This Penguin Classics edition gathers two of Dostoyevsky’s most psychologically penetrating novellas. In Notes from Underground, an unnamed narrator, alienated and deeply self-critical, retreats into bitter isolation, railing against society’s pressures and the illusion of rational order. In The Double, a stifled government clerk encounters a man who looks just like him, or perhaps embodies his darker self, probing the thin line between identity, madness, and reality. Ronald Wilks’s translation, aided by Robert Louis Jackson’s introduction, illuminates Dostoyevsky’s themes of alienation, identity, and existential tension with clarity and literary care.
About the Author
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) was one of 19th-century Russia’s great novelists. He endured exile and harsh punishment as a political detainee, and his later years were marked by financial troubles related to gambling. Yet his experiences deeply shaped his fiction, which explores suffering, morality, consciousness, and faith. Major works include Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Demons.
