The penultimate novel of Dostoevsky, unjustly overlooked, is the enlightened confession of a lonely teenager. The narrator and protagonist Arkady Dolgoruky is a naive, ambitious, and stubborn young man. The illegitimate son of a fallen landowner and a serf, who was mistreated at school by his teacher and classmates, he retreats into a grandiose isolation and plunges into chaotic thoughts, where the ghost of wealth, obsession with aristocracy, and mystical delirium intertwine.
He is consumed by the desire to reveal the flaws of his father, who knows little about him, but also to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to meet his "coincidental family," which has overwhelmed his dreams. With a vague desire for communication and connection, armed with a mysterious letter that he believes gives him power over others, he confronts everyone and everything, yet without the results he dreamed of. And all this amidst the romantic intrigues of Petersburg society.
The novel is infused with references to revolutionary motifs, the barricades of Paris in 1848, the French Commune, the specter of the Rothschilds and excessive wealth, and the thinkers Rousseau, Fourier, Gertsen, Bakunin, and Proudhon, as well as the Russian writers with whom Dostoevsky converses – Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy – and Balzac. This masterful ethnographic novel, full of exaltation and passion, combines the tragic with the comic. It captures the exuberance and disappointments of adolescence, its bliss and wretchedness, its instability and explosiveness.
The Adolescent was written in 1875 and fits perfectly between The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov. It was published the same year as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. "With its abundant action, numerous characters, the intensity of passions it describes, and its stormy confrontations, The Adolescent is Dostoevsky's novel that captivates you more than any other." –Konstantin Mochulsky, author.
Written in 1875, just before The Brothers Karamazov, The Adolescent in a way foreshadows the character type of the rebellious Alyosha that we will see starring in the next novel, while at the same time it bears strongly within it the imposing characters found in previous Dostoevsky novels, the captivating imprints of the impetuous Stavrogin, which here we find in Versilov, and the hidden virtues of the well-bred pilgrim, an elderly version of Prince Myshkin, represented in the character of Dolgoruky’s adoptive father, Makar Ivanovich.
Mostly, however, the book explores the conditions of a Dantesque hell drawn straight from the undergrounds and suffocating rooms, where existential discussions, secret conversations, almost fatal confrontations, and even suicides occur. The main difference is that the tragic is counterbalanced for the first time by a strong youthful humor and a libertarian, almost Shakespearean atmosphere that is hardly found in any of Dostoevsky's works, as his narrative principles, for which he was so fiercely criticized, are much looser here. Yet this is the main virtue of The Adolescent and its greatness. –TINA MANDILARA, LiFO newspaper, 26.5.2022.
Reading The Adolescent, the reader experiences a sense of chaos and disturbance. One term immediately comes to mind, postmodern sensitivity, the representation of the world as chaos, emptied of values and meaning, the "chaosmos" of James Joyce. Only in the early 20th century does Nikolai Berdyaev state that The Adolescent is one of Dostoevsky's brightest novels. Hermann Hesse writes that he was captivated by the general atmosphere present in the book, an atmosphere where the concerns and problems of an entire generation were expressed, a world tormented by dark nightmares at the intersection of reality and dream.
By inversing the title of Turgenev to "Sons and Fathers," Dostoevsky confesses in The Diary of a Writer that The Adolescent was a first experiment of his own idea about fathers and sons. Of course, one can trace samples in The Possessed and in Crime and Punishment itself, but it seems that The Adolescent is the key novel on this theme, not as in Turgenev but inverted. In Fathers and Sons, the generational issue is shown through the eyes of an objective author, while in Dostoevsky it is somewhat different: One observes the issue from within. Throughout the novel, the son studies the father, trying to understand the father.
