Since I had an overall positive experience with The Gambler, I thought it was best to move on to more Dostoyevsky works before I lose steam. This book contains two novellas – Notes from Underground and The Double, and they were both interesting reading experiences.

Notes from Underground has a protagonist that gives me strong “I am better than everyone vibes”, but his issue is that he knows that he’s not, in fact, the best at everything. So he spends the first half of his book talking about his philosophy, and the second half talking about things that he experiences – such as spending two years psyching himself up to bump into an officer that insulted him and inviting himself to a party with people he doesn’t like and then refusing to make a toast and other things. Basically, he sounds like an exhausting person to know.

The Double has another unlikeable character and a narrator that likes to make fun of the unlikeable protagonist. After going to see his doctor, who tells him he needs to be more social, Mr Golyadkin embarrasses himself at a party, runs into the night, and meets his doppelgänger. Or maybe he just started hallucinating. Either way, the stress of having a double that’s more socially adept than him drives Mr Golyadkin off the edge.

I think one problem I have with reading Dostoyevsky is that his works are quite dark and hence I don’t really want to linger over them. Where Tolstoy’s writing is light(er) and easier to follow, Dostoyevsky’s words feel denser and harder to follow. I was confused through a lot of The Double, which makes some sense since Mr Golyadkin is confused through most of the book too.*

This edition comes with an introduction by Robert Louis Jackson, which should be read after you finish both novellas and helped me understand that both stories held a lot more meaning than I initially understood.

Among the three works (The Gambler, Notes from Underground, and The Double), I don’t really have a clear favourite. I’m kinda glad that I read them, and I might even read them again when I feel like challenging myself, but I don’t really see myself reading Dostoyevsky for fun in the future (unlike Tolstoy, who is clearly the only other Russian author I know).

*On second thought, that may be a me problem. After reading this, I went for a talk on how the internet changes our reading and the speaker pointed out that if you spend most of your time reading on screens (as I do), your brain gets distracted trying to figure out if it should click on a hyperlink and the ability to deep read is diminished. So maybe if I cut down my screen time a bit more, this would have been easier to read?