ABSTRACT
For the integrating force of this spiritual expression of personality, effort and suffering are inescapable. The drama, and mystery, of personality is all-inclusive and consuming. The confessional form of A Raw Youth has , not unlike what mystics call "internal conversations," the special quality of probing and illuminating the inward terrain of personality, so that its essences are distinguished from objective fact. As such this drama of personality is an unfolding and not a functional process; it presages revelation-the revelation of Spirit. The prophetic properties of Dostoevsky's great novels are never compromised; his prophetic element remains constant. A Raw Youth thus contains his prophetic vision of personality, at once problematic and absolute in the sense of which Berdyaev shows a profound awareness when he writes:
The personality is the realization within the natural individual of his idea, of the divine purpose concerning him. It therefore supposes creative action and the conquest of self. The personality is spirit and, as such, it is opposed to the thing, to the world of things, to the world of natural phenomena. It reveals the world of man, the world of living beings, who are concrete by virtue of their relationship and of their existential communion.2
