Books That Matter: ‘The Double’

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Edvard Munch, “The Scream” (1893)[/caption]

I grew up in a household where Jane Austen was almost a religion. My mom and I read and re-read her books, were delighted by her wit, and compared favorite passages. On any given weekend, the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice was playing in the background of whatever we were doing.

But in middle school, I read Crime and Punishment for class, and Dostoevsky overtook me like a fever. Austen’s drawing room drama melted into the dark, gritty streets of Saint Petersburg. Gentle civility, biting wit, and familiar charm folded themselves away in boxes, making way for nihilism, angst, and pain. Dostoevsky’s books delve into levels of the human psyche that discomfort you — make you question yourself and doubt your sympathies. Can you understand, can you feel sympathy for a killer? Dostoevsky’s extremes of the human condition painted worlds I had never touched or imagined.

And I couldn’t look away. I read The Gambler, then The Idiot. But when, at last, I landed on The Double, I met my saturation point, my limit. I suddenly couldn’t look away fast enough.

Written in 1846, The Double is a novella following the slow descent into madness of one Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, an excitable and anxious man whose child-like temperament immediately kindled my protective, mothering instincts. Early in the story, Yakov meets his doppelganger — the black swan to Yakov’s white swan. The next day, the Double takes a position at Yakov’s workplace. Confident and coldly calculating, the Double insinuates himself into and takes over Yakov’s job. Around thirty pages into the book, the Double takes credit for Yakov’s work, while a nervous, stuttering Yakov helplessly looks on.

And that was it. I snapped the book shut. I couldn’t finish it. I knew how this kind of story would end, and I did not want to be party to it. Imagine such a horror! Where someone who looks exactly like you takes over everything that was once yours: your hard-earned work, your life, and your family. Imagine that your very essence — your soul — was so insignificant, that your family and friends hardly notice an imposter in your place. We all have our A-list nightmares, and this scenario is one of mine.

The Double looms large in my life not for its powerful prose or powerful ideas, but simply because I have never mustered the strength to finish it. For weeks after I put the book down, I was in a quandary. I could not imagine a worse torture for myself than having to finish The Double, yet I also had never not finished a book before.

It seems a childish sentiment, but I think it came from a yearning and Austen-instilled expectation that books set all misery right by their end, and restore justice to their world. But I knew the sentiments of Austen or Dickens refuse to encroach on a realist writer like Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky is a jailor, imprisoning his characters on his page — sentencing them to a life of misery, and favoring the drama and tragedies of life over the happiness of his characters. Dostoevsky’s captivating, soul-rending plots always come at the expense of his characters. Though futile, I grasped at the hope that as long as I did not finish the book, The Double’s plot would never be enacted, and Yakov would never descend into madness.

It was a strange thought that, I, as a reader, held some kind of power over the end of the book. The act of “reading” felt like a form of violence against Dostoevsky’s characters, who are forced to enact and reenact the dramas every time their book is read. The act of “not reading” was an extension of sympathy, a way to finally give Yakov peace.

I have not picked up The Double since high school. Even now, I still feel a bit like a coward for never finishing it. The Double continues to taunt me from my bookshelf — sometimes, I even catch myself slinking past its beady little spine. One day, I shall silence that nagging book. Just…not now.