The Adolescent (2 page)

This simultaneity and juxtaposition of events in an extremely restricted time frame leads to a downplaying of the importance of the linear plot – the
fabula
, as he liked to call it – in Dostoevsky’s novels. In
The Adolescent
the intrigue turns on the document sewn into Arkady’s coat. It is melodramatic and highly improbable, and Dostoevsky exploits it to the last drop. But it is not what the novel is about.

Near the beginning of the first notebook for
The Adolescent
, Dostoevsky wrote and underlined: “
Disintegration is the principal
visible idea of the novel
.” Later, after establishing a new plan, he returned to the same theme: “Title of the novel: ‘Disorder.’ The whole idea of the novel is to demonstrate that we have now general disorder, disorder everywhere and wherever you go, in society, in business, in guiding ideas (of which, for that very reason, there aren’t any), in convictions (which, for the same reason, we don’t have), in the disintegration of the family unit.” Arkady Makarovich Dolgoruky is the illegitimate son of a bankrupt landowner by the name of Andrei Petrovich Versilov. He has been raised by foster parents and tutors, has seen his mother, a peasant woman from Versilov’s estate, two or three times in his life and his father only once. His legal father, the peasant Makar Dolgoruky, he has never seen. On graduating from high school in Moscow, he goes to Petersburg, armed with his “Rothschild idea,” to meet his family and above all to confront Versilov, whose love he longs for and of whose disgrace and wrongdoing he has all sorts of notions and even some evidence.

As father, husband, and lover, Versilov is the center of a complicated “accidental” family made up of his legitimate children by his deceased wife, his illegitimate children, Arkady and Liza, and their mother Sofya Andreevna, whom he lives with but cannot marry because her husband, Makar Dolgoruky, is still alive. There is also the so-called “aunt,” Tatyana Pavlovna, who acts as a sort of fairy godmother to them all. Konstantin Mochulsky comments on the shift in emphasis from Dostoevsky’s previous novel:

As in
Demons
, the action is concentrated around the hero, but the personality of Versilov is revealed differently than the personality of Stavrogin. The hero of
Demons
is connected with the other characters only ideologically; the personality of Versilov includes in itself the entire history of his family;
it is organically collective
.
³
Stavrogin is the
ideological center
of the novel; Versilov is the
vital center
.

“The crisis of communion,” as Mochulsky says, “is shown in that organic cell from which society grows – in the family.” Within and around Versilov’s accidental family, Dostoevsky juxtaposes all the “material of reality” in Russian society at that time. “The novel contains all the elements,” he wrote in his notebook as early as September 1874, and he specifies:

The civilized and desperate, idle and skeptical higher intelligentsia – that’s [Versilov].

Ancient Holy Russia – Makar’s family.
What is holy, good about new Russia – the aunt.
A [great] family gone to seed – the young Prince (a skeptic, etc.)
High society – the funny and the abstractly ideal type.
The young generation – the [adolescent], all instinct, knows nothing.
Vasin – hopelessly ideal.
Lambert – flesh, matter, horror, etc.

If we add the swindler Stebelkov, the revolutionary populists (particularly the gentle suicide Kraft), and the young widow Akhmakov and her father, we will have a virtually complete list of the characters in
The Adolescent
. Together they make up an image of the general disorder, the “Russian chaos,” that was Dostoevsky’s main preoccupation in all his great novels.

Versilov is the “vital center” of the novel, and the essence of the disorder is reflected in him, but he is always Versilov as seen by his son, and thus he remains an elusive, mysterious, contradictory figure. Arkady’s perception of him is constantly changing, going to extremes of condemnation and adoration, owing to his own ignorance and naıvete’. But the contradictions are not only in Arkady’s perception, but in Versilov himself. As Mochulsky observes: “Versilov the philosopher-deist and bearer of the idea of ‘all-unity,’ and Versilov shattered by two loves – are one and the same man . . . Versilov suffers from all the infirmities of contemporary civilization: everything shifts, wavers, and doubles in his consciousness; ideas are ambiguous, truths – relative, faith – unbelief.” By letting the adolescent do the talking, Dostoevsky is able to present two dramas at once: the drama of Versilov’s life as the gradual revelation of the divided consciousness of his time, and the drama of Arkady’s
coming to consciousness
of precisely that drama, in himself as well as in Versilov. Arkady calls it “breadth,” as will Mitya Karamazov (“No, man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him down. Devil knows even what to make of him, that’s the thing!”). Olga Meerson, in her excellent study of
Dostoevsky’s Taboos
, calls it “the many-storiedness of
any
human soul.”

