Detective drama Dostoevsky-style

In the world of Gaito Gazdanov, a Russian émigré soldier turned taxi driver who began writing fiction in the 1920s, doublings abound, though their meanings are rarely resolved. As with his great contemporary Nabokov, this hall-of-mirrors effect provides a pleasant means of exploring the fragmentary and illusory self.

But it is Dostoevsky, and his novel The Double, that really loom larger here than Nabokov. Gazdanov shares Dostoevsky’s penetrating psychological insight, and is drawn to characters in the midst of a breakdown. While Gazdanov seems in thrall to these vastly different novelists, he has his own utterly distinctive voice.

First published in 1950, The Buddha’s Return is a deceptively slight novel, narrated by a student plagued by hallucinatory waking dreams (described as ‘excruciating deliriums’) which call into question his responsibility for his actions. It opens with our (unnamed) narrator remembering his imagined death as he scaled, and then tumbled from, a sheer cliff edge.