The Adolescent (Vintage Classics) by Fyodor Dostoevsky (EPUB)

Description

The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent(first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a na•ve 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father’s wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and armed with a mysterious document that he believes gives him power over others. This new English version by the most acclaimed of Dostoevsky’s translators is a masterpiece of pathos and high comedy.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Finally…When I first picked up Notes From Underground years ago, I never expected to allow myself to become immersed in 3500+ pages of mid-19th century commentary on Russian life, politics, and religion. I’m not sure what made me come back to Dostoevsky so far removed from the time I’d spent with Raskolnikov and the three Fyodoroviches, but I’m glad I’ve done so, and I’m glad I finally made it through.I would not have necessarily picked The Adolescent to be the swan song for my journey through the major works, but I certainly don’t feel the derision toward it that others seem to, and I found it as easy to identify with Arkady Dolgoruky nearly as much as I did with Prince Myshkin or the Underground Man. I should not have started reading this over the holidays as it certainly got convoluted at times, and it probably would have served me much better to have been able to read it in a more compacted timeframe. (As with, I suppose, all of his novels… maybe all novels in general) Despite my poor timing I still think I was able to submerse myself into the escapades of our poor confused Arkady and come away with some worthwhile amalgamation of what Dostoevsky intended to say and what I intended to hear.By this time I should know better than to believe I can figure out where a Dostoevsky story is headed anywhere prior to the halfway point, but this “Idea” of Arkady’s excited me, and I was hopeful it would take center stage and remain a primary theme throughout the novel. Not necessarily because I thought it was a good idea, but rather because it was something I had discussed and contemplated multiple times in regards to how it related to my own life. I looked forward to Dostoevsky’s eventual conclusions on the validity of the “idea” since I myself remain confused, but this book has provided more questions than answers. The first 100 pages or so were so fraught with notions and ideas upon which I had previously ruminated that I nearly underlined the entirety of Part One and was sure that, this time, the story really was about me… and maybe it was. Or, rather, will be… I am, after all, perhaps only halfway through my own story. Despite, or because of, the parallels that existed, the only answer I found was that the answer must lie somewhere outside the pages of a novel…What I did find was a young man whose soul had been spurned. A young man searching for validity and searching for a way to reconcile his perceived rejection by the world around him with the fact that he must still exist in that world. From his disdain for women (“I know nothing about women, and I don’t want to” and “I don’t like women, because they’re rude, because they’re awkward, because they’re not independent, and because they wear indecent clothes.”) to his cynicism regarding love (“I stooped so low because I’m… in love and stupid” and “I don’t love anyone, and it’s better that way…”) and his repeated laudations of the benefits of solitude (“I prefer even now to shut myself up still more in a corner” “People are a burden to me” and “The gain was independence, peace of mind, clarity of goal.”) Arkady was bitter, hot-headed, self-absorbed, self-righteous, and blind to the realities and troubles of anyone but himself. How often have I been that person? How often does my own adolescence rear its head even now as I approach the third season of my own life? Perhaps we never truly leave our “raw youth” behind but can only hope to continually reject our solitude as we grow to understand ourselves better through an understanding of our relationships with others. I often felt as though “An Accidental Family” would have been the better title for the novel, as this is the final lesson with which Arkady comes to terms. We are all members of an accidental family, and in the end we are all called to spurn ourselves and join that family for all its worries, failures, and inevitable inability to live up to every expectation we may have had. While Arkady had initially set out to, quite literally, understand his family by confronting his father and the illegitimacy of his birth, he did so believing that his goal was the denial of the importance of his heritage and his place in society. As with, I suppose, all journeys worth taking, he never could have known the truth to be found in his final destination – miles walked and lives touched culminating in an unpredictable understanding of the importance of love and acceptance.Arkady started on this pathway believing that solitude had been forced upon him. His father’s abandonment of his mother, his parents’ abandonment of him to Touchard’s, his lack of acceptance there, and, of course, his inability to secure the love of Katya Nikolaevna all combined to create in Arkady a belief that the only noble (perhaps only possible) way he could exist was in solitude. He had, in his very early childhood, known love yet found it quickly taken from him. His response, to me, sounds logical, inevitable, and yet wholly depressing as I’ve found myself falling down this rabbit hole of circular thought much too often. His rejection of love and acceptance is summed up quite nicely, if not overly dramatically, after he is accused of being a thief and feels compelled to give up on himself and all of those around him. “There is no way,” he posits, “I can vindicate myself, to start a new life is also impossible, and so… blow it all sky high, destroy everything, everybody… and only then will I kill myself.” While this exclamation appears later in the story, this must have been instilled in him early on for him to have come to the conclusion