The Adolescent

Written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Narrated by Malk Williams

The narrator and central character of The Adolescent is Arkady Dolgoruky, a naive 19-year-old boy full of 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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart and his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense influence on 20th-century fiction. He is commonly regarded as one of the finest novelists who ever lived, penning works including four long novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. His ideas profoundly shaped literary modernism, existentialism, and various schools of psychology, theology, and literary criticism. His works are often called prophetic because he accurately predicted how Russia’s revolutionaries would behave if they came to power. In his time, he was also renowned for his activity as a journalist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SNR Audio
• Release date: Mar 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805360599

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. Between 1838 and 1843 he studied at the St Petersburg Engineering Academy. His first work of fiction was the epistolary novel Poor Folk (1846), which met with a generally favourable response. However, his immediately subsequent works were less enthusiastically received. In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of the socialist Petrashevsky circle, and subjected to a mock execution. He suffered four years in a Siberian penal settlement and then another four years of enforced military service. He returned to writing in the late 1850s and travelled abroad in the 1860s. It was during the last twenty years of his life that he wrote the iconic works, such as Notes from the Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which were to form the basis of his formidable reputation. He died in 1881.