The Double

I've really enjoyed Pevear and Volokhonsky's new Dostoevsky translations.  And I've been thinking some about the strange feeling of echo that mindfulness or metacognition can produce.  So when I saw that the couple had also done The Double and The Gambler as a single collection, I decided to go for it.  As they mention in their introduction, The Double reads like a dress rehearsal for Notes from Underground.  Certainly, they treat the same theme of a hyper-self-consciousness torn between a dignified self defense and an abject self loathing.  As the title suggests, The Double personifies this inner tension as an outer relationship between a mid-level bureaucrat and his doppelgänger who comes to usurp his place at the same agency.  It's the sort of magical realism we associate with Kafka, and a direct descendant of Gogol's The Nose.  In other words, while it's an interesting story, it doesn't seem to me that Dostoevsky had really achieved his fully distinctive voice by the time he wrote it.  Though the night when our poor hero, trudging through a blizzard of disappointment, first encounters his double on the Ismailovsky bridge is a truly memorable scene that definitely foreshadows the amazingly dramatic moments of some of the later novels.