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and the writing of historical plays 'Mary Stuart' and 'Boris Godunov' (influenced by Sir Walter Scott), amongst other compositions. Then he resigned and, without stable income, spent four long years writing before his first novel, 'Poor Folk' (1845), was published. Fortunately this story was a big success amongst the critics of the day, finding particular favour with the liberal Vissarion Belinsky, perhaps the most influential critic of the time. It examines social issues through a love story - the perfect combination in progressive literary circles!

For a period Dostoyevsky was a celebrated figure, however the publishing of his next book, 'The Double' (1846), subdued the previously intemperate praise. The Double lacks the easy, polished style and emotional pull of 'Poor Folk'. Whereas 'Poor Folk' follows Dickens or Hugo, 'The Double' follows Poe or Gogol (the fracturing of personality is like that in 'The Overcoat'). The adverse reaction to 'The Double' affected Dostoyevsky and for the rest of his life he was nervous about the reception of the more fantastical elements of his novels, but felt them essential:
"What most people will call almost fantastic and an exception sometimes constitutes for me the very essence of reality. The ordinariness of events and the conventional view of them is not realism in my view but, indeed, the very opposite of it. In every newspaper you find accounts of the most real facts which are also the most strange and most complex. To our writers they appear fantastic and they do not even bother about them, yet they are reality because they are facts." (Letter to Stakhov, on 'The Idiot'.)

Belinsky's view was that the fantastic belonged, "in the madhouse, not in literature," however he did accept the work had more 'creativity', but disliked its prolixity. Generally 'The Double' is not regarded as one of Dostoyevsky's best works, but this was not Dostoyevsky's view. He felt he had: "never given anything more serious to literature." He came to think that it was not the idea but the form of exposition which was at fault, and harboured an ambition to rewrite it: "If I don't rewrite 'The Double' now, when will I rewrite it? Why should I lose an excellent idea, a type of the greatest social importance, which I was the first to discover, of which I was the herald?" (Letter to Mikhail Dostoyevsky.) I share Dostoyevsky's evaluation rather than the critical consensus. He was to reuse the double trope throughout his work, most notably in his final

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