that he needed only power and money without the need to utilize these things but only to know that he had gained them. (on his own!) This was a reflexive defense mechanism – another way in which he could separate himself from the world and those inhabiting it. A way, ultimately, to avoid the possibility of future rejection.Although, as a child, he was loved and as an adolescent he found some acceptance with Zershchikov, losing these things in addition to the things he was never able to have (the love of Katya, the true friendship of Lambert or the other classmates at boarding school, a father who was present…) was simply too difficult. Or at least the perception of having lost them… How heartbreaking it was to see his poor mother prostrate herself in front of him to show him love only to have him deny her out of some misplaced sense of pride… some youthful need to feel a sense of camaraderie with his peers. While this was Arkady’s failure, it remains true that he still *felt* alone. Through this constant rejection how difficult is it, once a light is found to, “now crawl back into the former darkness [of his idea]?” It is far too easy to fall from a place of darkness into light (especially an unexpected one) no matter how much you have previously convinced yourself that you belong in the dark. Even the dim light he believed existed in the possibility of friendship with Zershchikov proved enough to make him, to an extent, lose focus on his idea. The love of his sisters (particularly Liza) pulled him further away from his idea; his love for his mother further still. It was, naturally, his desire for Katya’s love that kept him from being able to retreat entirely into his solitude. When these other ideas… this other people… failed him, however, he found himself wanting to “destroy everything.” It is even easier to fall back and fall further into the safety of your darkness if ever your hope for escape flickers and disappears. This, to me, was Arkady’s primary fear and the primary battle he fought within himself. To ride the waves, to experience the ebbs and flows of life, to commune with others and experience the good, the bad, the love, and the hate, or to simply fight the current, skip the peaks and the troughs and remain afloat on the surface alone.There is, of course, a balance to be struck. All the waves of the oceans cannot roll to the shore together, and no two bolts of lightning follow the same path between earth and sky. There are, however, gatherings of clouds and swirling eddies in the sea all comprised of immeasurable little pieces combining to create something much greater than the sum of their individual parts. I once told someone something to the effect that, “Being next to you is the only time I am living life and the only goal of time spent apart is in an effort to be back by your side.” How unfair can one person be to another? How oblivious to the reality of being alive. How selfish, and so it struck me when Arkady attempts to place the same burden on the shoulders of Katya Nikolaevna. He looks for the lightning strike and yearns to multiply their amplitudes, yet he does not even understand the most basic requirements for living a life outside of himself. During a retelling of an embarrassing episode of his former life Arkady expresses a similar notion to my own faux pas. He explains that his embarrassment is a direct result of his ‘idea’ since, “if you have in mind something fixed, perpetual, strong, something terribly preoccupying, it is as if you thereby withdraw from the whole world into a desert, and everything that happens takes place in passing apart from the main thing.” This, confusingly, appears to be immediately contradicted in that, “no ‘idea’ can be so intensely fascinating that I cannot stop suddenly before some overwhelming fact and sacrifice to it at once all that I had done…” It was difficult to rectify the juxtaposition of these ideas in my head. I want to know that it exists (or the possibility exists) something so “terribly preoccupying” that I want to “withdraw from the [rest of] the whole world.” Something that, in fact, can never be forsaken for some new “overwhelming fact.” To withdraw from something one must, however, first exist within that thing. While he does conclude that, “both conclusions were nonetheless correct,” I think, first that he needs a fuller understanding of his place in the world and, second, that this can only be if there is a linear relationship between the two ideas. That perpetual and strong idea apart from which “everything takes place in passing” cannot exist unless it began as an “overwhelming fact” to which you were willing and desiring to sacrifice everything. I want to be overwhelmed; I want to sacrifice everything, but there first must be something worth sacrificing, and we must understand that that overwhelming idea will not – cannot – originate within ourselves. We don’t get to pick it, much less create it, it picks us, and our only hope is that we are willing to see it for what it is before it passes by.I feel, whereas my mistake was in denying the existence of the possibility of being overwhelmed, another of Arkady’s mistakes was in attempting to overwhelm himself by creating his idea to which he could sacrifice “all that he had done.” Our role is not to create the thing nor to deny its possibility but rather simply remain open to and believe in its potential existence. It is not Arkady but his new acquaintance Vasin who eventually uncovers the root of the issue. The genesis for his attempted replacement and my attempted denial lies in the notion that, “it’s not enough to refute a beautiful idea, one must replace it with something equally beautiful; otherwise, in my heart, unwilling to part with my feeling for anything, I will refute the refutation, even by force, whatever they may say.” Neither I nor Arkady ever fully knew a “beautiful idea.” We only knew that it was missing, and we knew… or believed we knew from experience… that the only place to find this beauty was in solitude – one of the only things that could be created without relying on inherently unreliable other people. His