Quixotic Book Club of New York City

We arrive at Fyodor Dostoevsky’s lost novel.

Ok, what a silly statement, of course, “The Adolescent” isn’t lost. It fits snuggly in Dostoevsky’s golden period, 1864-1880, where everything he wrote was genius. It’s well known in Russia. But for a multitude of reasons, western critics thought this novel failed to reach the same heights as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Devils, or Brothers Karamazov. It’s largely left out of the Western literary canon. Some modern critics are reassessing the merit of this novel and consider it Dostoevsky’s most underestimated work. We’ll decide this for ourselves.

One of the issues is that Dostoevsky experimented with the idea of narration in the first person, with a 21-year-old narrator, Arkady Dolgoruky. Dostoevsky considered the idea of narrating both Crime and Punishment and The Idiot in the first person but abandoned the idea.

Paraphrasing Richard Peaver’s Introduction; Dostoevsky sought a response to Tolstoy, who defied Russian radicals by presenting the tragedy of disruption of the ordered life of his own class, the hereditary aristocracy. Dostoevsky saw this as fantasy and landowner’s literature. Dostoevsky sought a “new word” a voice beyond the landowner, which didn’t exist. He sought to create this voice in The Adolescent.

The Adolescent is Dostoevsky’s fourth of five major novels written after Notes From Underground in 1864. The Adolescent lacks some of the dark intensity of Dostoevsky’s other novels, marking it in a special place. The Adolescent is up to something else.

There is a translation done by Constance Garnett (though out of print). There is a modern translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and we’ll use this as our baseline:

https://a.co/d/66UXUDB

We arrive at Fyodor Dostoevsky’s lost novel.

Ok, what a silly statement, of course, “The Adolescent” isn’t lost. It fits snuggly in Dostoevsky’s golden period, 1864-1880, where everything he wrote was genius. It’s well known in Russia. But for a multitude of reasons, western critics thought this novel failed to reach the same heights as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Devils, or Brothers Karamazov. It’s largely left out of the Western literary canon. Some modern critics are reassessing the merit of this novel and consider it Dostoevsky’s most underestimated work. We’ll decide this for ourselves.

One of the issues is that Dostoevsky experimented with the idea of narration in the first person, with a 21-year-old narrator, Arkady Dolgoruky. Dostoevsky considered the idea of narrating both Crime and Punishment and The Idiot in the first person but abandoned the idea.

Paraphrasing Richard Peaver’s Introduction; Dostoevsky sought a response to Tolstoy, who defied Russian radicals by presenting the tragedy of disruption of the ordered life of his own class, the hereditary aristocracy. Dostoevsky saw this as fantasy and landowner’s literature. Dostoevsky sought a “new word” a voice beyond the landowner, which didn’t exist. He sought to create this voice in The Adolescent.

The Adolescent is Dostoevsky’s fourth of five major novels written after Notes From Underground in 1864. The Adolescent lacks some of the dark intensity of Dostoevsky’s other novels, marking it in a special place. The Adolescent is up to something else.

There is a translation done by Constance Garnett (though out of print). There is a modern translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and we’ll use this as our baseline:

https://a.co/d/66UXUDB

We arrive at Fyodor Dostoevsky’s lost novel.

Ok, what a silly statement, of course, “The Adolescent” isn’t lost. It fits snuggly in Dostoevsky’s golden period, 1864-1880, where everything he wrote was genius. It’s well known in Russia. But for a multitude of reasons, western critics thought this novel failed to reach the same heights as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Devils, or Brothers Karamazov. It’s largely left out of the Western literary canon. Some modern critics are reassessing the merit of this novel and consider it Dostoevsky’s most underestimated work. We’ll decide this for ourselves.

One of the issues is that Dostoevsky experimented with the idea of narration in the first person, with a 21-year-old narrator, Arkady Dolgoruky. Dostoevsky considered the idea of narrating both Crime and Punishment and The Idiot in the first person but abandoned the idea.

Paraphrasing Richard Peaver’s Introduction; Dostoevsky sought a response to Tolstoy, who defied Russian radicals by presenting the tragedy of disruption of the ordered life of his own class, the hereditary aristocracy. Dostoevsky saw this as fantasy and landowner’s literature. Dostoevsky sought a “new word” a voice beyond the landowner, which didn’t exist. He sought to create this voice in The Adolescent.

The Adolescent is Dostoevsky’s fourth of five major novels written after Notes From Underground in 1864. The Adolescent lacks some of the dark intensity of Dostoevsky’s other novels, marking it in a special place. The Adolescent is up to something else.

There is a translation done by Constance Garnett (though out of print). There is a modern translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and we’ll use this as our baseline:

https://a.co/d/66UXUDB