Tag Archives: The Adolescent

The Adolescent (1875) The novel opens with Arkady trying to find out what kind of man his father, Versilov, is.  Most of the tension of Part One revolves around Versilov’s character.  Is he a good guy or a bad guy?  Arkady really wants to know because he looks up to his father as someone toContinue reading

The Notebooks for A Raw Youth (1874) Dostoevsky admires the skill of prominent authors of his day, writers like Leo Tolstoy, but he’s dissatisfied with their understanding of human capability.  In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, when Bolkonsky sees his rival’s leg being amputated, he discovers he is able to forgive him. Dostoevsky says, that’s greatContinue reading