Dostoevsky has left us several portraits of liberal idealists from the generation of the 1840s – Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky in “A Nasty Anecdote,” Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky in Demons, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov in The Brothers Karamazov – but the portrait of Versilov is by far the fullest, the most serious and searching. He was not invented out of nothing; among his prototypes were two of the most important figures of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life: Alexander Herzen (1812–70) and Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev (1794– 1856). Herzen, the illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, attended Moscow University, where he joined a socialist circle and became an opponent of serfdom. He wrote several novels, was sent to internal exile for his views, and in 1847, having inherited a large fortune from his father, left Russia forever. The failure of the French revolution of 1848 disillusioned him with the West, and he lamented the death of Europe in a collection of letters entitled
From the Other Shore
(1850). Versilov shares his “nobleman’s yearning” and his sorrow. Versilov also speaks with Arkady about a “high cultural type” that has developed only in Russia, calling it “the type of universal suffering for all” – a phrase that had been applied to Herzen by the critic Nikolai Strakhov. Versilov’s “breadth” is also reminiscent of Herzen, who was both an aristocrat and a socialist, a defender of the workers and a connoisseur of beauty, an unbeliever but with a great nostalgia for Christianity, a permanent exile who repeatedly proclaimed his love of Russia.

The biographical parallels of Versilov and Chaadaev are even more striking, and in fact, during the earliest stages of his work on
The Adolescent
, Dostoevsky gave the name of Chaadaev to his protagonist. Chaadaev was a friend and slightly older contemporary of Pushkin’s, a Guards officer of the high nobility, a handsome, intelligent, and spirited man, who took part in the Napoleonic campaigns of 1812 and the occupation of Paris, resigned his commission in 1821, and wandered in Europe before returning to Russia. In 1836, the publication of the first of his
Philosophical Letters Written to a Lady
(there were eight letters in all, written in French) caused an enormous scandal by its sharp criticism of Russia’s backwardness and isolation among the nations of Europe, which he blamed partly on the Orthodox Church. The shock was so great that the emperor Nicholas I had Chaadaev declared mad, forbade the publication of the remaining letters, and kept their author under permanent surveillance until his death. But the Letters circulated in manuscript, and in 1862 the first three were published in Paris, where Dostoevsky bought and read them. Dostoevsky also knew Herzen’s admiring portrait of Chaadaev in his book of reflections and reminiscences,
My Past and Thoughts
(1852 – 55). In
Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation
, Jacques Catteau lists the convergent details of Chaadaev’s and Versilov’s biographies:

Both are handsome and are pampered by women who admire them, protect them, and try to curb their prodigality. Both are inordinately proud, unconsciously egotistical, and of a wounding casualness. Both are remarkably intelligent and witty, profound and ironic. They have the same manners of the spoiled aristocrat, and the refined elegance of the dandy. They served in the same Guards regiment, haughtily refused to fight a duel, wandered for a long time in Europe, and underwent the fascination of Catholicism. Both fell in love with a whimsical and sick young girl . . . before becoming infatuated with a woman who reminds them of a world that is nobler and less empty than their own . . .

We might add that Chaadaev’s
Philosophical Letters
are addressed to a lady, while Versilov is referred to ironically at one point as a “women’s prophet.” Versilov is a complex and original figure, not simply an amalgam of his prototypes, but he is one deeply rooted in the intellectual and spiritual life of the Russian intelligentsia.

The gradual emergence of Versilov in Arkady’s consciousness is the overarching story of
The Adolescent
. It is varied by a number of inset stories, a technique that Dostoevsky would use even more extensively in The Brothers Karamazov. These are all spoken stories, each in a voice quite distinct from Arkady’s written notes: the tragic story of the young student Olya told by her mother; the comic story of the big stone told by Arkady’s landlord, Pyotr Ippolitovich; the three stories told by Makar Dolgoruky; and Versilov’s account of his dream of the golden age and the last days of mankind. Coming from experiences very different from Arkady’s, they form a counterpoint and something of a corrective to his “first person adolescent” point of view, as does the epilogue written by Arkady’s former tutor, Nikolai Semyonovich.

