The double case of Baron de Charlus and his nephew Saint-Loup, or the “Dostoyevskian side” of the inverts in À la recherche du temps perdu

Proust, a reader of Dostoyevsky and Stevenson, created the characters in À la recherche du temps perdu as double beings, such as Charlus and Saint-Loup, whose inverted character, like their membership in an ancestral lineage, produces a cleaved personality echoing the medical discourses of the time and creates the principle of a novelistic structure in two stages, appearances then revelations. Thus, the novelistic, hermeneutic, and philosophical dimensions of Recherche are linked.