The Story Archive

The Double

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1846 CE · Novel · Russian · Victorian

A punctilious titular councillor, humiliated at a party he was not invited to, meets a man on a snowbound embankment who has his face, his name and his post, and who is better at all three. The impostor is welcomed in every office where the original is tolerated, and nobody in the department will admit that anything is odd. Dostoevsky kept rewriting it for thirty years and still called its central idea the most serious he ever handled.

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Lineage

Attributes

Genre
PsychologicalGothic
Theme
Identity & SelfMadnessIsolation & AlienationAppearance vs Reality
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
The DoubleEverymanShadow
Plot structure
Dual WorldUnreliable NarratorIronic Reversal
Symbol / motif
The MirrorThe CityThe Staircase
Conflict
vs Selfvs Society
Mode / tone
GothicIronicRealist
Culture / tradition
Russian

Closest analogues