grand ‘idea’ is testament to this, and the episode at the casino referenced above is just the logically depressing extension of a search for an ephemeral beauty that would prove to consistently slip through his fingers whenever he relied on another person to help provide it… at least until his understanding of other people grew to the point where he could cease manipulating, allow others to live their lives, and live his own next to them. Unknowingly, I think that Arkady was attempting to replace the beautiful idea of Love with the (perceived) beauty of solitude. Once he had gone down that road, the solitude became his beautiful idea, and it could not simply be turned off. It had to be replaced, and this journey to replace his own idea with something real and outside himself became the primary theme of the novel.While Arkady claims to understand Vasin’s statement early in the novel it is Versilov who finally seems to bring about a full understanding of its meaning in relation to Arkady’s own “idea.” Father and son, no matter how much the son may want to reject the idea, are much more similar than they appear to be. As Arkady continues to confront Versilov regarding the abandonment of his mother, Versilov opens his past and explains that he, “suddenly realized that my serving the idea did not free me, as a moral and reasonable being, from the duty of making at least one person happy in practice during the course of my life.” He is not, however, able to make just anyone happy. He attempts to build the case that the only real love he had was for Arkady’s mother noting that he is unable to make “some passing German man or woman” happy as he was waiting to be back by Sofya’s side. Why then did he make her wait for him? How was it possible that Katya’s appearance in Germany suddenly overcame his true love? Versilov attempts to reconcile and justify his abandonment of Sofya for Katya Nikolaevna by displaying his fearful weakness as some eternal truth to which he had no choice but to succumb. He “had no wish for this slavery of passion,” and he “did not want to love,” but it was “fatum” that brought him together with Katya, and he could not resist. This is, of course, a wholly ridiculous notion. Fate does not come between True Love. Fate is True Love and True Love is Fate. This was the fear of rejection and the fear of failure manifesting itself in the father the same as it would later manifest itself in the son. A pathetic excuse, an attempt to deny what should have been, a resounding refutation of Love in favor of self and safety. A nearly unforgivable mistake that would ultimately be forgiven for both father and son as they finally found themselves in the eyes of those they loved despite their best efforts to avoid Fate.Through his blunders and his machinations, Arkady is finally able to give up his selfish manipulation of others only through the help and love of his sisters. His revenge for the scorn with which he believes Katya has gifted him is wholly unsuccessful, his anger toward his sisters is unfounded, and his desire to retreat within himself and his “idea” is rendered base and useless – especially in his attempt to secure the love of Katya Nikolaevna. We are given a portent of Arkady’s failure very early in the novel as Arkady himself notes that, “what is simplest is always understood only in the end, once everything cleverer or stupider has been tried.” We the reader are inundated with Arkady’s assurances that in the “solitary and calm awareness of strength” one can find “the fullest definition of freedom.” Even I, through my own cynicism, was immediately struck by the gaping hole in this erroneous tautology – freedom in solitude necessarily precludes one’s freedom to love and one’s freedom to be loved. Every decision we make is a decision to also not choose the opposing idea. Every freedom we choose from a thing also denies us the freedom to have that thing. While I still hesitate to fully denounce the merits of living life alone, I cannot, any longer, bring myself to believe that freedom can be found there – not fully; not completely, and I certainly can no longer abide the idea that one can (or should) consciously choose such a life… or choose, definitively, *any* specific future life for ourselves. Desire is good and necessary… naturally our past and our hearts inform what we wish the future to be, but to be so brazen as to believe you know what your future holds, will hold, or should hold is the height of hubris.That said, I was, due to my own bitterness, somewhat angry with the hopeful notion with which we were left regarding the love Arkady had for Katya. I desperately want to believe in the possibility of the improbable… even of the impossible, but I still find the existence of this possibility in practice to be… rare, at best. Despite espousing the virtues of finding comfort in whatever way one’s life turns out, I know that I am still expecting the bolt of lightning to strike, and anything less than that will not be good enough. I still am attempting to rectify the fact I thought I saw that lightning strike with the fact that, if there is True Love, it is also Fate. If Fate is True Love and True Love is fated, then I have yet to know True Love, and that is a difficult concept with which to come to terms. At least while attempting to predict the future based on the past. I am still trying to expect the unexpected and accept that an unexpected future will always have unexpected revelations for the past. It is never fair to yourself to make a definite choice about the way your future will be based on what your past has helped you become. It must be enough to know that the unexpected is possible; it is necessary and good to be scared of hope – hope that something will happen and fear that it won’t. Or vice versa. But Love must exist, it must be earned, it must be accepted, and you can never predict when or where it will show up; perhaps all any of us can hope for is an accidental family, and we must just remain open to seeing ourselves as part of it. So here’s to letting go, expecting the unexpected, and hoping I don’t know what happens next…

