The Adolescent

Dostoevsky's 1875 novel 'Подросток' ('Podrostok'), also translated as 'A Raw Youth'

Tradition: Russian realism / Orthodox-Christian existential novel

Dostoevsky's 1875 novel 'The Adolescent' — fatherhood, money, and the search for an 'idea'

First serialised in 'Otechestvennye zapiski' (Notes of the Fatherland) across 1875, Dostoevsky's 'Подросток' ('Podrostok' — The Adolescent, also translated as 'A Raw Youth' or 'A Bad Joke') is his fourth great novel, between Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Narrated by the nineteen-year-old illegitimate Arkady Dolgoruky in the year following his arrival in St Petersburg in 1872, the novel weaves three Dostoevskian preoccupations: the absent or weak father (Arkady's biological father Versilov, the elegantly dissipated minor noble; his legal father Makar Ivanovich Dolgoruky, the wandering pilgrim-saint); the Rothschild-style ambition to acquire wealth ('I have my idea — to become a Rothschild,' Arkady declares early; the book is structured around this idea's testing and partial dissolution); and the search for a unifying 'idea' that could make sense of a fragmented life. The novel's plot involves an elaborate intrigue around a compromising letter, the contested affections of Katerina Nikolaevna, the Versilov family's complicated history, and Arkady's first-person attempts to understand both his father and himself. The novel is the first major Russian novel to be wholly narrated by a young protagonist whose voice contains both the events he reports and his unreliable self-interpretation. The character Makar Dolgoruky — Arkady's legal father and a wandering pilgrim — is one of Dostoevsky's principal Russian-Orthodox spiritual-ideal figures, foreshadowing Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov.