#ThrowbackThursday. The Adolescent

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "The Adolescent" (or: The Raw Youth - Russian: Подросток = Podrostok) - 1875

I love classics. Especially Russian authors. This novel describes the simple life in Russia about 150 years ago and you can imagine how the revolution started and why some things in history happened the way it did.

Read more on my original post here.

I also read more books by this great author since, see here.

Gogol, Nikolai "The Overcoat. Stories from Russia"

Gogol, Nikolai (Никола́й Васи́льевич Го́голь, Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol) "The Overcoat. Stories from Russia" (Russian: Шинел/Shinyeliь) (German collection: Gogols Mantel. Erzählungen aus Russland - 1842 et al.

This is a collection of Russian short stories, starting with "The Overcoat" by Nikolai Gogol. As with many of these anthologies, there isn't one with exactly the same stories. But, you can find all these in different other editions which I have tried to find for you.

I always love reading Russian novels. Even these short stories were fantastic. Funnily enough, my favourite was literally the most "fantastic" of them all, "Pkhenz" by Andrei Sinyavsky who wrote under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. Not that it helped him much, the KGB found out who was behind that name and sent him to a labour camp.

When I found the book, I thought it was a book with more than one story by Gogol. It wasn't, there's just "The Overcoat". But the others are all fantastic stories, as well. There was even a Nobel Prize winner among them, Ivan Bunin, who was the first Russian to received that prestigious award.

"The Overcoat" was discussed in our international online book club in October 2018. 

Gogol, Nikolai (Никола́й Васи́льевич Го́голь, Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol) "The Overcoat" (RUS: Шинель/Shinel) - 1842
If you're not sure whether you like Russian literature, this is a perfect example. A simple story of a man who buys an overcoat yet there is so much in it about Russia and its soul. Unbelievable. A story I will probably read again and again.
Famous quote by Dostoevsky "We all come out of Gogol's 'Overcoat". Well said.
Blurb: "A sincere young clerk makes great sacrifices to attain an overcoat of untold value and power."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "A Gentle Creature" (aka The Gentle Spirit) (RUS: Кроткая/Krotkaja) - 1876
Dostoevsky is one of my favourite Russian authors and this short story is just as great as some of his big novels. In this tale he explains the beginning and end of a relationship and how it all happened. Incredible how much you can put on so few pages.
Blurb: "In this compelling study of despair, based on a real-life incident, a pawnbroker mourns the loss of his wife, a quiet, gentle young girl. Why has she killed herself? Could he have prevented it? These are the questions the pawnbroker asks himself as he pieces together past events and minor incidents, changes of mood and passing glances, in his search for an answer that will relieve his torment.
In this short story, Dostoyevsky masterfully depicts desperation, greed, manipulation and suicide."

Tolstoy, Lew Nikolajewitsch (Толстой, Лев Николаевич) "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (RUS: Смерть Ивана Ильича/Smert' Ivána Ilyichá) - 1886
I've read this before since it was in Tolstoy's "Collected Works". Again, a very Russian work. An observation about death and its impact not only on the person dying but also on those near to him. There are people who try to enjoy life as much as they can, live it to their fullest, others who give up and have nothing.
If you want to experience Russian literature at its best but don't like long stories, try this one. It's a great one by this brilliant author.
Blurb: "Tolstoy’s most famous novella is an intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities of redemption
Ivan Ilyich is a middle-aged man who has spent his life focused on his career as a bureaucrat and emotionally detached from his wife and children. After an accident he finds himself on the brink of an untimely death, which he sees as a terrible injustice. Face to face with his mortality, Ivan begins to question everything he has believed about the meaning of life. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a masterpiece of psychological realism and philosophical profundity that has inspired generations of readers."

Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (Антон Павлович Чехов) "The Lady with the Dog" (RUS: Дма с собачкой/Dama s sobachkoy) - 1899
Oh, the problems of the upper class (today we would say first world problems, I guess) who know nothing about the problems of the little man who has to work tremendously in order for his family not to starve. Often we read about the latter but this is a tale about the former. Great writing.
Again, I have read this story before in another collection "Summer Holidays".
Blurb: "This short story describes an adulterous affair between an unhappily married Moscow banker and a young married woman which begins while both are vacationing alone in Yalta. It is one of Chekhov's most famous pieces of short fiction, and Vladimir Nabokov considered it to be one of the greatest short stories ever written."

