Versilov wins a court case, but afterwards takes the letter to his opponent, Prince Sergej Petrowitsj Sokolsky, and they share the money.

The second letter, received from his teacher's wife Maria in Moscow, is a request by the young widow Katerina Nikolaevna Akhmakovato to have her father, Prince Nikolay Ivanovitch Sokolsky, declared financially incompetent due to insanity.

A focus of the novel is the recurring conflict between father and son, particularly in ideology, which represents the battles between the conventional "old" way of thinking in the 1840s and the new nihilistic point of view of the youth of 1860s Russia.

As Arkady navigates the complexities of love, family, and societal norms, he grapples with existential questions and moral dilemmas.

With its intricate character portrayals and philosophical depth, "The Adolescent" stands as a quintessential work in Dostoevsky's literary canon, offering profound insights into the human condition and the challenges of coming of age.

Answering the question of emancipation, in Dostoevsky's novel, has to do with how to educate the serfs and address the damage of Petrine reforms in order to construct a new Russian identity.

Hermann Hesse appreciated the novel for its art of dialogue, "psychological seerism and passages full of confessed revelations about Russian people".