![]() ![]() ![]() But I constantly found myself wondering if I was somehow missing the plot. Having listened to, twice, all of Doestoevsky's great books, I had high hopes for this one. If you haven't read Dostoevsky yet, I'd probably start with 'Crime & Punishment', 'Brothers Karamazov', and/or 'the Idiot' first Anyway, if you love Russian novels and love Dostoevsky, this is a must (especially if you also love Nabokov). Dostoevsky's double/doppelgänger/unreliable narrator idea inspired a whole fugue of Nabokov novels ('Despair', 'Pale Fire', etc), entire Kafkaesque worlds, Solaris, the Riplad, etc. I finished reading 'the Double' and immediately started seeing how Dostoevsky fits and flips right into the whole bizarre family tree of madness literature. After reading this short, early piece of Dostoevsky it is nice to start recognizing its influence on other authors and their work. While patterns still do emerge in translations, they are fragmented and seem often like poor reflections of what the original must be. His Gogol-inspired novella plays with language, poetry, puns and double entendres are hard to translate adequately (go with Pevear and Volokhonsky for the poetry and avoid Constance Garnett). Wish I could have read it in the original RussianÄostoevsky's 'The Double' is one of those novellas/novels where I REALLY wish I could have read it in the original Russian. ![]()
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