The Adolescent (62 page)
III
“. . . AND NEVER, my unforgettable Arkady Makarovich, could you have employed your leisure time more usefully than now, having written these ‘Notes’ of yours! You’ve given yourself, so to speak, a conscious account of your first stormy and perilous steps on your career in life. I firmly believe that by this account you could indeed ‘re-educate yourself ’ in many ways, as you put it yourself. Naturally, I will not allow myself the least thing in the way of critical observations per se; though every page makes one ponder . . . for instance, the fact that you kept the ‘document’ so long and so persistently is in the highest degree characteristic . . . But out of hundreds of observations, that is the only one I will allow myself. I also greatly appreciate that you decided to tell, and apparently to me alone, the ‘secret of your idea,’ according to your own expression. But your request that I give my opinion of this idea per se, I must resolutely refuse: first, there would not be room enough for it in a letter, and second, I am not ready for an answer myself and still need to digest it. I will only observe that your ‘idea’ is distinguished by its originality, whereas the young men of the current generation fall mainly upon ideas that have not been thought up but given beforehand, and their supply is by no means great, and is often dangerous. Your ‘idea,’ for instance, preserved you, at least for a while, from the ideas of Messrs. Dergachev and Co., undoubtedly not so original as yours. And, finally, I concur in the highest degree with the opinion of the much-esteemed Tatyana Pavlovna, whom, though I know her personally, till now I had never been able to appreciate in the measure that she deserves. Her idea about your entering the university is in the highest degree beneficial for you. Learning and life will, in three or four years, undoubtedly open the horizon of your thoughts and aspirations still more widely, and if, after the university, you propose to turn again to your ‘idea,’ nothing will hinder that.
“Now allow me on my own, and without your request, to lay out for you candidly several thoughts and impressions that came to my mind and soul as I was reading your so candid notes. Yes, I agree with Andrei Petrovich that one might indeed have had fears for you and your solitary youth. And there are not a few young men like you, and their abilities always threaten to develop for the worse—either into a Molchalin-like obsequiousness
47
or into a secret desire for disorder. But this desire for disorder—and even most often—comes, maybe, from a secret thirst for order and ‘seemliness’ (I am using your word). Youth is pure if only because it is youth. Maybe in these so early impulses of madness there lies precisely this desire for order and this search for truth, and whose fault is it that some modern young men see this truth and this order in such silly and ridiculous things that it is even incomprehensible how they could believe in them! I will note, incidentally, that before, in the quite recent past, only a generation ago, these interesting young men were not to be so pitied, because in those days they almost always ended by successfully joining our higher cultivated strata and merging into one whole with them. And if, for instance, they were aware, at the beginning of the road, of all their disorderliness and fortuitousness, of all the lack of nobility, say, in their family surroundings, the lack of a hereditary tradition and of beautiful, finished forms, it was even so much the better, because later they themselves would consciously strive for these things and learn to appreciate them. Nowadays it is somewhat different—precisely because there is almost nothing to join.
“I will explain by a comparison or, so to speak, an assimilation. If I were a Russian novelist and had talent, I would be sure to take my heroes from the hereditary Russian nobility, because it is only in that type of cultivated Russian people that there is possible at least the appearance of a beautiful order and a beautiful impression, so necessary in a novel if it is to graciously affect the reader. I am by no means joking when I say this, though I myself am not a nobleman at all, which, however, you know yourself. Pushkin already sketched out the subjects of his future novels in his ‘Traditions of the Russian Family,’
48
and, believe me, it indeed contains all we have had of the beautiful so far. At least all we have had that has been somewhat completed. I do not say this because I agree so unconditionally with the correctness and truthfulness of this beauty; but here, for instance, there were finished forms of honor and duty, which, except among the nobility, are not only not finished anywhere in Russia, but are not even begun. I speak as a peaceful man and seeking peace.
“Whether this honor is good and this duty right—is another question; but for me it is more important that the forms precisely be finished and that there be at least some sort of order that is not prescribed, but that we ourselves have finally developed. God, the most important thing for us is precisely at least some order of our own! In this has lain our hope and, so to speak, our rest; finally at least something built, and not this eternal smashing, not chips flying everywhere, not trash and rubbish, out of which nothing has come in the last two hundred years.
