There is a great doppelganger tradition in literature, but there is nothing is quite like Fyodor Dostoevsky's _The Double_. There is a modern quality in this Russian nightmare -- where much of Dostoevsky shares qualities with Dickens and Tolstoy, The Double reminds us of the work of Kafka or Sartre -- Sartre's 'Nausea' particularly. The novel leaves us with a feeling as though we had partaken of too much vodka: it has a drunken quality to it, and it is a drunken quality it pleases us to share.