Makar Dolgoruky, the wanderer, is himself an inset figure in the novel. He appeared suddenly and as if fully formed in Dostoevsky’s early notes, and he also appears suddenly in Arkady’s life, to die just as Arkady “resurrects.” He is Dostoevsky’s only full-length portrait of a Russian peasant, a slightly idealized figure out of the past of “Holy Russia,” an image of peasant piety and strength, of mirth, and of spiritual beauty. In his notes, Dostoevsky worked especially on his voice, filling several pages with characteristic phrases and expressions, full of “scriptural sweetness” and cast in the half-chanting cadences of peasant speech. Makar Dolgoruky is the antithesis of Versilov. Arkady bears his name only by chance, but the old man becomes a spiritual father for him. After meeting him for the first time and talking with him only briefly, the adolescent bursts out feverishly: “I’m glad of you. Maybe I’ve been waiting for you a long time. I don’t love any of them; they have no seemliness . . . I won’t go after them, I don’t know where I’ll go, I’ll go with you . . .” But later he makes the same declaration to Versilov, when the latter finally seems to welcome him as his son: “‘Now I have no need for dreams and reveries, now you are enough for me! I will follow you!’ I said, giving myself to him with all my soul.” Arkady stands between these two fathers, these embodiments of two very different Russias. He loses one and in the end saves the life of the other.

In the beginning, Arkady says of Versilov: “I absolutely had to find out the whole truth in the very shortest time, for I had come to judge this man.” He learns in the course of the novel that it is very difficult to judge something as complex, as “many-storied,” as another person, that what he – and we, too, of course – would have considered a moral failing may in fact be a higher kind of virtue. At one point, for instance, Versilov advises him: “My friend, always let a man lie a little – it’s innocent. Even let him lie a lot. First, it will show your delicacy, and second, you’ll also be allowed to lie in return – two enormous profits at once.
Que diable!
one must love one’s neighbor!” The moral condemnation of lying is unexpectedly displaced by Christ’s second commandment, and Versilov’s ironic tone is only a cover for his sincerity. Again, Arkady thinks – as most of us do – that honesty implies speaking everything out, but when he asks Versilov to explain something during one of their conversations, Versilov demurs:

“In short, it’s – one of those long stories that are very boring to begin, and it would be much better if we talked about other things, and still better if we were silent about other things.”

“All you want to do is be silent.”

“My friend, remember that to be silent is good, safe, and beautiful.”

“Beautiful?”

“Of course. Silence is always beautiful, and a silent person is always more beautiful than one who talks.”

These are dialogues of innocence and experience. The examples could be multiplied many times. Olga Meerson has shown that the question of speaking or keeping silent is of central importance in
The Adolescent
. Arkady learns to respect the silences of others. He finally comes to understand, as Meerson says, “that he
has no choice
but to keep silent about the scandalousness of this fallen world and of himself in it. The taboo on paying attention to this scandalousness is absolute because nobody imposes it on the character-narrator; he simply begins to perceive it as the only means for survival – moral, spiritual, psychological, or narrational.” He learns the meaning of tactfulness, of attention, of not judging others; he learns the meaning of forgiveness. That is the beginning of his struggle for order in the disordered world around him.

When
The Adolescent
started to appear in
Notes of the Fatherland
in 1875, it caused considerable amazement. The journal, under the influence of the critic N. K. Mikhailovsky, had become the organ of the populists, who abandoned the extreme rationalism and negation of the nihilists of the 1860s and preached a “going to the land” and the communal values of the Russian peasantry. The editor of the journal at that time was the poet and publicist Nikolai Nekrasov, an old acquaintance of Dostoevsky’s and his longtime ideological opponent. Dostoevsky’s devastating attack on the nihilists in Demons (1871– 72) had turned most of the radical intelligentsia against him. Though they may have had a lingering respect for him as the “prisoner of Omsk,” who had served a ten-year term of hard labor and exile for his own “antigovernment” activities, they hardly expected to find him in their company. On the other hand, the publication of
The Adolescent
in such an extreme-left journal brought accusations of betrayal and opportunism from Dostoevsky’s conservative friends, many of whom abandoned him. What explains this apparent switch of loyalties?