“Do not accuse me of Slavophilism; I am saying it just so, from misanthropy, because my heart feels heavy! Nowadays, in recent times, something quite the opposite of what I have described above has been happening among us. It is no longer rubbish that grows on to the higher stratum of people, but, on the contrary, bits and pieces are torn with merry haste from the beautiful type, and get stuck into one heap with the disorderly and envious. And it is a far from isolated case that the fathers and heads of former cultivated families themselves laugh at something that their children may still want to believe in. What’s more, they enthusiastically do not conceal from their children their greedy joy at the unexpected right to dishonor, which a whole mass of them suddenly deduced from something. I am not speaking about the true progressists, my dearest Arkady Makarovich, but only about the riffraff, who have turned out to be numberless, of whom it is said:
‘Grattez le russe et
vous verrez le tartare.’
122
And, believe me, the true liberals, the true and magnanimous friends of mankind, are by no means so many among us as it suddenly seemed to us.
“But this is all philosophy; let us go back to the imaginary novelist. The position of our novelist in such a case would be quite definite: he would be unable to write in any other genre than the historical, for the beautiful type no longer exists in our time, and if any remnants remain, in the now-dominant opinion, they have not kept their beauty. Oh, in the historical genre it is still possible to portray a great many extremely pleasant and delightful details! One can even carry the reader with one so far that he will take the historical picture for something still possible in the present. Such a work, given great talent, would belong not so much to Russian literature as to Russian history. It would be an artistically finished picture of a Russian mirage, which existed in reality until people realized that it was a mirage. The grandson of the heroes portrayed in the picture portraying a Russian family of the average upper-class cultivated circle over three generations and in connection with Russian history—this descendant of his forebears could not be portrayed as a contemporary type otherwise than in a somewhat misanthropic, solitary, and undoubtedly sad guise. He should even appear as a sort of eccentric, whom the reader could recognize at first glance as someone who has quit the field, and be convinced that the field is no longer his. A bit further, and even this misanthropic grandson will vanish; new, as yet unknown persons will appear, and a new mirage; but what kind of persons? If they are not beautiful, then the Russian novel will no longer be possible. But, alas! is it only the novel that will turn out then to be impossible?
“Rather than go far, I will resort to your own manuscript. Look, for instance, at Mr. Versilov’s two families (this time allow me to be fully candid). First of all, I will not expand on Andrei Petrovich himself; but, anyhow, he still belongs among the ancestors. He is a nobleman of very ancient lineage, and at the same time a Parisian communard.
49
He is a true poet and loves Russia, but on the other hand he totally denies her. He is without any religion, but is almost ready to die for something indefinite, which he cannot even name, but which he passionately believes in, after the manner of a multitude of Russian-European civilizers of the Petersburg period of Russian history. But enough of the man himself; here, however, is his hereditary family. I will not even speak of his son, and he does not deserve the honor. Those who have eyes know beforehand what such rascals come to among us, and incidentally what they bring others to. But his daughter Anna Andreevna—is she not a young lady of character? A person on the scale of the mother superior Mitrofania
50
—not, of course, to predict anything criminal, which would be unfair on my part. Tell me now, Arkady Makarovich, that this family is an accidental phenomenon, and my heart will rejoice. But, on the contrary, would it not be more correct to conclude that a multitude of such unquestionably hereditary Russian families are, with irresistible force, going over
en masse
into
accidental
families and merging with them in general disorder and chaos? In your manuscript you point in part to the type of this accidental family. Yes, Arkady Makarovich, you are
a member of an
accidental family
, as opposed to our still-recent hereditary types, who had a childhood and youth so different from yours.
“I confess, I would not wish to be a novelist whose hero comes from an accidental family!
“Thankless work and lacking in beautiful forms. And these types in any case are still a current matter, and therefore cannot be artistically finished. Major mistakes are possible, exaggerations, oversights. In any case, one would have to do too much guessing. What, though, is the writer to do who has no wish to write only in the historical genre and is possessed by a yearning for what is current? To guess . . . and be mistaken.
