Marcell Benedek. The Double of Mr. Golyadkin

It is here presented the Russian translation of the introduction Dostoevsky’s short story The Double, firstly published in the fourth volume of the Hungarian translation of Dostoevsky’s Collected Works (1922) that was part of a large educational project by the publishing house Révai. The author of this short article about The Double, Marcell Benedek (1885–1969), writer, translator, and literary scholar, was an eminent representative of the Hungarian culture of the early and mid-20th Century. His works and media appearances were intended to familiarize readers with the works of Hungarian and European literature, to teach them to understand the language of fiction and the mechanisms of the aesthetic interpretation of reality. Benedek wrote one of the first articles about Dostoevsky’s early work in the European history of Dostoevsky studies and is at the origins of a tradition of deep reflection on the nature of the writer’s aesthetic principles.