SOURCE: “The Russian Double,” in The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Macmillan, 1990, pp. 99–126.

In the following excerpt, Herdman examines The Double in the context of nineteenth-century European literature featuring doubles.

The age of Hoffmann and Hogg might be called the ‘high noon’ of the double in Western Europe; in the middle years of the century … the theme fell somewhat into abeyance as a serious literary preoccupation, to experience a new resurgence in the last years of the century, a fresh access of vitality which was related to a revival of the Gothic mode and to new scientific developments which cast a beguiling light on matters of duality and psychic division. In Russia, however, the hiatus was bridged, for the influence of Hoffmann and the ‘Russian Hoffmannists’ bore new fruit in the 1840s in the early work of Dostoevsky, who throughout his career continued pertinaciously to revert to the preoccupation...