The Adolescent by Dostoevsky
Finished reading The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The book has sometimes been translated as A Raw Youth or An Accidental Family. The narrator is a young man about 19 years old who has been raised in boarding schools and such, and is finally traveling to Petersburg to meet his real (not official) father, his mother, and other relations. He also happens to be carrying a document that, if revealed, can change the fate of several lives.
This is quite an obscure and overlooked novel by Dostoevsky, which is strange as it was written during his greatest period, and was actually the second-last one he ever wrote, followed only by The Brothers Karamazov. So I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was very pleasantly surprised! The novel is written in the first person and it's an amazing rendering of adolescent consciousness. It's split into three parts and to be honest the last part does seem to lose steam and focus, so that it descends from the excellent to the good. Still, very unjustly ignored! Sort of a combination of the manic narration of Notes from Underground, the social drama of Dickens, and (I reluctantly reference) the world and self-exploring fragile consciousness of The Catcher in the Rye.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
electric_pages) wrote,
