The Double and the Gambler

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, Michael Page

eAudio - 2019

The Double, written in Dostoevsky's youth, was a sharp turn away from the realism of his first novel, Poor Folk. The first real expression of his genius, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelgänger—a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of this increasingly paranoid hero, Dostoevsky makes vividly concrete the inner disintegration of consciousness that would become a major theme of his work.The Gambler was written twenty years later, under the pressure of crushing debt. It is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's ex...hilarating and destructive addiction, a compulsion that Dostoevsky—who once gambled away his young wife's wedding ring—knew intimately from his own experience. In the disastrous love affairs and gambling... more