Notes from the Underground

Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky''s Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter irony, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the ''anthill'' and his gradual withdrawal from society. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who looks exactly like him - his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly tragi-comic study of human consciousness.