SOURCE: “The Double (1846),” in Feodor Dostoevsky, Continuum, 1993, pp. 149–56.

In the following essay, Amoia discusses the importance of the characterization in The Double in the development of Dostoevsky's subsequent works.

Some of Dostoevsky's most significant characterizations and themes are developed in his six short novels. Among them are the paranoiac split personality whose double materializes before his incredulous eyes; the decrepit dotard with his impossible marital dream; the “perfectly good man” confronted with the despotic hypocrite in the microcosmic village of Stepanchikovo; the unloved, unloving “underground man” in his miserable mouse hole; the gambler whose ardor and vitality are focused on the treacherous revolutions of a roulette wheel; and, lastly, the respectable “eternal husband” who finds himself inexorably linked with his eternal rival.

The Double, which was written immediately after Poor Folk, is the earliest and probably the best known of Dostoevsky's short novels, not only because of its...