In The Double, the narrative tone depicts a man whose life is on the verge of destruction due to the sudden appearance of a literal facsimile of his self. This double attempts to destroy the protagonist's good name and claim the position of both his public life in the Russian bureaucracy and within the social circle inhabited by "Golyadkin" Senior (the author's "original Golyadkin, our hero").

The Double centers on a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. It deals with the internal psychological struggle of its main character, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, who repeatedly encounters someone who is his exact double in appearance but confident, aggressive, and extroverted, characteristics that are the polar opposites to those of the toadying "pushover" protagonist.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821—9 February 1881) sometimes spelled Dostoevsky, was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Although Dostoyevsky began writing books in the mid-1850s, his best remembered work was done in his last years, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.

"One of the most outstanding and influential writers of modern literature." —The Reader's Encyclopedia

"The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture." —Virginia Woolf