Notes From Underground And The Double Av Fyodor Dostoyevsky

<p>''That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka, to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky''s work'' Malcolm Bradbury<br><br>Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky''s <i>Notes from Underground</i> tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter irony, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the ''anthill'' and his gradual withdrawal from society. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in <i>The Double</i> when a government clerk encounters a man who looks exactly like him - his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like <i>Notes from Underground</i>, this is a masterly tragi-comic study of human consciousness.<br><br>Translated by Ronald Wilks with an Introduction by Robert Louis Jackson</p>