish little flowers, looked upon him with familiarity.

In front of the mirror, on this exceptional day for him,

it would really be a fine thing," Golyadkin said under his breath, "it would really be a fine thing if I weren't in proper order today, if, let's say, some novelty had cropped up, a nice, completely untimely pimple, for instance.

Our hero must be flawless; he is invited—or believes himself to be—to the birthday of the only daughter of State Councillor Berendeyev. Yet amidst this prevailing euphoria, Dostoevsky immediately gives us several signs that something is amiss: as he steps into a light-blue carriage for hire, his servant exchanges

knowing glances with the coachman and several loafers, (...) barely suppressing the coarsest laughter;

having climbed into the carriage, our hero

shuddered (...) and hastily, almost terror-stricken, shrank into the darkest corner of the carriage;

finally, we discover that Golyadkin, the staid civil servant, is in the care of a doctor who urges him not to shun a carefree life, not to be an enemy of the bottle. We are therefore hardly surprised when our hero is turned away by the doorman and denied entry to the birthday of the powerful councillor's daughter. He is not a welcome guest! Through a subterfuge, Golyadkin manages to slip into the reception, where, in a state of delirium, he behaves so unseemly that he is shown the door. But is it reality or a hallucination born of an already diseased mind? This serves as the prelude to the entrance of a new character: the double, the slimy, disgusting, cunning Golyadkin number two. At first, the double displays a humble attitude toward "number one," hanging on his every glance, but soon grows increasingly arrogant, currying favor with our hero's superiors. What is more, he mocks him in front of their younger colleagues.

After tickling him a little, (...) causing great amusement among the young people surrounding them, Mr. Golyadkin number two, with disgusting brazenness, decisively gave a tap to the protruding belly of Mr. Golyadkin number one, accompanying the gesture with the most venomous and suggestive of smiles, saying: "having fun, little brother?"

What is the double referring to? As Dostoevsky will make explicit in Notes from Underground (see the review on this site), there is within us, deep in our soul, a malice that leads us to commit wicked acts, and which can also drive us to madness. Only in a dream does our hero manage to glimpse a petty act,

a piece of cowardice seen, heard, or committed by himself not long before,

an unbecoming behavior:

a well-known young lady, (...) a little German girl,

to whom the double can freely allude,

wheedling around Golyadkin, smiling at him affably, and displaying, in that way, false cordiality toward him.

For our hero, it comes as a relief when he sees the doctor arrive:

tears streamed from Mr. Golyadkin's eyes. "in that case I am ready... I submit entirely and entrust my fate (to the doctor)," (...) a tremendous and deafening cry of joy burst from the chests of all those surrounding him and, with the cruellest resonance, rippled through the waiting crowd. (...) The slimy twin of Mr. Golyadkin (...) blew little kisses to Mr. Golyadkin; but then he began to show signs of flagging and appeared less and less frequently, until he disappeared completely.

A psychiatrist might say that we are confronted with a schizophrenic personality in a state of mounting impairment, with a splitting of the self. A psychoanalyst, long before Freud, might discern the ego's fear of meeting its double, of uncovering the evil harbored within, behind the veneer of bourgeois respectability—a rejection of the cogs of the Russian Empire's oppressive bureaucracy. And so Golyadkin's madness, the conjuring of his disgusting, slimy double, is nothing less than a desperate act of revolt, one that can only lead to the asylum, deviant as it is from the reigning norms. And Dostoevsky is the bard of Petersburg society.

Oh, if only I were a poet! A poet, naturally, equal to Homer and Pushkin, for with a less sublime talent it is impossible to step forward.

Could it be that for us contemporaries, too, nothing remains but madness in the face of such a suffocating world—yet where is a Dostoevsky?
The pace is brisk and lively, calling to mind for the reader the splendid The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants (see the review on this site). Already a great writer, Dostoevsky leads us by the hand through the tale of the protagonist's madness—at first incredulous, with gentle, ironic touches, then in an increasingly overt manner. To be sure, the narration of madness coils in upon itself, and how could it be otherwise, given that only through the repetition of events and emotional states can one dig deep beneath the surface? The concept of the double is brilliant because it establishes another point of view, a perspective both external and internal at once—a truly innovative narrative device found in few novels, such as Natsume Soseki's I Am a Cat (see the review on this site), though undeniably with a vastly different rhythm.

Why read it? Intense and disquieting at once.

The Double: A Petersburg Poem