Information about the author:
Yuri Corrigan, Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, Department of World Languages and Literatures, Boston University, Boston University, Commonwealth Avenue 745, 02215, Boston, MA, USA.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4900-8199
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Abstract:
This essay examines Dostoevsky’s Adolescent from the point of view of its young protagonist’s attempts to hide his “soul” in a series of locations (in objects, ideas, and people) as a means of self-defense or selfpreservation. The novel’s plot follows the gradual loss and desolation of Arkady’s hiding places and, in this sense, constitutes an unorthodox contribution to the modern European tradition of the novel of personal formation, or bildungsroman. Rather than depict, in The Adolescent, the formation of a personality, the transition from unsteady youth to firm adulthood, Dostoevsky follows the gradual unraveling and stripping away of the trappings of identity. In developing a new understanding of the novel’s psychological arc, the essay challenges the critical reception of The Adolescent as chaotic and incoherent in its plot structure.