Dostoevsky (151 page)

The novel is written as a first-person confessional memoir by the title character, Arkady Dolgoruky, the natural son of Andrey Petrovich Versilov, a once wealthy aristocrat now down on his luck (he has already run through three fortunes) and a philosophical seeker after truth. Arkady sets out, a year after the events have occurred, to recount the circumstances that have brought about a change in his life and transformed his character. These circumstances all took place in a period of six months after his arrival in Petersburg to join his family and are compressed within twelve days, leaping from September and November to December. Through the carefully arranged “disorder” of Arkady’s narration (he is constantly apologizing for his lack of literary skill), all of the relevant past is included in so-called digressions. Taking full advantage of the time sequence of the memoir form, which narrates events from a point later than when they occurred, Arkady-as-narrator obviously knows the outcome of the episodes that he recounts, but his naïve determination to stick to “the facts” as they appeared to him
then
allows Dostoevsky to preserve the suspense element of his story. At the same time, Arkady-as-narrator slips in evaluations of the behavior of Arkady-as-character, and by the end he writes: “I have suddenly become aware that I have reeducated myself through the process of recalling events and writing them down” (13: 417).

A Raw Youth
unquestionably contains moving scenes of childhood in Dostoevsky’s best “philanthropic” manner, and his inner portrait of a rebellious adolescent is often touching and persuasive. The book is also distinguished by Dostoevsky’s most modulated and sympathetic depiction of a member of the Romantic Idealist generation of the 1840s, a portrait that rises to a visionary height of lyrical pathos. However, the melodramatic plot ingredients (concealed letters, lawsuits over disputed inheritances, attempts at blackmail) whip up excitement by means that are purely superficial and external. All too much of the text relies on such a moth-eaten plot that swamps the stretches of genuine feeling and ideological elevation. The major plot-line involves Versilov and the nineteen-year-old Arkady, who has come to live with his family (his unmarried peasant mother, Sofya, and equally illegitimate sister, Liza). Arkady carries a letter entrusted to him and sewn into his jacket that compromises Katerina Akhmakova, the beautiful widow of a general and a princess in her own right. The letter asks for legal advice about committing her elderly father, Prince Sokolsky, to an institution for the mentally enfeebled, and she fears that, if he learns of this
document, she will be cut out of his will. Both Katerina and Versilov are in search of this letter and rightly suspect that Arkady possesses it.

Two other subplots also run through the book, each concerning another child of Versilov’s. One centers on his legitimate daughter by his deceased first wife, Anna Andreyevna, who has designs on the addlepated Prince Sokolsky. The enormously wealthy prince is an ardent but, by this time, quite harmless admirer of female pulchritude, and the helpless prince is eventually kidnapped by the much younger Anna, who plans to marry him and ensure her future. A second subplot focuses on Arkady’s sister, Liza, who has an affair with the
young
Prince Sokolsky and becomes pregnant by this well-meaning but flighty and spineless aristocratic scion.

All these plots illustrate the moral chaos of Russian society, especially of its upper class; each reveals some infraction or violation of the normal family structure or of the moral code governing relations between the sexes. Also, each subplot is meant to bring out, as is typical for Dostoevsky, the significance of the main one by modulation and contrast. Arkady, who has become madly infatuated with the ravishing Katerina and is troubled by his sexual stirrings, is tempted to behave like Anna Andreyevna and to blackmail the haughty Katerina into sexual submission in exchange for the letter. Versilov and the two Princes Sokolsky are similar in their weakness for the fair sex, but Versilov, for all his personal failings, is endowed with a moral-philosophical dimension completely beyond the range of the others. He is also carelessly contemptuous about money, whereas the old prince is on the board of various stock companies and the younger one is in the clutches of the unscrupulous swindler and stock forger Stebelkov.

Dostoevsky had been criticized by Mikhailovsky for failing to include in his work “the devils” of capitalist development, and while he did not intend to expose himself to such charges again, neither did he intend to abandon his exposure of the anomaly at the heart of Populist values. Old Prince Sokolsky, writes Dostoevsky in his notes, “has . . . become an atheist himself”—in conformity with “his inbred and well-bred Westernism.” One sample of his “witty” conversation on the topic of God reveals the stamp of his character: “And, finally, if it is really as you say, then prove to me, so I can see it, or as they say, have a sensation of it. All right if He (God) exists in person, and not in the form of an effusion of spirit or something (for I must admit, that is even more difficult for me to understand), then what does He wear? How tall is He? Don’t be angry, my dear, naturally I have a right to ask the question, for if He is a God, a personal God, i.e., a person, then how tall is he,
et enfin
, where does he live?” (16: 25–26). Dostoevsky thus juxtaposes a comically fatuous atheist with a serious one like Versilov, emotionally torn by his inability to believe, and he also foreshadows the literal questioning of the supernatural that will be displayed more sarcastically by Feodor Karamazov.

At the center of the book is Arkady, who is left “solely to [his] own devices” and has nowhere to turn for moral guidance and support. In a note of July 23, 1874, Dostoevsky had sketched an image of the son that will remain unchanged: “The young man arrives smarting from an insult, thirsting for revenge. Colossal vanity, a plan (to become) a Rothschild (his secret)” (16: 24). The “insult” will become the irresponsible treatment of Arkady by his father all through his early life, and his vanity will take the form, which appears frequently throughout Dostoevsky’s works, of “wishing to become a Rothschild.”

