His first book, Poor Folk, did very well but on 23rd April 1849 he was arrested for subversion and sentenced to death. He graduated from the St Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering in 1846 but decided to change careers and become a writer. He had six siblings and his mother died in 1837 and his father in 1839. Translated by Ronald Wilks with an Introduction by Robert Louis Jackson Read more Detailsįyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on 11th November 1821. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly tragi-comic study of human consciousness. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who looks exactly like him - his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. With bitter irony, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the 'anthill' and his gradual withdrawal from society. '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 BradburyĪlienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life.
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