![]() ![]() Ambition in a stagnant society has no sane outlet, seems to be the message. ![]() In ‘The Nose’ the Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov’s nose plays truant, and goes about town in the uniform of a more exalted rank, taking carriages and praying in the cathedral, before returning to its owner as mysteriously as it first departed. He decides he is the King of Spain, and his asylum a court. In the latter a poor clerk and quill-sharpener, Poprishkin, falls in love with the daughter of his office chief, and goes mad when she is wholly unregarding. His immediate source, however, was Gogol’s heartlessly whimsical and funny stories ‘The Nose’ and ‘Diary of a Madman’. Dostoevsky had read Hoffmann, where the theme is treated as lurid melodrama and associated with ‘animal magnetism’. Hoffmann’s tales - for example, ‘The Devil’s Elixirs’ - to R. It haunts nineteenth-century literature, from E. Dostoevsky did not, of course, invent the theme of doubleness. If Poor Folk concerned the pains of want of status and money, The Double is about the pains of identity itself. ![]()
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