"I am not myself, but someone completely different who is astonishingly similar to me" - this is the realization that the shy clerk Goljadkin comes to when he encounters his doppelgänger one night. The doppelgänger follows him everywhere and tries to displace him from all areas of his life. A grotesque, opaque struggle ensues between the two, leading to madness. The novel "The Double" is an early highlight of Dostoevsky's literary explorations of the soul and the self.