Babel, Isaac Emmanuilovich (Исаак Эммануилович Бабель) "Red Cavalry" (RUS: Конармия/Konarmiya) - 1926
"Nine prisoners of war are no longer alive."
A witness oft he civil war when Cossack cavalry invaded Poland after WWI, Isaac Babel describes the attack on a train and the subsequent killing of nine prisoners. This is only on of the stories from this collection which must all be great.
Blurb: "Based on Babel's own diaries that he wrote during the Russo-Polish war of 1920, Red Cavalry is a lyrical, unflinching and often startlingly ironic depiction of the violence and horrors of war. A classic of modern fiction, the short stories are as powerful today as they were when they burst onto the Russian literary landscape nearly a century ago. The narrator, a Russian-Jewish intellectual, struggles with the tensions of his dual identity: fact blends with fiction; the coarse language of soldiers combines with an elevated literary style; cultures, religions and different social classes collide. Shocking, moving and innovative, Red Cavalry is one of the masterpieces of Russian literature."

Kharms, Daniil (Дании́л Ива́нович Хармс) "Interruption" (RUS: помеха/Pomeha)
collection: Russian Absurd and Даниил Хармс. В двух томах. Том 1/Daniil Kharms. V dvukh tomakh. Tom 1
article: Three New Decrees (Авиация превращений/Aviacija prevrashhenij) (original: Собрание сочинений в 3 томах/Sobraniye sochineniy v 3 tomakh)
Another short story from a collection of stories. Very futuristic.
This is only a very small story, three pages long. I have found a few collections of short stories by Daniil Kharms and hope it is in one of them.
To my liking, this was far too short, I would have liked to read more.
Blurb: "A writer who defies categorization, Daniil Kharms has come to be regarded as an essential artist of the modernist avant-garde. His writing, which partakes of performance, narrative, poetry, and visual elements, was largely suppressed during his lifetime, which ended in a psychiatric ward where he starved to death during the siege of Leningrad. His work, which survived mostly in notebooks, can now be seen as one of the pillars of absurdist literature, most explicitly manifested in the 1920s and ’30s Soviet Union by the OBERIU group, which inherited the mantle of Russian futurism from such poets as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. This selection of prose and poetry provides the most comprehensive portrait of the writer in English translation to date, revealing the arc of his career and including a particularly generous selection of his later work."

Bunin, Ivan Alekseyevich (Иван Алексеевич Бунин) "In Paris" (RUS: в Париже/v Parizhe) - 1943
collection: Dark Avenues (or Dark Alleys) (RUS: Тёмные аллеи/Tyomnyie alleyi)
Ivan Bunin was an emigrant, he saw a lot of Russian culture from the outside. "In Paris" is a story of Russian emigrants - exactly - in Paris, where he lived for a long time.
As someone who lived abroad myself for a long time, I could relate to many of his allusions. This short story is very interesting and I wouldn't mind reading more by this author.
You will find this story in his collection "Dark Avenues".
Blurb: "One of the great achievements of twentieth-century Russian émigré literature, Dark Avenues took Bunin's poetic mastery of language to new heights.
Written between 1938 and 1944 and set in the context of the Russian cultural and historical crises of the preceding decades, this collection of short fiction centres around dark, erotic liaisons. Love - in its many varied forms - is the unifying motif in a rich range of narratives, characterized by the evocative, elegiac, elegant prose for which Bunin is renowned."
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933 "for following through and developing with chastity and artfulness the traditions of Russian classic prose." He was the first Russian author to be awarded this prize.

Tertz, Abram (Абрам Терц), Abram/Sinyavsky, Andrei Donatovich (Андрей Донатович Синявский) "Pkhenz" (RUS: Пхенц/Pkhenz) - 1959
collection: Fantastic Stories 
A science fiction story. Not normally my thing though I have read a few that I really liked. As I did this one. Probably the story that will stay with anyone longest who reads this collection.
I can see the comparison with Kafka though I really prefer this one.
Blurb: "Abram Tertz is the pseudonym of Andrei Sinyavsky, the exile Soviet dissident writer whose works have been compared to fabulists like Kafka and Borges. Tertz's settings are exotic but familiar and as compelling as those of lunatics and mystics. This edition contains the nightmarish 'Pkhentz', a story missing from the first English edition."

