The Raw Youth

A Raw Youth (The Adolescent) is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1875 novel which tells the story of the life of a 19-year-old intellectual, Arkady Dolgoruky, who is the illegitimate child of the controversial and womanizing landowner Versilov. The novel focuses primarily on the conflict that arises between Arkady and Versilov, when Arkady rejoins his family in St. Petersburg. Arkady who has been away at boarding school hardly knows his family and when he comes to learn more about them he becomes embroiled in the scandalous affairs of his father. Rich with the depictions of the complex psychological, emotional, and moral conflicts that plague the human condition and are so common to the characters of Dostoyevsky’s work, A Raw Youth (The Adolescent) is a classic work by an author who many consider as the greatest to ever have lived.