The Double and the Gambler

Two award-winning translators present the definitive English versions of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s strikingly original short novels The Double and The Gambler “Pevear and Volokhonsky may be the premier Russian-to-English translators of the era.”—The New Yorker The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare—foreshadowing Kafka and Sartre—in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger, a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of this increasingly paranoid hero, Dostoevsky makes vividly concrete the inner disintegration of consciousness that would become a major theme of his work. The Gambler is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man’s exhilarating and destructive addiction to gambling, a compulsion that Dostoevsky—who once gambled away his young wife’s wedding ring—knew intimately from his own experience. In chronicling the disastrous love affairs and gambling adventures of Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk that he believed was an essential part of the Russian national character. Chillingly psychological with timeless portrayals of obsession and destruction, these stunning translations offer a glimpse into the mind of one of the nineteenth century’s most acclaimed writers.