Alma Evergreen: The Double

Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Goly­adkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confi­dent and socially succesful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the original. As he is increasingly persecuted, Golyadkin finds his social, romantic and professional life unravelling, in a spiral that leads to a catastrophic denouement. The Double, Dostoevsky''s second published work of fiction, which foreshadows in its themes many of his mature novels, is the surreal and hallucinatory tale of an unfortu­nate anti-hero, at once chilling in its depiction of the dark sides of human nature and exuberantly comical.