The Adolescent
Table of Contents
TRANSLATORS’ NOTES
LIST OF PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
Russian names are composed of first name, patronymic (from the father’s first name), and family name. Formal address requires the use of first name and patronymic; diminutives (Arkasha, Lizochka, Sonya) are commonly used among family and intimate friends. The following is a list of the principal characters in
The Adolescent
, with diminutives and epithets. In Russian pronunciation, the stressed vowel is always long and unstressed vowels are very short.
Dolgorúky, Arkády Makárovich (Arkásha, Arkáshenka, Arkáshka): the adolescent, “author” of the novel.
———, Makár Ivánovich: his legal father.
———, Sófya Andréevna (Sónya, Sophie): his mother.
———, Lizavéta Makárovna (Líza, Lízochka, Lizók): his sister.
Versílov, Andréi Petróvich: natural father of Arkady and Liza.
———, Ánna Andréevna: Versilov’s daughter by his first marriage.
———, Andréi Andréevich: the kammerjunker, Versilov’s son by his first marriage.
Akhmákov, Katerína Nikoláevna (Kátya): young widow of General Akhmakov.
———, Lýdia (no patronymic): her stepdaughter. Sokólsky, Prince Nikolái Ivánovich: the old prince, Mme. Akhmakov’s father.
Prutkóv, Tatyána Pávlovna: the “aunt,” friend of the Versilov family.
Sokólsky, Prince Sergéi Petróvich (Seryózha): the young prince, no relation to Prince Nikolai Ivanovich.
Lambért, Mauríce: schoolfriend of Arkady’s, a Frenchman.
Verdáigne, Alphonsíne de (Alphonsina, Alphonsinka): Lambert’s girlfriend.
Dárya Onísimovna (no family name; her name changes to Nastásya Egórovna in Part Three): mother of the young suicide Ólya (diminutive of Ólga).
Vásin, Grísha (diminutive of Grigóry; no patronymic): friend of Arkady’s.
Stebelkóv (no first name or patronymic): Vasin’s stepfather. Pyótr Ippolítovich (no last name): Arkady’s landlord. Nikolái Semyónovich (no last name): Arkady’s tutor in Moscow.
———, Márya Ivánovna: Nikolai Semyonovich’s wife. Trishátov, Pétya [i.e., Pyótr] (no patronymic): the pretty boy. Andréev, Nikolái Semyónovich: le grand dadais.
Semyón Sídorovich (Sídorych; no last name): the pockmarked one.
A NOTE ON THE TOPOGRAPHY OF ST. PETERSBURG
The city was founded in 1703 by a decree of the emperor Peter the Great and built on the delta of the river Neva, which divides into three main branches – the Big Neva, the Little Neva, and the Nevka – as it flows into the Gulf of Finland. On the left bank of the Neva is the city center, where the Winter Palace, the Senate, the Admiralty, the Summer Garden, the theaters, and the main thoroughfares such as Nevsky Prospect, Bolshaya Millionnaya, and Bolshaya Morskaya are located. On the right bank of the Neva before it divides is the area known as the Vyborg side; the right bank between the Nevka and the Little Neva is known as the Petersburg side, where the Peter and Paul Fortress, the oldest structure of the city, stands; between the Little Neva and the Big Neva is Vassilievsky Island. To the south, some fifteen miles from the city, is the suburb of Tsarskoe Selo, where the empress Catherine the Great built an imposing palace and many of the gentry had summer houses.
TRANSLATIONS OF DOSTOEVSKY
BY PEVEAR AND VOLOKHONSKY
The Adolescent
(2003)
The Idiot
(2002)
Demons
(1994)
Notes from Underground
(1993)
Crime and Punishment
(1992)
The Brothers Karamazov
(1990)
INTRODUCTION
In the early 1870s, the radical satirist M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin declared that in Russia the family novel was dead: “The family, that warm and cosy element . . . which once gave the novel its content, has vanished from sight . . . The novel of contemporary man finds its resolution in the street, on the public way, anywhere but in the home.” In 1875, however, two novels began to appear serially in rival journals: Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
in the conservative
Russian Messenger
, and Dostoevsky’s
The Adolescent
in the populist
Notes of the Fatherland
. Though they have nothing else in common, both are family novels
in excelsis
. Their appearance at that time suggests that, far from having vanished from sight, the family was still the mirror of Russian social life, and the fate of the family was a key to Russia’s destiny.