“But ‘Notes’ such as yours could, it seems to me, serve as material for a future artistic work, for a future picture—of a disorderly but already bygone epoch. Oh, when the evil of the day is past and the future comes, then the future artist will find beautiful forms even for portraying the past disorder and chaos. It is then that ‘Notes’ like yours will be needed and will provide material—as long as they are sincere, even despite all that is chaotic and accidental about them . . . They will preserve at least certain faithful features by which to guess what might have been hidden in the soul of some adolescent of that troubled time—a not-entirely-insignificant knowledge, for the generations are made up of adolescents . . .”
NOTES
PART ONE
1.
The princely family of Dolgoruky belonged to the oldest Russian nobility. Yuri Dolgoruky founded the princedom of Suzdal in the twelfth century.
2.
At that time there were seven classes in the Russian gymnasium (high school), the seventh being the last. Graduates would generally be between nineteen and twenty years old.
3.
Anton the Wretch
, a novella by Dostoevsky’s old school friend D. V. Grigorovich (1822–1899), and Polinka Sachs, a novella by A. V. Druzhinin (1824–1864), were both published in the journal
The Contemporary
in 1847. The former portrays peasant life in the darkest colors; the latter, written under the influence of George Sand, tells of a loving husband who, when betrayed by his wife, grants her the freedom to marry his rival. Both are sentimental tales in the liberal taste of the period.
4.
The Semyonovsky quarter in Petersburg was named for the illustrious Semyonovsky Guards regiment, which was stationed there.
5.
In the table of fourteen civil ranks established by the emperor Peter the Great, the rank of privy councillor was third, equivalent to the military rank of lieutenant general.
6.
Dostoevsky himself was sent to a boarding school run (in K. Mochulsky’s phrase) by “a poorly enough educated Frenchman” named Souchard. He stayed there for only a year, but the experience clearly left its mark on him. In his notes for the novel, he first uses the name Souchard and later alters it to Touchard.
7.
The Senate in Petersburg also served as the highest Russian court; hence the opportunities for bribery.
8.
The German romantic poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) stood, in Dostoevsky’s keyboard of references, for notions of the ideal, the “great and beautiful,” and a simplified struggle for freedom. Having loved Schiller’s works as a young man, Dostoevsky indulged in a good deal of indirect mockery of him in his later works.
9.
The Summer Garden in Petersburg is on the left bank of the Neva, a short distance from the imperial Winter Palace. Copies of antique sculptures were placed in it, on the orders of the tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725), for the edification of the public that went strolling there.
10.
Lambert, being French, is a Catholic. In the Catholic Church at that time, first communion followed and was directly connected with confirmation in the faith, and was received at the age of ten or twelve, usually accompanied by a family celebration. (In the Orthodox Church, communion is given immediately after baptism to infants as well as adults.)
11.
The relics of a saint are “revealed” when they start producing miracles of one sort or another—giving off a sweet fragrance, healing the sick, and so on.
12.
One form of mortification of the flesh among ascetics was (and perhaps still is) the wearing of heavy iron chains wrapped about the waist under one’s clothing.
13.
Baron James Rothschild (1792–1868), the “moneylender to kings,” died a few years before the events described in the novel. His “coup” had to do, however, with advance knowledge of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, not of the assassination of the Duc de Berry in 1820.
14.
Dostoevsky modeled Dergachev and his associates on an actual conspiratorial group of some ten members, led by an engineer named Dolgushin, which called for the overthrow of the landowners and the tsar, the extermination of the bourgeoisie, and the redistribution of the land under an elected government. Dostoevsky closely followed their trial in July 1874. Among Dolgushin’s people there was a Kramer and a Vasnin, corresponding to the Kraft and Vasin of the novel. Kraft’s fate exactly parallels Kramer’s, as described in the memoirs of Dostoevsky’s friend, the famous jurist A. F. Koni.
15.
The police found several inscriptions in Dolgushin’s house, in English, French, Italian, and among them this one in Latin; they also found a large wooden cross with Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité carved on it.
16.
