Others view him as an oddity, possibly even a laughingstock, and his bumbling efforts to behave according to social expectations indicate that something is very wrong. Goliadkin’s vacillations demonstrate that he is socially disconnected and unable to fit in. Goliadkin flunks performing normalcy so badly that he “flare up like fire, frown, and cast a terrible, defiant glance into the front corner of the carriage, a glance intended to incinerate all his enemies to dust at a stroke.” Who these enemies are is unclear-everyone outside the window?-but Mr. His colleagues are “extremely perplexed” and “extremely amazed” to see him in a carriage, and during the outing he alternates between “assuming a decent and decorous air” and hiding, depending on the rank of the person he passes and his relation to them. Goliadkin, getting gussied up and taking a carriage ride about town, something beyond his rank as a titular councilor near the bottom of the Russian civil service. The novel begins with the protagonist, Mr.
Much like his predecessor Nikolai Gogol, Dostoevsky took a harsh view of nineteenth-century Russia’s civil service and the trappings of the upper class, but what makes The Double so painful is the extreme tactic Dostoevsky uses to “penetrat into the depths of the normal human soul,” as translator Richard Pevear observes, and the dramatic shift in character that tactic evokes.
Dostoevsky likewise felt that in dismissing it, critics were dismissing something crucial. Mirtsky, however, like other readers who aren’t Dostoevsky’s contemporaries, noticed in The Double not a failure but “a perfect work of art,” and considered critics foolish for panning it. Published in 1845 just three months after his first novel, Poor Folk, which was received with rave reviews, The Double was a critical flop from which Dostoevsky’s career didn’t recover until after he was arrested, sentenced to death as a scare tactic, then exiled to a prison camp in Siberia for four years. Mirtsky wrote in 1927 about Fyodor Dostoevsky’s second novel, The Double. “It is painful, almost intolerable reading,” Russian literary and political historian D.S.
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