With his mixture of justified exasperation and scarcely suppressed rage, his quasi-comical and self-glorifying aspiration toward dominance and power, Arkady is an adolescent (and much less articulate) variation of the underground man. He is a touching and sympathetic figure, not a grotesque
persona
acting out one or another dead end of Russian radical ideology. Determined to live as a self-proclaimed egoist and to isolate himself entirely from society, he hopes to amass a fortune and “to become a Rothschild.” Once having scaled such a financial height, he will have gained absolute power over the whole world—or rather, the “consciousness” of such power. These self-glorifying intentions, inspired by Pushkin’s “The Covetous Knight,” are nothing but the pitiful, compensatory dreams of a poor, neglected schoolboy left to fend for himself emotionally and constantly humiliated because of his irregular parentage. Dostoevsky thus grounds Arkady’s “underground” impulses and behavior in a “philanthropic” and social-psychological context that makes them understandable and forgivable. Arkady’s love-hate dialectic with the world is presented as the twisted expression of an essentially candid and high-minded young personality shamefully thrown back on itself.

His youthful innocence is conveyed both by the naïvely enthusiastic and hyperbolic style of his narrative and, more obviously, by numerous revealing incidents. Even while determined to become a Rothschild, he spontaneously uses his savings to look after a baby girl left on the doorstep of his home. Moreover, the “ideological” expression of his egoism also has a magnanimous aspect. Arkady wishes to become a Rothschild solely for the sensation of power that his wealth would entail and imagines himself, rather like the underground man in his “sublime and beautiful” phase, donating this enormous wealth to humankind: “I shall give my millions away, let society distribute my wealth and I . . . I will mix with nothingness again” (13: 76). Dostoevsky takes care to indicate that Arkady wishes to obtain his financial goal only by “honorable” means. He would subsist only on black bread, tea, and a little soup, saving half of the small allowance he received from his guardians, submitting himself to something “like the monastic life and feats of monastic self-discipline” (13: 67). The same combination of idealism and self-centered egoism can also be seen in Arkady’s father,
Versilov, though these traits manifest themselves differently in the world-weary and highly sophisticated aristocrat than in the turbulent adolescent.

Versilov is far and away the most interesting character in the book, and after
Part 1
, Dostoevsky is unable to prevent him from taking center-stage. The events of
Part I
are designed to change Arkady’s image of his father, who is by no means simply the scoundrelly blackguard that the youth believes him to be. However, various incidents demonstrating Versilov’s rectitude are presented in such a way as to reveal his desire always “to be on a pedestal” (13: 210), that is, to believe himself to be morally elevated while, for example, seducing Arkady’s mother, an attractive peasant girl married off to a much older husband. Incidents of this kind, involving Versilov in his relations with other characters, present the continuously shifting perspective from which he is viewed—one that is simply the objective correlative of his inner uncertainty and moral instability. The strongest sense of Versilov’s character is given during his lengthy conversations with Arkady in
Part 1
, which succeed in communicating the mixture of charm, intelligence, and blasé sensibility that makes him so appealing. But they also reveal an attitude of disillusionment, an ingrained inability to take himself (or anything else) with unqualified seriousness, that underlines his basic lack of moral substance.

Arkady, on closer acquaintance with his father, comments on this crippling inner disposition. “He was completely charming to me,” he writes, “and jested with me, but . . . there was a strange irony on his part” (13: 18). A typical example is when Versilov first speaks of the peasant husband of Arkady’s mother with great respect, but then makes a risqué allusion to his gray hairs. “Versilov had a very nasty aristocratic trick. After saying (when he could not help it) some particularly clever and fine things, he would all at once intentionally cap them with some stupid saying. . . . To hear him, one would suppose he was speaking quite seriously, and all the time he was posing to himself, or laughing” (13: 109). Dostoevsky’s ability to convey both the sensitivity of Versilov’s insight and the disengaging twist of his self-reflexive irony redeems a good many scenes of
A Raw Youth
.

The history of Versilov will gradually disclose his hopeless inability to master the passions that lie at the root of his self-debilitating mockery. Although he is a man of “ideas,” he always regards them from a certain ironic distance; they do not penetrate his entire personality and thus become “idea-feelings.” He is contrasted in this respect with the young man Kraft, whose suicide illustrates what occurs when such a powerful idea-feeling is undermined. Arkady meets Kraft when he visits the Dergachev group; a few days later, Kraft commits suicide out
of what can only be called patriotic despair. He has become convinced that the “Russians are a second-rate people destined . . . not to play an independent part in the history of humanity,” and this disillusionment has maimed his will to work for “the common cause” (that is, the propaganda work of the Dergachev group). The destruction of his faith in a glorious future for his people, like the destruction of Kirillov’s faith in Christ as God-man in
Demons
, leads to a crisis of despair that ends in suicide (though Kirillov believed that his death would have a positive significance).

A discussion between Kraft and Arkady at Dergachev’s underscores the importance of values being embedded in an idea-feeling pervading the personality to its very core, and the impossibility of replacing such an idea-feeling by any abstract notion such as a “future unknown people.” Dostoevsky here is transposing his own belief in humankind’s need for an irrational faith—specifically, a faith in Christ as God-man, and hence a belief in immortality and resurrection—as the sole secure buttress of moral values.