One slogan of the Dolgushin group was: “Man should live according to truth and nature.” The words have a long history both in enlightened social thought and in Dostoevsky’s work, where they go back to the narrator’s sarcastic play in
Notes from Underground
on the prefatory note to the
Confessions
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in which Rousseau claims to offer his readers “the only portrait of a man, painted exactly from nature and in all its truth, that exists and probably ever will exist.”
17.
The “calendars” published in Russia at that time, like the American
Farmer’s Almanac
, included stories, lore, advice, and statistics.
18.
The term “phalanstery” (
phalanstère
in French) was coined by the French utopian socialist thinker Charles Fourier (1772–1837) to designate the physical and productive arrangements of the future communal life. “Barracks communism” is another term for the same idea. Here and further on, Arkady Makarovich plays ironically on various radical notions of the time, including the “rational egoism” of the radical ideologist N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) and the social structures envisioned in his novel
What Is to Be Done?
Dostoevsky’s interest in “Fourierism” as a young man led to his arrest by the tsar’s agents in 1849.
19.
The Kalmyks are a nomadic Buddhist Mongol people, originally from Dzungaria in western China, who migrated to the steppes between the Don and the Volga, and also to Siberia.
20.
The Crimean War (1854–1856) was fought by Russia against an alliance of Turkey, England, France, and the Piedmont.
21.
Arbiter of the peace was one of the government posts established in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs by the “tsarliberator” Alexander II in 1861. Arbiters of the peace were elected by the nobility from among local landowners and were mainly responsible for questions of land division between peasants and landowners. The function, taken earnestly at first, later became subject to abuses and was finally abolished in 1874.
22.
Harpagon and Plyushkin are both famous misers, the former from the comedy L’Avare (“The Miser”) by Molière (1622–1673), the latter from the novel
Dead Souls
, by Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852).
23.
Historically, Russia had two capitals: Moscow, dating back to the thirteenth century, and St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703. Dostoevsky later refers to the period following 1703 as “the Petersburg period of Russian history.”
24.
Names of well-known Russian tycoons of the period following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, when mining, industry, railroads, and banking developed at a great pace. Polyakov and Gubonin were mainly builders of railroads.
25.
John Law (1671–1729), a Scottish financier, became comptroller general of French finances, created the French Indies Company, and in 1719, having offered the plan unsuccessfully to Scotland, England, and Savoy, managed to persuade the Regency government to create a Banque Générale of France, based on the selling of shares and the issuing of paper money. Extremely popular and successful at first, the system soon led to runaway inflation and ended in a catastrophic bankruptcy. Law was forced to flee France, and died in poverty in Venice.
26.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), prince of Bénévent, bishop of Autun, an ambitious, intelligent, and extremely witty man, was one of the most skillful French diplomats and politicians of his time, during which he served under the king, the constitutional assembly, the Directoire, the consulate, the empire, and finally the restoration of the Bourbons. Alexis Piron (1689–1773) was a poet, known mainly for his satires and often licentious songs. Denied admission to the French Academy, he wrote his own epitaph, which is also his most famous piece of verse:
Ci-gît Piron, qui ne fut rien, / Pas mê;me académicien
(“Here lies Piron, who was nothing, / Not even an academician”).
27.
These lines come from the central monologue of the Baron in
The Covetous Knight
, one of the “little tragedies” by the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Arkady Makarovich’s “Rothschild idea” has been strongly influenced by the Baron’s own “idea”—that the awareness of the power money brings is superior to the need to exercise it.
28.
God commanded the ravens to feed the prophet Elijah when he went into hiding in the wilderness after denouncing the wicked King Ahab for abandoning the God of Israel (I Kings 17:4–6).
29.
The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), the “Iron Chancellor,” was one of the main architects of German unification. In 1871, after defeating France, he proclaimed the German Empire, of which he became the first chancellor in that same year. The early period of Bismarck’s
Kulturkampf
against the Catholics and social democrats coincided with the writing of
The Adolescent
, and Dostoevsky kept a close eye on the successes of this man who was famous for having said, “The questions of the time will be decided not by speeches and resolutions of the majority, but by blood and iron.”
30.
See note 16 above. Rousseau’s
Confessions
were published posthumously in 1782 and 1789. Arkady Makarovich makes explicit what Rousseau describes more circumspectly at the beginning of Book III: “I sought out dark alleys, hidden redoubts, where I could expose myself from afar to persons of the fair sex in the state in which I should have liked to be able to be up close to them.”
