In the spring of 1874, Fyodor Dostoevsky had just resigned from a backbreaking sixteen-month stint as editor in chief of the conservative weekly journal The Citizen. He was planning a new novel to begin serial publication in January 1875. As usual, he couldn’t decide where to start. He played with ideas that looked backwards—to his earlier novels The Idiot and Demons—and forwards, to a plot about three brothers that would later become The Brothers Karamazov.

Eventually he settled on a blanker slate: a teenage protagonist, clueless but not innocent, who would be torn among the ideological currents of contemporary life—radical nihilism, utopian socialism, peasant faith, the morally bankrupt aristocracy. This hero, Arkady Dolgoruky, is born out of wedlock to a beguiling landowner father and a formerly enserfed mother; he is caught between worlds and consumed by resentment. The novel took on the title The Adolescent (Podrostok, first translated by Constance Garnett as A Raw Youth). It is among Dostoevsky’s wildest, sloppiest, least-loved works—and there has never been a better time to read it.

Almost from its first serial installments, The Adolescent was dismissed as a failure. This is a testament to both its genuine incoherence and its distinctly experimental aesthetics. Arkady is the narrator, trying to make sense of his first tumultuous year with his birth family by writing a full account of it. Because he foreswears “literary beauties” and because he remains confused about what exactly happened to him, the result is hard to follow. He knows this, and his narrative is riddled with disclaimers: “But I will try to describe it all in strict order, though I warn you beforehand that there was little order in my thoughts then. Events came pressing in like the wind, and thoughts whirled in my mind like dry leaves in autumn. Since I consisted entirely of other people’s thoughts, where could I get my own, when I needed them for an independent decision? And I had no guide at all.”¹

Arkady joins a long tradition—running from Augustine to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Jean-Jacques Rousseau—of real and fictional autobiographers who stage the transformation from past protagonist to present author. But in The Adolescent, Dostoevsky seems just as lost as his narrator. Its first two installments teem with blackmail plots, suicides, and a rapid stream of nonevents: a clandestine political meeting (which results in no action), a life-changing inheritance (which is relinquished), a challenge (which does not lead to a duel).

Arkady vacillates between renouncing and idolizing his aristocratic father, Versilov. He spends chapters laying out his idea of “becoming Rothschild” through fanatical persistence and asceticism, and then does nothing to pursue it. He falls in love with an older woman—and so becomes Versilov’s rival—but her appearances are so far apart that it is easy to forget she exists. Arkady as narrator is constantly bluffing; what he says will be important is usually not important, and he earnestly appeals to a master plot that never arrives. As a result, we start to read not for the plot but against it, searching the chaos, as Arkady himself searches, for some stable core. The novel’s biggest gamble is that this core remains ungraspable.

Meanwhile, the narrative travels through memorably brilliant islands of first-person storytelling as Arkady discovers his own self-division, suspended between his peasant legal parents and his westernized natural father. His dilemma radiates out toward each of the novel’s characters and becomes an explicit device. In one of The Adolescent’s climactic scenes, Versilov smashes an icon and it splits “exactly into two pieces.” He instructs the other characters not to read this as an allegory, and then (characteristically) reconsiders: “But, anyhow, why not take it as an allegory; it certainly must have been!” True: in his notebooks, Dostoevsky framed The Adolescent explicitly as an allegory, a novel that gathers together “all the elements” of contemporary society. The illegitimately born Arkady, unable to choose among his possible fathers, dramatizes the aporia of the post-Petrine Russian Empire.

But what is the point of an allegory that repels interpretation? Over 150 years after The Adolescent’s publication, this question captures much of what makes it—and Dostoevsky—still worth reading. In the face of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, and resurgent authoritarianism around the world, his zeal for the Russian church and state is hard to stomach. But unlike his rabidly nationalist journalism, or his equally fervid masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80), The Adolescent sets the struggle for personal and national selfhood into a landscape of radical experimentation and uncertainty. Despite portentously symbolic scenes that traverse the novel, its outcome is anything but predetermined.

Here is one flamboyant example. Arkady’s only childhood friend is a dissolute French boy, Lambert, who likes to beat prostitutes and shoot canaries at point-blank range. The canary “scattered into a hundred little feathers” is a sinister answer to the dove Arkady remembers flying through a church, during one of his rare early encounters with his peasant mother Sofya. Much later, these motifs bear fruit: Arkady falls asleep in the snow and dreams about how he scorned Sofya when she visited him at boarding school but cried into his pillow after she left. In the dream, Lambert starts to kick Arkady; by a fantastic Gothic coincidence, he wakes up to find this same Lambert kicking him awake in the novel’s present. Lambert presides over the nightmare of seedy violence and blackmail that dominates the novel’s conclusion, but it culminates (true to form) in a sequence of nonevents: the aversion of a threatened rape, murder, and suicide. Arkady thus ends the novel much where he began it—living with his birth family, still unsure of his father Versilov’s true character, looking ahead hopefully to an unknown future.

In a metafictional tour de force, Dostoevsky gives the last word to Arkady’s former tutor. Comparing the manuscript of Arkady’s memoir (that is, the very novel we are reading) with Tolstoy’s majestic “historical” fiction, the tutor asserts that he “would not wish to be a novelist whose hero comes from an accidental family! Thankless work and lacking in beautiful forms […]. What, though, is the writer to do who has no wish to write only in the historical genre and is possessed by a yearning for what is current? To guess … and be mistaken.” Arkady’s “notes” are not a novel, but they will provide material for a future novelist, “even despite all that is chaotic and accidental about them.” Ventriloquizing the criticism The Adolescent had received, Dostoevsky invokes a proto-modernist aesthetic, not unlike Baudelaire’s call to “distill the eternal from the transitory.”²), p. 12.] The Adolescent is formless because his project has always been to capture “what is current”: the hidden essence in life that will one day make it fit for art.

Dostoevsky’s expectations for the novel genre were just as utopian as his expectations for the Orthodox Church and Russian Empire. He hoped that each had the power—eventually—to resolve present chaos into “beautiful forms.” His messianic nationalism has long been notorious, but his messianic vision for the novel is easier to miss. By showing it plain, The Adolescent captures an adolescence of the genre itself, straddling the gap between realism and modernism: the clash of grand aspirations and turbulent execution, the nakedness of ambitions that cannot possibly coalesce. Loosened from the spell of Dostoevsky’s craft, the novel is gripping precisely in its failures. Where Dostoevsky struggled against the mess of contemporary reality, his readers are free to wonder at the irrepressible unruliness of narrative.