He definitely used his own experiences with epilepsy and pre-epileptic visions when writing <i>The Idiot</i>, but that was much later. I think <i>The Double</i> had more purely literary antecedents. Doppelgängers were an established trope by then, which Dostoevsky got from the German romantics—people like E.T.A. Hoffmann, who specialized in stories with weird phenomena that <i>could</i> have a natural explanation (e.g. the mentally ill hero&#x27;s delusional imagination) but are uncanny and probably magical all the same.<p><i>The Double</i> was only Dostoevsky&#x27;s second novel but it was one of the best things he ever wrote. It&#x27;s fabulous! And short.