A Raw Youth (sometimes translated as The Adolescent) is a most chaotic and for non-Russians one of the more confusing of Dostoevsky’s major novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky assumed his readers were familiar with the intellectual debates from the 1840s through the 1860s, when dramatic changes, the liberation of the serfs and liberal idealism gave way to anarchism and terrorism.
The first person narrator, Arkady, describes his coming of age, his self doubts, his emerging sensuality and his search for roots in family. It is as it were a nineteenth century forerunner of Catcher in the Rye. As such the novel is equally relevant today as it was 150 years ago.
As a translator of other Russian texts, I am acutely aware of what can be “lost in translation.” I have carefully proofread, corrected, and condensed the text, consulting the original Russian at critical points. I have tried to retain the charm of the Constance Garnett’s original translation. Although the text has been reduced by almost half, I believe listeners and readers, even those familiar with the novel, will be hard-pressed to find the actual cuts. In fact, this condensed version may help readers more easily follow the essential story and themes of the original. In condensing the novel what emerges is, I trust, the “essential Dostoevsky” with his characters, themes, and “accursed questions” intact.