While writing The Double, Dostoevsky introduced the word стушеваться (stushevatsya), meaning, in Dostoevsky’s words, “to disappear, to vanish, to efface oneself, to come, so to speak, to nothing… delicately, smoothly, imperceptibly sinking into insignificance.”

Coming from the verb tushevat, which means to shade or blur in a drawing, Dostoevsky added a psychological component by adding the prefix “с” (“s”), which, as a verbal prefix, often means something like off, down, away, together, or completely, depending on the verb. He also made it reflexive by adding “ся” (“sya”).

Here’s one example of its use in The Double:

“Mr. Golyadkin gave a start and grimaced at a certain indefinable, yet at the same time most unpleasant, sensation. Mechanically, he glanced around him; the thought had crossed his mind to somehow, casually, sidlingly, surreptitiously, slip away and avoid any trouble: to simply take himself off and stushevatsya (fade into the background), that is, to act as if he had absolutely no idea what was going on, as if the whole affair had nothing whatsoever to do with him.”

Writing about it years later, Dostoevsky explained “Later, in the 1860s, it became completely naturalized in literature. And now, I repeat, I even encounter it in official papers published in newspapers, and even in scholarly dissertations. And it is used precisely in the sense in which I first used it.”

He later used the word in Crime & Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov.