The Double combines the themes of the splitting of one person (as in ‘The Nose’) and of ambition punished by madness (as in ‘The Diary of a Madman’). Ambition in a stagnant society has no sane outlet, seems to be the message. In ‘The Nose’ the Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov’s nose plays truant, and goes about town in the uniform of a more exalted rank, taking carriages and praying in the cathedral, before returning to its owner as mysteriously as it first departed. influential novel, Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky, 2004) the other, the less well known story, The Dream of a. These materials (also newly translated) include writings from some of the thinkers against whom Dostoevsky positioned himself excerpts from Dostoevskys. He decides he is the King of Spain, and his asylum a court. stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse.

In the latter a poor clerk and quill-sharpener, Poprishkin, falls in love with the daughter of his office chief, and goes mad when she is wholly unregarding. In this fragment, entitled Underground, this person. His immediate source, however, was Gogol’s heartlessly whimsical and funny stories ‘The Nose’ and ‘Diary of a Madman’. Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insigni cance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevskys groundbreaking Notes from Underground tells. Dostoevsky had read Hoffmann, where the theme is treated as lurid melodrama and associated with ‘animal magnetism’. Hoffmann’s tales - for example, ‘The Devil’s Elixirs’ - to R. Alongside with such literary and cinematic tales, drawing theoretical guidance from refuseniks from Henry David Thoreau to Guy Debord, this course investigates. It haunts nineteenth-century literature, from E.

Dostoevsky did not, of course, invent the theme of doubleness. Published in 1864, Notes from Underground is considered the authors first masterpiece - the book in which he became Dostoevsky - and is seen as the. If Poor Folk concerned the pains of want of status and money, The Double is about the pains of identity itself.

Tales from the underground dostoevsky