The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky

   Written in 1864, this novel is the first and strangest of Dostoevsky's masterpieces - and the source of those that followed. Violating literary conventions in ways never before attempted, this classic tells of a mid-19th-century Russian official's breakaway from society and descent "underground". The painfully awkward civil servant, Mr. Golyadkin, encounters a man who is his double in every way...