Fedor Dostoevskii's novel The Adolescent (1875), sandwiched between Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, is an outlier among Dostoevskii's five elephants. Generally considered the weakest of the lot, if not an outright failure, The Adolescent represents Dostoevskii's single first-person narrative among the big five. Dostoevskii had originally wanted to cast both Crime and Punishment and The Idiot as first-person narratives, but clearly he kept being drawn to the idea. As we can see from his notes for The Adolescent, Dostoevskii staked the success of his novel precisely on his choice of hero and the first-person narration, which he believed would create a sense of “freshness” and better express the adolescent's personality. The narrator's youth and naivete, coupled with his inexperience as a writer, would allow the reader to share in the adolescent's confusion and rapidly changing emotions. Thus, the riddle of his father, Andrei Versilov, is revealed to Arkadii and the reader simultaneously. The downside of the first-person narrative is that it requires hackneyed devices of misplaced letters, listening at keyholes, and skipping forward in time in order to create a coherent narrative.

Constance Garnett published her translation of the novel as A Raw Youth in 1916, and it is still in print to this day. Although it is now fashionable to disparage Garnett's abilities as a translator, her choice of title is brilliant. The Russian title is Podrostok (Adolescent), which works perfectly well in Russian, but “adolescent” in English more often connotes some sort of clinical application, as in “adolescent psychology.” It is difficult to imagine an English-speaking young man of nineteen applying the term to himself, as Arkadii does on occasion. Richard Freeborn translated the novel in 1994 for Oxford University Press as An Accidental Family, a term borrowed from the final pages of the novel. Freeborn's substitution, however, directs the focus away from Arkadii. The remaining three translations, all titled The Adolescent, are by Andrew MacAndrew (1972), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2003), and Dora O'Brien, the translation under review.

Garnett's translation is workmanlike. She did not have a knack for dialogue and most likely found the psychology of a nineteen-year-old male not up her alley. MacAndrew best conveys the turmoil of a teenager's mind and turns of speech. In doing so, he takes liberties with Dostoevskii's text (cutting long sentences and paragraphs into shorter, more manageable units), but the result is persuasive and makes for a good read. Freeborn adheres more closely to the Dostoevskii text, as do Pevear and Volokhonsky, who have staked their reputation for doing precisely that. These last three all have solid introductions that place the novel in the context of Dostoevskii's work as a whole and make the case for why we should read The Adolescent.

O'Brien's new translation, unfortunately, comes without any introduction or translator's note that would make the case for why we should read The Adolescent or outline what she wished to achieve. Instead, the book comes with an uninspired gallery of photos of Dostoevskii and his family; “extra material” that consists of a precis of Dostoevskii's life and works; and a short, out-of-date bibliography, half or which is made up of moth-eaten biographies from the 1930s and 50s. On the plus side, she provides extensive, useful notes and a list of characters to help the reader navigate the novel.

O'Brien strives to capture the adolescent's voice with contractions, idiomatic expressions, and slang that seems not of Dostoevskii's time, for example, “roulette joint” (303) or “slowcoach” (588), the British equivalent of “slowpoke.” In the same vein, at least two chapters begin with the phrase, “Now for something completely different” (17, 375), presumably borrowed from Monty Python. It might have been interesting to stylize the translation in a twenty-first-century vernacular, as some British playwrights have done with Anton Chekhov's plays, but these anachronisms are so few and far between that they stand out all the more amidst the stilted prose. O'Brien is zealous about following the Russian text's sentence and paragraph structure, but tries too often, in my opinion, to embrace Russian syntax as well. She hits her stride in passages like Versilov's lengthy monologue in part three, which presents, among other things, another variation on Dostoevskii's hobbyhorse, the Golden Age. Dostoevskii feared that Versilov, representing the generation of the 1840s, unless properly handled would overshadow the many representatives from the generation of the sons. It is difficult not to conclude that his fears were well grounded.