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Coetzee, J.M. "The Master of Petersburg"

Coetzee, J.M. "The Master of Petersburg" - 1994

I love Russian authors and I love Nobel Prize winners, so this was a win-win situation. A book by a Nobel Prize winning author writing about the life of a Russian author must be good, right?

It was but it was a hard read, despite it being just around 250 pages. You had to constantly remind yourself that this is a work of fiction even though a lot of the events are taken from real life. You do recognize the author Dostoevsky here and all his struggles with life, you do see parts of Russia's problems during that time, some real-life people. So, you either don't know anything about Dostoevsky and just accept this as a story or you have to constantly forget that this isn't non-fiction.

However, Dostoevsky was wonderfully portrayed, it was a great book about Russia, the book received several international prizes, i.a. the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

From the back cover:

"Winner of The Nobel Prize For Literature 2003

In The Master of Petersburg J. M. Coetzee dares to imagine the life of Dostoevsky. Set in 1869, when Dostoevsky was summoned from Germany to St Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, this novel is at once a compelling mystery steeped in the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Russia and a brilliant and courageous meditation on authority and rebellion, art and imagination. Dostoevsky is seen obsessively following his stepson's ghost, trying to ascertain whether he was a suicide or a murder victim and whether he loved or despised his stepfather."

J.M. Coetzee "who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider" received the Nobel Prize in 2003 and the Booker Prize for this novel in 1999.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "The Brothers Karamazov"

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "The Brothers Karamazov" (Russian: Братья Карамазовы/Brat'ya Karamazovy) - 1879-80

I have always loved reading Russian authors. Dostoevsky is no exception. And this novel had more than 1,200 pages, so the right book for me.

This is not the first book I read from this author and he has not disappointed me so far. Brilliant writing, the setting is always exceptional, the way the story unfolds, the many different characters he describes in detail. Everything is so well done. You get caught from page one until you are finished. What a book!

And the book is packed full with philosophical and religious questions, questions about human existence. The three brothers Karamazov all represent a different side, all have different answers. Dmitri or Mitya is most like the farther Fyodor, He is a soldier and leads an unrestrained life. Ivan has visited the university and is more an enlightened, mind-oriented, atheist intellectual. Alexei or Alyosha, the protagonist, is a religious man, he is a novice in a monastery.

Then there is a fourth, illegitimate brother who is a servant in the father's house.

We discover the Russian society through these different men and their miseries. The story is spellbinding, not the easiest of reads but certainly one of the most deserving. It is a philosophical as well as a spiritual drama, an account of a country that is about to change into modern times and what that does to its inhabitants. A story that stays with us for a long long time.

After "Crime and Punishment", "The Gambler" and "The Adolescent", this is my fourth novel by this fantastic author. I am sure it won't be the last.

From the back cover:

"In 1880 Dostoevsky completed The Brothers Karamazov, the literary effort for which he had been preparing all his life. Compelling, profound, complex, it is the story of a patricide and of the four sons who each had a motive for murder: Dmitry, the sensualist, Ivan, the intellectual; Alyosha, the mystic; and twisted, cunning Smerdyakov, the bastard child. Frequently lurid, nightmarish, always brilliant, the novel plunges the reader into a sordid love triangle, a pathological obsession, and a gripping courtroom drama. But throughout the whole, Dostoevsky searches for the truth - about man, about life, about the existence of God. A terrifying answer to man's eternal questions, this monumental work remains the crowning achievement of perhaps the finest novelist of all time."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "Crime and Punishment"

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "Crime and Punishment" (Russian: Преступление и наказание = Prestupleniye i nakazaniye) - 1866

I can't mention it often enough. I love classic novels and I love Russian authors. The way they describe every situation, every little detail, it's priceless and unique.

In "Crime and Punishment", Dostoevsky manages to bring in so many different topics. It is a classic crime novel but it is also a historical novel, and it is also a psychological and philosophical work. No wonder he needs around 800 pages to describe a crime and its redemption.

You always feel like you are the protagonist or any of the other characters in the novel, you can think the way they think. The author is just that great. This story brings up a lot of questions about the meaning of life, about society and how we all relate to each other. There have been many answers over the centuries, I am sure, but everyone needs to find their own solutions, their own answers.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts, is inexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder.