Tolstoy defied the radicals by portraying the ordered life of his own class, the hereditary aristocracy, and the tragedy of its disruption – that is, by looking back at a world which, as Dostoevsky saw, had become a fantasy. “But you know,” Dostoevsky wrote to his friend Apollon Maikov, “this is all landowner’s literature. It has said everything it had to say (magnificently in Leo Tolstoy). But this word, a landowner’s in the highest degree, was the last. A
new word
, replacing the landowner’s, does not exist yet.” In
The Adolescent
, which he conceived in part as an answer to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky found that new word, portraying what he calls the “accidental family” of his time, the reality behind Tolstoy’s grand “mirage.” In
Dostoevsky, His Life and Work
, Konstantin Mochulsky draws the ultimate conclusion about the family chronicle as Dostoevsky conceived it. The main theme of
The Adolescent
, he writes, is “
the problem of communion
: man is determined by his character, but his fate is defined in freedom,
in spite of his
character
. The influence of one personality on another is limitless; the roots of human interaction go down into metaphysical depths; the violation of this organic collectivity is reflected in social upheavals and political catastrophes.”
1
What Saltykov-Shchedrin saw taking place on the public way had its cause in what was taking place in the fundamental unity of the family, which could still serve as the image of Russian society in its inner, spiritual dimension.
The Adolescent
is the fourth of the five major novels that Dostoevsky wrote after the turning point of
Notes from Underground
(1864). These novels in their sequence represent an ascending movement from “underground” towards the cold, clear light at the end of
The Brothers Karamazov
.
The Adolescent
is the next-to-last step in this ascent. And yet it is the least known of the five novels, the least discussed in the vast critical literature on Dostoevsky, simply omitted, for instance, from such major readings of his work as Vyacheslav Ivanov’s
Freedom
and the Tragic Life
, Romano Guardini’s
Der Mensch und der Glaube
(“Man and Fate”), and the essays of the philosopher Lev Shestov. In
The Mantle of the Prophet
, the final volume of his critical biography of Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank refers to
The Adolescent
rather dismissively as “a curious hybrid of a novel” and “something of an anomaly among the great creations of Dostoevsky’s last period.” He finds that it lacks “the collision of conflicting moral-spiritual absolutes that invariably inspired his best work.” Edward Wasiolek, editor and annotator of The
Notebooks for
“
A Raw Youth
,”
2
simply calls it “a failure.”
It is true that
The Adolescent
lacks the dark intensity of
Crime and Punishment
,
The Idiot
, and
Demons
, the mephitic atmosphere, the whiff of brimstone that many readers consider Dostoevsky’s essence. It is very different in tone from the preceding novels. But that difference is a sign of its special place in the unity of Dostoevsky’s later work.
The Adolescent
is up to something else.
The distinctive tone of the novel is set by the adolescent narrator himself, that is, by the fact of his being an adolescent, speaking in the first person and writing as an amateur. Dostoevsky’s notebooks show how carefully he weighed the question of point of view, and with what effect in mind. In September 1874, during the early stages of planning the novel, he notes: “In
the first person
it would be much more original, and show more love; also, it would require more artistic skill, and would be terribly bold, and shorter, easier to arrange; moreover, it would make the character of [the adolescent] as the main figure of the novel much clearer . . .” And a little further on: “A narrative
in the first person
is more original by virtue of the fact that the [adolescent] may very well keep skipping, in ultra-naïve fashion . . . to all kinds of anecdotes and details, proper to his development and immaturity, but quite impossible for an author conducting his narrative in regular fashion.” A few days later, he repeats: “In
the first person
it would be more naïve, incomparably more original, and, in its deviations from a smooth and systematic narrative, even more delightful.”
