Publisher's Synopsis
The Raw Youth, also published as The Adolescent or An Accidental Family, is a novel by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in monthly installments in 1875 in the Russian literary magazine Notes of the Fatherland. Ronald Hingley, the author of Russians and Society and a specialist in Dostoevsky's works, named this novel a bad one, whereas Richard Pevear (in the introduction to his and Larissa Volokhonsky's 2003 translation of the novel), stridently defended its worth. Originally, Dostoevsky had created the work under the title "Discord".
The Idiot is a novel by the 19th-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was first published serially in the journal The Russian Messenger in 1868-69.
The title is an ironic reference to the central character of the novel, Prince (Knyaz) Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young man whose goodness, open-hearted simplicity and guilelessness lead many of the more worldly characters he encounters to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence and insight. In the character of Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky set himself the task of depicting "the positively good and beautiful man." The novel examines the consequences of placing such a unique individual at the centre of the conflicts, desires, passions and egoism of worldly society, both for the man himself and for those with whom he becomes involved.
