Constantly rebuffed from the social circles be aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Colyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially succesful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the original. As he is increasingly persecuted, Colyadkin finds his social, romantic and professional life unravelling, in a spiral that leads to a catastrophic denouement. The Double. Dostoevsky"s second published work of fiction, which foreshadows in its themes many of his mature novels, is the surreal and hallucinatory tale of an unfortunate antihero, at once chilling in its depiction of the dark sides of human nature and exuberantly comical.