A Dilemma: A Story of Mental Perplexity

Leonid Andreyev’s A Dilemma is a dark psychological study of crime, reason, and the fragile boundary between sanity and madness. First published in Russia in 1902, the story follows Dr. Anton Kerzhentseff, a physician whose extraordinary confidence in his own intellect leads him into a disturbing experiment with his own mind.
After committing a murder, Kerzhentseff is placed under psychiatric observation. From there, the story becomes less a conventional crime narrative than an unsettling exploration of self-analysis and the limits of rational thought. Kerzhentseff believes he can use reason to understand and control his own mind—but the deeper he looks, the harder it becomes to tell whether he is manipulating madness or falling into it.
Andreyev's real subject is the uncertainty itself: Can a person examine their own mind without becoming trapped inside it? The distinction between sanity and insanity gradually becomes as elusive as the distinction between thought and obsession.
Originally titled Mysl—literally “Thought”—the work was given the English title A Dilemma by translator John Cournos, who considered it a fitting name for a story built around layers of mental uncertainty.
For readers drawn to Dostoevsky’s psychological intensity, unreliable narrators, and stories in which the greatest danger lies not outside a character but within his own consciousness, A Dilemma offers a remarkably tense and unsettling experience.