Adolescent [Hardcover]

Fyodor M Dostoevsky (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE @ TRADE (1980)
• ASIN: B000N762CA
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)

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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's all that, but no bag of chips, May 15, 2000

By 

"mikeu3" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Adolescent (Norton Paperback) (Paperback)

The Adolescent (also known as A Raw Youth) is the least well-known of the five long novels written by Dostoevsky from 1866 to 1880. Briefly, it deals with a 19-year old illegitimate youth, Arkady Dolgoruky, who comes to Petersburg to join his family, which he barely knows because he was shipped off to boarding school throughout his childhood. In the brief time during which the action takes place, he becomes embroiled in the intrigues surrounding his family and its close acquaintances, culminating in a blackmail scandal surrounding a letter which the young widow Katerina Akhmakov (with whom both Arkady and his father Andrei Versilov are in love) had written a couple years earlier which expresses her interest in having her wealthy, aging, and mildly senile father declared insane--she is expected to be disinherited if her father finds out about the letter.

The greatest strength of the novel, to my mind, lies in its intriguing characters. In particular, both Arkady and Versilov are rather deeply probed, and instead of hastily fitting into certain types as can often be seen in Dostoevsky's work, they both emerge as extremely complicated individuals pulled by multiple conflicting forces, and their confusion about themselves and the world around them is a superb reflection of the confusing atmosphere that prevailed in Russia in the 1870s (and in Arkady's case, also the confusion inevitable for a 19 year-old young man with no strong roots). In addition, the cast of female characters is probably as strong and diverse as I've seen any of Dostoevsky's works (with the possible exception of The Idiot), and the saintly old Makar (Arkady's mother's husband and hence his legal father) is an excellent precursor to Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov.

The plot, though, leaves a bit to be desired, and that's probably why The Adolescent is less noted than its sister novels. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that the fate of a letter is not quite as interesting a thing to center a novel around as murder (as in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov), radical political mayhem (as in The Possessed), or a meek hero's Christian love for humanity (as in The Idiot and, to an extent, Karamazov again). Also, Dostoevsky inserts a few too many somewhat implausible plot twists (in particular, characters randomly run into each other in the street so often that you'd think Petersburg was no bigger than a small village), and the whole plot, especially the ending, is really quite melodramatic.

The weak plot doesn't prevent The Adolescent from being a very engrossing novel (and as an aside I might mention that translator Andrew MacAndrew's introduction is the best introductory essay I've read to any of Dostoevsky's works). If you're a Dostoevsky fan, consider it required reading; if you're not, you'll probably still enjoy it, but I'd say that The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot share most of its strengths and have more to offer overall, so you should read those first.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps Dostoevsky's greateset work, August 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Adolescent (Norton Paperback) (Paperback)

Written before The Brothers Karamazov in the later part of his life, this novel again demonstrates the Russian masters ability to meld heavy characterizations with the Dark vs. Light moral and spiritual conflict. Again somewhat autobiographical(as many readers are already aware of this pattern), the story concerns a 19 year old bastard son of a cultured nobleman and a simple peasant wife. Determined to break his awkward social position, since he is the son of an ambiguously respected man yet cannot carry his namesake, Arkady begins an intellectual and moral quest to discover more about himself, his dichotomic parents and the people most closely with which they are entangled. Yet beginning to burn beneath the surface are other queries as well: his attraction to an older woman whom he knows is maybe linked romantically to his father, his mysterious "other father"(his mothers' serf husband until her affair with Arkady's father ended that, yet he carries this man's name), and a dangerously rebellious group of young men that succeed in rousing his moral and intellectual curiosity. Beautifully complex in its many layers, I believe this particular novel of Dostoevsky most vividly displays the authors genius. He is an artist who can only be compared to the best the world has ever known. Russia's most prolific artist ever, PERIOD. Also, not to go unmentioned, Macandrews' translation is by far the best I've ever found for any of Dostoevskys work, PERIOD. If you have never gotten around to reading any of the many great 19th century Russian novels, I recommend this novel with the highest possible honors.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a pleasant surprise, February 1, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Adolescent (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) (Hardcover)

I picked up this book not knowing much about it and not having read any of the reviews here on Amazon. Being a big Dostoyevsky fan and having read most of his other books multiple times, my first thought after reading about 20 pages into The Adolescent was, "why didn't I read this sooner!" What I like most about Dostoyevsky is his ability to develop such vivid characters, mostly through dialogue. In this book, the eponymous main character is also the narrator (the book is meant to be his memoirs) so the reader gets an even deeper insight into character. We get to read how the young man wants and intends to behave, and then we get to see him repeatedly fail to come across as the dignified adult he wants to be as he behaves more like the adolescent he is. It's often pretty funny--I found this book far more humorous than Dostoyevsky's others.

That being said, I agree with the other reviewers that some of Dostoyevsky's other books are probably a better place to start for people who have read none of his books. I think of Crime and Punishment as being the best introduction. Any of his more well-known books gives a more fully-explained intro to his thinking and style and will probably make The Adolescent a more enjoyable read.