The Double and The Gambler (Vintage Classics)

New York: Vintage Books / Random House, Inc, 2007. Reprint. Trade Paperback. Very Good. 5x0x8. 1/4 inch closed tear and associated 1 inch crease on bottom edge of front wrapper, otherwise an excellent copy. 2007 Trade Paperback. xx, 336 pp. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, with an introduction by Richard Pevear. The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have given us the definitive version of Fyodor Dostoevsky's strikingly original short novels, The Double and The Gambler.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. 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.