SOURCE: “Dostoevsky's Hero in The Double: A Re-Examination of the Divided Self,” in Symposium, Vol. 26, Summer, 1972, pp. 101–13.

In the following essay, Anderson examines Golyadkin's conception of himself as a divided personality.

Dvojnik [The Double] has always occupied a unique place in Dostoevsky scholarship because of its multiple levels of meaning and its complexity. In one respect it presents an almost clinical profile of the hero's confused mind drifting into paranoia and schizophrenia. It can also be examined in its relation to developing social activism in Russia at the time of its publication in 1846. Literary depictions of innately good but disadvantaged urban poor in Russia were firmly established through the influence of George Sand, Dickens, Balzac, and Hugo. The strong philanthropic current in Dostoevsky's first novelette Bednye ljudi [Poor Folk] certainly primed critical expectations for a continuation of that tendency in The Double. On yet another level the hallucinatory...