There is something paradoxical in approaching the creative process through abortive plans, however important or typical. We must leave the Ideal, and turn to its asymptote, the reality of the finished novel. Our choice of A Raw Youth needs to be justified.

Arguments

A Raw Youth is a tributary of the previous novels, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Devils, and springs from the resurgence of the great underground river, ‘The Life of a Great Sinner’. It announces and prepares The Brothers Karamazov, a novel where theme and structure are perfectly controlled and balanced. This gives it a key position in the works of Dostoyevsky as a whole, chronologically and ideologically; it is a place where all the great novels meet. Embryologists say that all the potential of a species, even in its evolutionary form, is present, though not differentiated, in the potential of any individual. A Raw Youth contains all the actual or possible characteristics of the Dostoyevskian novel, planned or achieved.

Moreover it is an extraordinarily complex work, the most ‘mad’ and so the most neglected book in the canon. It is a concentration of all those elements of the Dostoyevskian novel which are most irritating to the Euclidean mind.