The Adolescent

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.