The penultimate novel by Dostoevsky, unjustly overlooked, is the enlightened confession of a solitary teenager. The Adolescent was written in 1875 and fits perfectly between The Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. It was published the same year as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

The narrator and protagonist, Arkady Dolgoruky, is a naive young man, ambitious and stubborn. Illegitimate son of a fallen landowner and a serf, who mistreated him at school, he isolates himself in megalomaniacal seclusion and plunges into chaotic reflections, where the specter of wealth, obsession with aristocracy, and mystical delirium intertwine. He burns with the desire to reveal his father's mistakes, whom he barely knows, but also to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to meet his "symptomatic family," which has filled his dreams. With an indefinite desire for communication and contact, armed with a mysterious letter that he believes gives him power over others, he confronts everyone and everything, but without the results he dreamed of. And all this against the backdrop of the amorous intrigues of Petersburg society.

The novel contains references to revolutionary motifs, the barricades of Paris in 1848, the Paris Commune, the specter of the Rothschilds and excessive wealth, the thinkers Rousseau, Fourier, Herzen, Bakunin, and Proudhon, the Russian writers with whom Dostoevsky converses - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy - but also Balzac.

This masterful character novel, full of exuberance and passion, combines the tragic with the comic. It captures the abundance and disappointments of adolescence, its prosperity and misfortune, its instability and explosiveness.