While the book owes a debt to Nikolai Gogol, the younger author moves beyond social critique to the psychological drama that would become his trademark in the great novels that followed.

The preeminent Dostoevsky scholar of our times, Stanford’s Joseph Frank, said of the novella: “the internal split between self-image and truth, between what a person wishes to believe about himself and what he really is – constitutes Dostoevsky’s first grasp of a character type that became his hallmark as a writer.” The Double marks a turning point in the life of the author. A surprise for the evening was the eminent author and psychiatrist Herant Katchadourian, author of Guilt: The Bite of Conscience(he’s Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Human Biology at Stanford University), spoke for a few minutes to give a psychiatric evaluation of the novella’s protagonist, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin. Monika was a panelist from our event on Joseph Conrad’s Shadow-Line, and some of you met Lena at our mega-event for The Peregrine.ĭavid Schwartz was our photographer for the occasion, and captured Lena in elegant black-and-white, and the others in color. He and Lena were joined by Monika Greenleaf, associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures. The Stanford professor writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and hosts the popular talk show, Entitled Opinions. I interviewed her at that time for Music & Literature here.)Īcclaimed author Robert Pogue Harrison moderated the discussion.

(Her husband Werner Herzog was an interlocutor for the Another Look event on J.A. Russian photographer Lena Herzog joined us from Los Angeles.

The double book dostoevsky