From that moment on, we share his conflicting feelings of self-loathing and pride, of contempt for and need of others, and of terrible despair and hope of redemption: and, in a remarkable transformation of the detective novel, we follow his agonised efforts to probe and confront both his own motives for, and the consequences of, his crime.

The result is a tragic novel built out of a series of supremely dramatic scenes that illuminate the eternal conflicts at the heart of human existence: most especially our desire for self-expression and self-fulfilment, as against the constraints of morality and human laws; and our agonised awareness of the world's harsh injustices and of our own mortality, as against the mysteries of divine justice and immortality."

I also read "The Adolescent" and “The Gambler” and will certainly read more in the future.

Tsypkin, Leonid "Summer in Baden-Baden"

Tsypkin, Leonid Borissowitsch (Леонид Борисович Цыпкин) "Summer in Baden-Baden" (Russian: Ljubit Dostojewskowo - лджубит достоджэвсково) - 1981

Have you ever read a book that consists of just one sentence? Well, neither have I but if you want that feeling, you better start reading this one. A biographical novel about Dostoevsky's travels in Germany with this wife. An interesting perspective, especially if you  have read Dostoevsky's works. This novel reminded me a lot of "The Gambler" since this seems to be the part where Dostoevsky found his story.

The book is not very large but not that easy to read. Sentences sometimes spread over several pages. A thought that starts on one page might be broken up and lead to several other points until taken up again a couple of pages later.

It still is a very interesting book to read, it's amazing when you consider that the author never left his home country, never walked the walks in Baden-Baden like his hero, and still is able to describe them as if he had lived there all his life.

It's a different sort of reading but very well worth it.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"A complex, highly original novel, Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December: a species of 'now.' A narrator - Tsypkinis on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything 'right.' Nothing is invented, everything is invented. Dostoevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay (which appeared in The New Yorker), Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and celebrates the happy event of its publication in America with an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel."

Dostoewsky, Fyodor "The Gambler"

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "The Gambler" (Russian: Igrok - Игрок) - 1866

Apparently, Dostoevsky wrote this book simultaneously with "Crime and Punishment" as he was suffering from gambling compulsion.

After reading "The Adolescent" with my book club, I definitely had to read another Dostoevsky. This won't be my last. I enjoyed his story, the characters, the description of the characters, everything. A lively story, yet a lot of musings, as well. I like the style of the Russian authors. If you do, too, and haven't tried Dostoevsky, you should definitely give him a chance.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2024.

From the back cover:

"Its story of passion and despair is based on Dostoevsky's own experience as a compulsive gambler—but Dostoevsky was able to break away, whereas Alexei vows to quit as soon as he breaks even—an event, it is clear, that will never happen.
Like so many other characters in Dostoeveky's novels, Alexei is trying to break through the wall of the established order and the human condition itself. But instead he is drawn into the roulette wheel's vortex."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "The Adolescent"

Dostoevsky, Fyodor "The Adolescent" (or: The Raw Youth - Russian: Подросток = Podrostok) - 1875

I love classics. Besides English classic authors like Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens, I probably like the Russians best. After reading (and loving) Anna Karenina, this book was recommended to our book club by one of our members who knows a lot about Russian literature. And I was not disappointed. The description of the simple life in Russia about 150 years ago is very interesting. Also, you can imagine how the revolution started and why some things in history happened the way it did.

The story portrays the life of 19-year-old Arkady Dolgoryky, the conflicts he has with his father, a landowner, the difference between the "old" ways and the views of the young Russians of the time. As a lot of young people, Arkady rebels against what society expects of him.

Even though this book is more than a century old, it still holds a lot of truth. Some things always have been a certain way and will never change, even though the environment and the circumstances kids grow up in change.

I really liked this book, it gave me a lot to think about. If you like Russian classics, read it.

We discussed this in our international book club in December 2005.

From the back cover:

"The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent (first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a naïve 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father’s wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and armed with a mysterious document that he believes gives him power over others. This new English version by the most acclaimed of Dostoevsky’s translators is a masterpiece of pathos and high comedy."

I also since read "The Gambler", "Crime and Punishment" and a few other books by Dostoevsky, see here.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.