SOURCE: “The Bronze Horseman and The Double: The Depoeticization of the Myth of Petersburg in the Young Dostoevskii,” in Slavic Review, Vol. 55, Summer, 1996, pp. 399–428.

In the following essay, Rosenshield discusses Dostoevsky's role in the development of the nineteenth-century myth of Petersburg, as well as its representation in The Double.

In his discussion of The Double, Joseph Frank remarks that Dostoevskii's decision to change the original subtitle from The Adventures of Mr. Goliadkin (Prikliucheniia Gospodina Goliadkina) to A Petersburg Poem (Petersburgskaia poema) had, among other things, the “advantage of correctly assigning The Double its place in the Russian literary tradition initiated by The Bronze Horseman.”¹ If The Double is truly in the Petersburg tradition of The Bronze Horseman, it is curious that no one has studied the relationship between these works, each of which features a minor civil servant (chinovnik) who goes mad. The few comparative analyses of the...