⭐Written from the point of view 20-year-old Arkady is a whining, complaining, emotional know it all setting out to change his personal world for the better.Having been abandoned by his biological father and mother and his legal father Arkady is left to the school system in the cold indifference of society. It is through this he learns to try and take things on for himself. When he re-engages with his biological family he finds things much more complicated than he believed them to be and has to deal with all sorts of bizarre family drama. Anything from his father being married to another woman than his mother loving his mother and loving other women to his sisters loving various men himself falling in love with a woman when he said that he never would.Dostiosky writes it fairly brilliantly it is however a fairly complicated narrative and can be difficult to follow at times. I do however believe that it is a life lesson for how we treat our youth from 160 years ago up until today in relation to family and identity mutual respect and other social issues. That pretty much always constitute a Doskevsky novel.

⭐The Adolescent must, in my opinion, be acknowledged one of Dostoevsky’s masterpieces. The Adolescent, Dostoevsky’s second-to-last novel, stands on par with The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Crime & Punishment, Devils, and Notes from Underground.It difficult for me to understand why some critics have dismissed The Adolescent as a substandard work, or, as is the case in some instances, why others have omitted entirely a discussion of the novel in their critical works.The plot centers around the narrator Arkady, who, having graduated from High-School, arrives in Petersburg to become acquainted for the first time with Petersburg society, as well as with his biological family, with whom he had had very little contact with since the days if his early childhood. Arkady is an illegitimate son: his father a nobleman; his mother a former household serf.Adding to the drama is the fact that when Arkady arrives in Petersburg he has with him a sought-after document that could be used to extort and control several important people. One such person is the beautiful and enchanting Katerina Nikolaevna, with whom Arkady and his father, Verislov are both madly in love.Similar to all of Dostoevsky’s great novels, the greatness of The Adolescent is not in the actually plot, but rather, is a result of the deeply insightful, brutally honest and endlessly fascinating portrayal of man and society.The most noticeable difference in The Adolescent is the narrative form. The novel is written in the first-person, expressing the point of view of the Adolescent himself.Another difference in The Adolescent is that it does not contain the absolute forms of personality-types that are prominent in the other major novels. This is true more for Arkady than for Verislov. Instead one finds layered hybrids and a more ordinaryAs a result of these differences — which, by the way, I consider to be a great strength of this novel — one will find that the character of the adolescent (that is, of Arkady Makarovich Dolgoruky) offers the most in-depth, most layered, and above all the most realistic psychological portrait of Dostoevsky’s entire literary output. In Arkady one finds traces of a number of Dostoevskian character-types, i.e.: the Underground Man, Prince Myshkin, and Aloysha Karamazov. Yet, unlike those characters, Arkady is a much more ordinary, familiar and altogether realistic character in terms of both his personality and the circumstances in which he is to observed.If you are new to Dostoevsky, I recommend starting with Crime and Punishment and then moving on to The Brothers Karamazov. If you enjoyed those books and find yourself left wanting more, then The Adolescent, in my opinion, would be a good place to turn and is sure to be an enjoyable and memorable reading experience.

⭐One of the last works of Dostoyevsky, it strangely mirrors the epistolary style of his first work “Poor Folk” but rather it encompasses the journal entries of a brash nineteen year old. It’s beautifully written thanks in part to the translators. Overlooked by many but will leave a lasting imprint on you.The quality of the novel was excellent, as expected from an Everyman’s Library hardcover. The quality of the story, the characters, themes, and philosophy along with the quality of the textbook itself will guarantee a lifelong admiration for the book.

⭐”The Adolescent” is often considered a somewhat lesser accomplishment than others of Dostoevsky’s late novels, a la Auden’s late poems or Picasso’s late paintings. Not quite so! Merely, he was writing in a different vein–from the perspective of the “raw youth.” Hence its unique appeal–and the tendency to misread it. I found this novel a vital constituent in the late bouquet of works and highly recommend it to anyone who wishes to appreciate one more of the many facets of this grand master of prose.

⭐I am in the process of going through all of dostoevsky’e works. By the time i got through the first part i could scarce understand what was going on. There was a huge range of characters going back and forth and one could never quite grasp who they were and what they stood for. In fact this work relies heavily on dialouge but there are times when u cant even understand who is interacting with whom.I would only recommend this book for someone with a serious academic interest who has plenty of time to go through it slowly and carefully.

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