The Double

A petty civil servant, Yakov Golyadkin, is already on edge — anxious about his rank, his reputation and a woman he cannot quite approach. Then one night he meets a man who looks exactly like him. Same face, same name, same job. The newcomer is quicker, smoother and better liked, and he begins to take Golyadkin's place.

Subtitled A Petersburg Poem, it is a darkly comic study of a mind coming apart. Critics found it baffling in 1846; later readers recognised in it the first glimpse of the divided self that runs through all of Dostoevsky's work.