Mr. Golyadkin is a poor single man with an even poorer servant, Petrushka. Golyadkin lives a boring life of work-to-home, work-to-home, work-to-home. He envies the ostensibly happy, respected, and affluent that appear to have happiness and the respect which he covets. A doctor visits Golyadkin, encourages him to get out more, socialize, entertain, and to cultivate a visible hobnobbing life. Golyadkin takes the doctor’s prescription, and that’s where the horrow ensues. Golyadkin appears to go mad as his twin, (the double) with precisely the same name, torments him at every turn, by pointing out his masks.

For 150 pages, Dostoyevsky does what no writer does better. Like Kafka, he dramatizes the soul’s internal conflict and shows what it means to be a divided man. The metaphor running throughout is that of the mask–of its ubiquity and necessity–if one is to skate through life.

“The Double” is not as lauded as Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov but Dostoyevsky’s themes are all here. Great stuff for those who have the character to examine the darker spheres of our nature.