Dostoevsky had considered writing both
Crime and Punishment
and
The Idiot
in the first person, but had abandoned the idea. He came back to it in
The Adolescent
, which is his only novel with a first-person protagonist after
Notes from Underground
. The two have more than a little in common. For instance, both narrators, though they are constantly aware of the reader, deny any literary or artistic purpose and claim to be writing only for themselves. “I, however, am writing only for myself,” asserts the man from underground, “and I declare once and for all that even if I write as if I were addressing readers, that is merely a form, because it’s easier for me to write that way. It’s a form, just an empty form, and I shall never have any readers. I have already declared as much . . .” The adolescent, Arkady Dolgoruky, begins his “notes” with the declaration that he is “not writing for the same reason everyone else writes, that is, for the sake of the reader’s praises.” Later he says:
. . . The reader will perhaps be horrified at the frankness of my confession and will ask himself simple-heartedly: how is it that the author doesn’t blush? I reply that I’m not writing for publication; I’ll probably have a reader only in some ten years, when everything is already so apparent, past and proven that there will no longer be any point in blushing. And therefore, if I sometimes address the reader in my notes, it’s merely a device. My reader is a fantastic character.
Arkady also turns out to share some of the underground man’s opinions, for instance about rational egoism and social progress. At a meeting of young radicals, he delivers a perfect “underground” tirade:
Things are not at all clear in our society, gentlemen. I mean, you deny God, you deny great deeds, what sort of deaf, blind, dull torpor can make me act this way [i.e. nobly], if it’s more profitable for me otherwise? You say, “A reasonable attitude towards mankind is also to my profit”; but what if I find all these reasonablenesses unreasonable, all these barracks and phalansteries? What the devil do I care about them, or about the future, when I live only once in this world? Allow me to know my own profit myself: it’s more amusing. What do I care what happens to this mankind of yours in a thousand years, if, by your code, I get no love for it, no future life, no recognition of my great deed? No, sir, in that case I shall live for myself in the most impolite fashion, and they can all go to blazes!
The unaware reader would find it hard to tell which of the two is speaking.
But the differences between them are far more important. And the main difference is precisely Arkady’s adolescence. The underground man is trapped in the endless alternation of “Long live the underground!” and “Devil take the underground!” and has sat in his corner like that for forty years. Arkady Dolgoruky is young, fresh, resilient. Time and again he falls asleep after some disastrous blunder or crushing humiliation, sleeps soundly and dreamlessly, and wakes up feeling heartier than ever. The underground man is inwardly fixed; Arkady is all inner movement, constantly going beyond himself. His experiences do not bind him as the underground man’s do; they liberate him.
Why did Dostoevsky come to give such a privileged place to adolescence in his work? A brief sketch jotted down in his notebook sometime in October or November of 1867, years before he began writing
The Adolescent
, may suggest an answer. Among plans that would later be realized, we find a heading all in capitals, “A THOUGHT (POEM) / THEME WITH THE TITLE: ‘THE EMPEROR,’” followed by two pages of notes for a story based on the strange life of the Russian emperor Ivan VI, better known as Ivan Antonovich, who lived from 1740 to 1764. Ivan Antonovich was the son of Peter the Great’s niece, the empress Anna Ivanovna. She died the year he was born, and he was immediately proclaimed emperor, but he never reigned. In 1741 Elizaveta Petrovna, the daughter of Peter the Great, seized the throne and had the one-year-old emperor imprisoned in the Schlüsselburg fortress, where he remained until 1764, when a certain Lieutenant Mirovich attempted to restore him to the throne by means of a coup. The plot failed, and Ivan Antonovich was killed.
As his notes make clear, what interested Dostoevsky was not so much the historical episode as the thought of this boy growing up in complete isolation from the world: “Underground, darkness, a young man not knowing how to speak, Ivan Antonovich, almost twenty years old. Description of his
nature
. His development. He develops by himself, fantastic frescoes and images, dreams, a young girl (in a dream). He imagines her, having seen her from the window. Elementary notions of all things. Extravagant imagination . . .” And then the catastrophic confrontation of this isolated consciousness with reality. Dostoevsky made only a few notes for the story and never came back to it, but in imagining the situation of Ivan Antonovich, he was preparing himself for the portrayal of Prince Myshkin, Alyosha Karamazov, and, above all, Arkady Dolgoruky.
