Why am I making a game based on Dostoevsky's novella "The Double"?

Chapter 2 is still in the works, but I already can't wait to tell you why I got myself into this game in the first place. "The Double" isn't Dostoevsky's most famous work. People often call it his first flop, actually. And that's exactly why it fits a twist-game so well. Here's the stuff that hooked me personally.

It was only his second book, and it flopped right away.

After "Poor Folk", Dostoevsky woke up famous, and everyone was obviously waiting for a second miracle. But the critics tore "The Double" apart. His first real failure. Before his arrest and hard labor he'd managed to write a few more things, but one of them, "Netochka Nezvanova", he never finished. That same arrest got in the way.

the house where Dostoevsky wrote most of "The Double". Vladimirsky Prospekt 11 (the Pryanichnikov house, still standing).

Everything great was written after the hard labor.

"Crime and Punishment", "The Idiot", "Demons", "The Brothers Karamazov". All of that comes later, after his years of penal servitude for a political case. Siberia really did a number on his mind. And that's what makes "The Double" special: it shows us a completely different Dostoevsky. A younger one, not yet ground down by prison (though just as gloomy, let's be honest).

the house where Dostoevsky was arrested. The Schil house, Voznesensky Prospekt 8 (still standing, rebuilt).

And he was only 24.

That still blows my mind. A fresh graduate of the Engineering School, a guy who'd spent a while just sitting in the drafting office, and he goes and impresses Belinsky himself, the top critic in the empire. With what? With how precisely he understood what goes on inside his characters.

the house where Belinsky held his literary evenings. The Lopatin house, Nevsky Prospekt 68 (demolished and rebuilt from scratch back in 2011).

"The Double" was the only thing he wanted to fully rewrite.

He thought the idea was brilliant but the execution a failure, and for years he kept coming back to the idea of rewriting the whole thing from scratch (in the end he only partly reworked it, in 1866). By the way, in his "Diary of a Writer" from 1877, having already written "Crime and Punishment", "The Idiot" and "Demons", he drops this line: "I have never advanced anything in literature more serious than this idea." Meaning he ranks the idea of "The Double" above all his great novels. There you go.

the title page of the 1866 edition or a later portrait of Dostoevsky.

So where's the genius? He turned a carnival trick into a clinical diagnosis.

People had written about doubles before him. But for the Romantics it was a purely supernatural gimmick: a magical twin, an omen of death, a scare for cheap thrills. Dostoevsky did something fundamental. He took away the certainty.

And you never quite work it out

is the double real, or is Golyadkin slowly losing his mind? This is the first deep dive in Russian literature into a split personality and paranoia. He laid out a mental illness decades before psychoanalysis (Freud wouldn't even be born until 1856).

And check this

even Nabokov, who couldn't stand Dostoevsky, called "The Double" the best thing he ever wrote.

"and this guy won't be born for another 10 years".

Petersburg, where losing your mind was easy. The capital of the empire, where everything revolved around money and connections. An outsider had no place in that machine. Add the climate and the medicine of the day, and going out of your mind was a very real option. It's no accident the full title reads "The Double. A Petersburg Poem". The city here isn't a backdrop, it's a full-blown character.

the Bezborodko dacha, a typical mansion of the era (still standing with minor changes).

Its mark on film and pop culture.

The theme still gets pulled into movies today. In 2013 a direct adaptation came out, "The Double" by Richard Ayoade with Jesse Eisenberg (the director, by the way, openly admitted that Dostoevsky "did it first"). And Darren Aronofsky flat-out named "The Double" as an inspiration for "Black Swan". You catch that same split-self DNA in "Fight Club" too, and in a bunch of other films. In my own game I also try to work in direct quotes from the novel.

a still from "Fight Club".

View store page But what have cards got to do with it?

Well, in Petersburg cards weren't just for fun. They were a whole way of socializing. Whist, preferans, poker, baccarat and, of course, our own "Ochko", the local cousin of blackjack. And that very game of Ochko is one of the main twists of my whole adaptation.

the Imperial Playing Card Factory (still standing).

And what about the mysticism?

The novel itself keeps you in this constant state of "wait, what is even going on?". I wanted the game to catch at least a bit of that feeling. Besides, mysticism was everywhere back then. For all the dominance of Orthodoxy, people happily ran off to fortune-tellers and held séances. Just look at the whole Rasputin and the royal family story (even if that one happened noticeably later).

an engraving of a séance or a card reading.

Long story short, "The Double" is just about the perfect thing to build a twist-game on: understated, a slog to get through, leaving you with a pile of questions, and somehow managing to make you laugh and sink into gloom at the same time. That exact feeling is what I'm trying to capture.

Chapter 2 is almost here. If this grabbed you, throw it on your wishlist and stick around. Thanks for reading all the way through!