Books: Freaking-Out with Fyodor

THE ADOLESCENT by Fyodor Dosfoevsky. A new translation by Andrew R. MacAndrew. 585 pages. Doubleday. $10.

To judge by the red-blue-green-gold psychedelic dust jacket, the emphasis on "a new translation," and the streamlined title (it used to be A Raw Youth), one might conclude that the world's greatest novelist is somehow becoming obsolete. For today's readers, apparently, Dostoevsky needs to be dressed up in motley and passed off as an expert on the generation gap or the counterculture. Indeed, the jacket blurb describes this 97-year-old novel as a work of "extraordinary timeliness."...

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