Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
The last novel Fyodor Dostoevsky published before The Brothers Karamazov, The Adolescent has been overshadowed by the great writer’s other works. Yet this pivotal novel contains some of Dostoevsky’s most groundbreaking experiments with literary form—and some of his most provocative explorations of desire, sexuality, and capitalism.
In 1870s St. Petersburg, a young man named Arkady Dolgoruky strives to understand his origins. The illegitimate son of a nobleman and a peasant woman, he is caught between an enigmatic biological father, who is intellectually compelling but morally suspect, and a legal father, a peasant who has become an ascetic wanderer. As Arkady seeks to make sense of his unconventional family, he tries out several paths in life: amassing wealth, aristocratic debauchery, and a quest for spiritual truth. Along the way, he becomes embroiled in conspiracy and plans to blackmail a beautiful widow.
The Adolescent is Dostoevsky’s most extended work of first-person narration, told entirely by Arkady. His voice is one of the writer’s supreme achievements: a callow young man who combines overconfidence and uncertainty, impulsiveness and hesitation. Susanne Fusso’s translation introduces readers to a late masterpiece of one of the world’s greatest novelists.
— Robin Feuer Miller, author of Dostoevsky's Unfinished Journey
This is an unflinching translation that preserves the humor, poignancy, and disorder of Dostoevsky’s least-known novel. Fusso renders The Adolescent into English with a unique combination of precision and sympathy. The resulting narrative is nothing short of riveting.
— Chloë Kitzinger, author of Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) is one of the most influential writers in all world literature. Arrested in 1849 for belonging to a secret society, he was sentenced to ten years of prison and exile in Siberia. After his return, he wrote several major novels, including Crime and Punishment and The Idiot.
Susanne Fusso is Marcus L. Taft Professor of Modern Languages and professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky (2006) and Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy: Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel (2017). She has translated Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose and Other Stories (Columbia, 2020), among other books.