Try to write about your life in the underground. If spite makes you unworthy of a single pound, Now we know why the narrator of Notes from Underground was so bored, he has to share the same book with the characters from The Double. It's so boring that it gives solitary confinement a run for its money. Even at the beginning of this Penguin edition it even notes that The Double was not successful when it was first published. The Double was written when Dostoyevsky was only 25 while Notes from Underground and his other major works were written when he was in his 40s and 50s.

Its inclusion in this collection baffles me. It is a juvenile piece of melodramatic garbage, a black smudge on Dostoyevsky's almost perfect oeuvre. I read Crime and Punishment in 24 hours but this novella took me longer to read than Dostoyevsky probably took to write it. Good god this story is 150-pages long and it took me two months to get through. I strangely found myself relating with the narrator which probably says a lot about my outlook on life. It also contains Dostoyevsky's infamously morbid black humour which has you smiling at the most desolate of images. I enjoyed the narrator's pithy voice while he went over the events which lead to his 'living underground'.

This was the more enjoyable work in this collection. Morrissey - 'A Song From Under The Floorboards' Magazine - 'A Song From Under The Floorboards' Life is good even in sorrow it is good to live in the world, however you live. “And when there is love, you can live even without happiness. “But try letting yourself be carried along blindly by your feelings, banish your reason if only for the moment hate, or love, anything rather than do nothing.” “But man is a fickle disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.” Reading, of course, helped me a great deal – it excited, delighted and tormented me.” I wanted to stifle all that was smoldering inside me with external impressions and reading was for me the only possible source of external impressions. “At home, to begin with, I did a lot of reading. “…to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.” (a personal favorite, because I completely agree) “I say, let the world perish, if I can always drink my tea.” So many thoughts, and so few words to express them! “…which is better, a cheap happiness or a lofty suffering? Tell me then, which is better?”

The double by fyodor dostoyevsky