31.
This painting of the Mother of God by Raphael Sanzio (1483– 1520), usually known as the Sistine Madonna because it was painted for the church of St. Sixtus in Piacenza, belongs to the collection of the Dresden Pinakothek. For Dostoevsky, who had seen the painting a number of times during his visits to Dresden, it represented the ideal of pure beauty. In the last years of his life, he himself had a large engraving of it hanging in his study in Petersburg.
32.
Arkady Makarovich probably means the famous doors of the Florentine Baptistry, the work of Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455), which Michelangelo, in admiration, called “the doors of paradise.” Dostoevsky’s wife, Anna Grigorievna, recalls in her memoirs that her husband, during their stay in Florence (1868–1869), often made a special detour to look at these doors, before which he would stand in ecstasy.
33.
Versilov is probably referring to the ideas of Rousseau (who was born in Geneva) and his followers, including the early utopian socialists. In Part Two of the novel, he will explain to Arkady that by “Geneva ideas” he means “virtue without Christ . . . today’s ideas . . . the idea of the whole of today’s civilization” (in the notebooks for the novel, Dostovsky has him say more specifically “the French ideas of today”).
34.
Eliseevs’ was and still is a fine delicatessen and wine shop on Nevsky Prospect in Petersburg. Ballet’s was a confectioner’s shop, also on Nevsky Prospect, still mentioned in Baedecker’s guide for 1897.
35.
This is the first line of a folk song made popular by the singer and amateur of folk music M. V. Zubova (d. 1779). There is mention of the lady and the song in a book titled
Modern Russian
Women, by P. D. Mordovtsev, published in 1874, when Dostoevsky was working on the novel.
36.
The allusion is to the famous reply of Voltaire (1694–1778), when he was asked which literary genre was the best: “Tous les
genres sont bons hors le genre ennuyeux
” (“All genres are good, except the boring genre”).
37.
The poet Ivan Krylov (1769–1844), Russia’s greatest fabulist, is often referred to as the Russian La Fontaine (many of whose fables he translated or adapted into Russian). Arkady will quote from his fable “The Fussy Bride” a little further on.
38.
Woe from Wit
, a comedy by the Russian poet and diplomat Alexander Griboedov (1795–1829), is the first masterpiece of the Russian theater; many lines from the play became proverbial in Russia and have remained so.
39.
Chatsky is the disillusioned protagonist of
Woe from Wit
, and the first in the series of “superfluous men” in nineteenth-century Russian literature. He is often likened to Alceste, the hero of Molière’s
Misanthrope
. Zhileiko was a well-known actor of the time, who played in the private theaters of the nobility as well as on the public stage.
40.
The linked short stories of
A Hunter’s Sketches
, by Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), were published in one volume in 1852.
41.
As the son of a serf, Arkady Makarovich would not have had the possibility of attending high school and university and would not have enjoyed the legal rights of a gentleman.
42.
The wanderer (
strannik
) is a well-known figure in Russian religious life. Such spiritual wandering meant abandoning a fixed home and undertaking a sort of perpetual pilgrimage from monastery to monastery, as is described most memorably in
The Way of a Pilgrim
, an anonymous book published in the nineteenth century.
43.
The Slavophiles (“lovers of the Slavs”) were a group of writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century (the most important were Alexei Khomyakov, Konstantin and Ivan Aksakov, and Yuri Samarin) who believed that Russia should follow her own way of development, based on the structures of the rural community and the Orthodox Church, instead of imitating the West, as their opponents, the Westernizers, advocated. The Slavophile-Westernizer controversy dominated Russian social thought throughout the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky appeared, at various times, to take both sides in it.
44.
This combination of terms goes back ultimately to such eighteenth-century treatises as
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
, by the Anglo-Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
, by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). The Russian phrase, replacing “sublime” with the less rhetorical “lofty,” became a critical commonplace in the 1840s, but acquired an ironic tone in the utilitarian and anti-aesthetic 1860s. The narrator of Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
makes much sarcastic play with it.
