Leopold Bloom Leopold Bloom Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's "Ulysses". His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem the "Odyssey". The character's name and some of his personality was inspired by James Joyce's friend Leopold Popper. Popper was a Jew of Bohemian descent who had hired Joyce as an English tutor for his daughter Amalia. Popper managed the company of Popper and Blum and it is believed that Leopold Bloom was invented by taking Popper's first name and Anglicizing
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