Notes from the Underground

“It is best to do nothing! The greatest virtue is conscious inertia! Long live the underground!” The anonymous narrator in Dostoyevsky’s revolutionary work, “Notes from Underground,” is estranged from society and paralyzed by feelings of insignificance. He recounts his tormented life with bitter sarcasm, refusing to become a mere cog in the societal machine and instead retreating into an ‘underground’ existence. In “The Double,” the seemingly ordinary world of St. Petersburg takes a nightmarish turn when a government clerk encounters a man who is his exact double – perhaps a doppelgänger or the darker aspect of his own psyche.