4 - Funny and Frightening: Dostoevsky’s The Double in Richard Ayoade’s Interpretation

Summary

At first glance it seems surprising that the celebrity comedian and actor Richard Ayoade (b. 1977), perhaps best known from the Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd (2006–2013), should take on the project of adapting a Dostoevsky novella for a contemporary audience. A notoriously dark and complicated Russian classic in the hands of a British comedian? However, Ayoade’s film The Double (2013) had a generally positive reception, and a Guardian reviewer even praised Ayoade for turning ‘an unpromising Dostoevsky story into a quick-witted, elegant and genuinely unsettling film.’ Other reviewers have been more appreciative of the qualities of the source text, Dostoevsky’s The Double (Dvoinik, 1846/1866), as a ground-breaking identity drama, and of the way Ayoade and co-scriptwriter Avi Korine transposed the qualities of the literary work into a completely different setting. In the present chapter, I follow this line of thinking while analysing Ayoade’s adaptation in further depth than has yet been attempted. I do so after a presentation of Dostoevsky’s source text in quite some detail. I shall highlight those particulars of Ayoade’s interpretation that I regard as congenial, specifically: its chronotope; its dark, primarily linguistic humour; and its elaboration of the hero’s quest for manhood. In doing so, I shall consider the effect of apparent deviations from the Russian original and discuss Ayoade’s authorship in terms of a benevolent manipulation through which he creatively widens Dostoevsky’s images and vocabulary while remaining true to the already modern spirit of his novella. In my analysis, Ayoade’s ambition is not so much to translate a Russian literary classic into a modern British or Anglophone film version, as it is to bring out the novella’s transcultural, world literature qualities in a screening true to contemporary globalised culture.

DOSTOEVSKY’S DOUBLE

Dostoevsky’s The Double appeared in 1846 as the young writer’s second published work after the novel of letters Poor Folk. Compared to his later novels, it is a small work, a novella comprising only 120 pages in the academic edition of his collected works, where Crime and Punishment comprises 420 pages.