In the notes, Mirovich “finally declares to [Ivan Antonovich] that he is the emperor, that everything is possible for him. Visions of power.” “Everything is possible” – that is the link between Ivan Antonovich and the state of adolescence. “Visions of power” are certainly part of it in Arkady’s case. He has his “Rothschild idea” of achieving power by accumulating money. He also has a document sewn into his coat which he believes gives him power over certain people who are central to his life. He even tells himself that the consciousness of power is enough, without the need to exercise it, and declaims, “enough for me / Is the awareness of it,” quoting from Pushkin’s The Covetous Knight. Further on he comments:
They’ll say it’s stupid to live like that: why not have a mansion, an open house, gather society, exert influence, get married? But what would Rothschild be then? He’d become like everybody else. All the charm of the “idea” would vanish, all its moral force. As a child I had already learned by heart the monologue of Pushkin’s covetous knight; Pushkin never produced a higher idea than that! I’m also of the same mind now.
Dostoevsky himself reread Pushkin’s “little tragedy” during the summer of 1874, while staying at the German health spa of Ems and trying to start work on his new novel. “Please God only that I can begin the novel and draw up at least some plan,” he wrote to his wife. “Beginning is already half the affair.” But he read Pushkin instead and “grew intoxicated with ecstasy.” Here, clearly, is the origin of Arkady’s vision of power. And it is linked, through Pushkin, with the struggle between son and father. Mikhail Bakhtin notes in
Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Poetics that, starting with
The Gambler
in 1866, The
Covetous Knight
“exercises a very fundamental influence on all of Dostoevsky’s subsequent works, especially on
The Adolescent
and The Brothers Karamazov.” The “Rothschild idea” is Arkady’s underground. “My idea is – my corner,” he says. “The whole goal of my ‘idea’ is – solitude . . . Yes, I’ve thirsted for power all my life, power and solitude.” The formula is perfect and reveals the extent of Arkady’s willed refusal of human communion. This refusal will be sorely tested in the course of the novel.
But if the phrase “everything is possible” suggests an abstract dream of power, it also describes adolescence in another way, as that state of uncertainty, ignorance, incompleteness, but also of richness and exuberance, in which everything is literally still possible. In fact, far more turns out to be possible than Arkady ever suspected. He keeps being astonished, keeps stumbling into situations he was unaware of, keeps speaking out of turn. This constant maladroitness sets the tone of the novel and also governs its events. This was the freshness and naïveté Dostoevsky was seeking, a sense of the world and the person being born at the same time.
Thus “adolescence” also determines the compositional method of the novel, which is characteristic of Dostoevsky’s later work in general. Bakhtin was the first to define it clearly:
The fundamental category in Dostoevsky’s mode of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but
coexistence
and
interaction
. He saw and conceived his world primarily in terms of space, not time. Hence his deep affinity for the dramatic form. Dostoevsky strives to organize all available meaningful material, all material of reality, in one time-frame, in the form of a dramatic juxtaposition, and he strives to develop it extensively . . . For him, to get one’s bearings on the world meant to conceive all its contents as simultaneous, and
to guess at their
interrelationships in the cross-section of a single moment
.
The action of
The Adolescent
covers a period of some four months, but each of its three parts takes place in only three days: the 19th to 21st of September, the 15th to 17th of November, and “three fateful days” in December. Nothing takes shape over time; everything is already there and only waiting to be revealed. Arkady writes his notes a year after the start of events, and it is then that his real awakening occurs, as he says himself : “On finishing my notes and writing the last line, I suddenly felt that I had reeducated myself precisely through the process of recalling and writing down.” In a notebook entry for 18 September 1874, Dostoevsky settled the problem of the lapse between the events and the time of writing. He had been considering a space of five years, but decided: “. . . better make it a year. In the tone of the narrative, the whole impact of a recent shock would still be apparent, and a good many things would still remain unclear, yet at the same time there would be this first line: ‘A year, what a tremendous interval of time!’” All through the novel, Dostoevsky plays with fine humor on this “adolescent” sense of time, the double view of “what I was” and “what I am now,” meaning “now that
so much
time has passed.” The Russia of the 1870s thus appears as the sum of all the conflicts and contradictions that enter Arkady’s consciousness in the space of those few days, as he comes to understand them, and insofar as he comes to understand them, a year later.