Italo Svevo Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce's seminal novel "Ulysses". "Confessions of Zeno" never looks outside the narrow confines of Trieste, much like Joyce's work, which rarely left Dublin in the last years of Ireland's time as part of the United Kingdom. Svevo brings a keenly sardonic wit to his observations of Trieste and, in particular, to his hero, an indifferent man who cheats on his wife, lies to his psychoanalyst and is trying to explain himself to his psychoanalyst by revisiting his memories. There is a final connection between Svevo and the character Cosini. Cosini sought psychoanalysis, he said, in
The Double (Dostoevsky novel) The Double (Dostoevsky novel) The Double (, "Dvoynik") is a novella written by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was first published on January 30, 1846 in the "Fatherland Notes". It was subsequently revised and republished by Dostoevsky in 1866. "The Double" centers on a government clerk who goes mad. It deals with the internal psychological struggle of its main character, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, who repeatedly encounters someone who is his exact double in appearance but confident, aggressive, and extroverted, characteristics that are the polar opposites to those of the toadying "pushover" protagonist. The motif of the novella is a doppelgänger ("dvoynik"). Golyadkin