The Adolescent

In fact, Nekrasov even has a certain presence in The Adolescent. The figure of Makar Dolgoruky is based in part on the description of the old peasant wanderer in Nekrasov’s poem “Vlas,” as Dostoevsky signals by having Versilov quote a line from it when he first describes Makar to Arkady. Dostoevsky had written an admiring article on “Vlas” in 1873, a year before he began work on the novel. But there is another more hidden presence. Towards the end of the tribute he wrote in 1877 on the occasion of Nekrasov’s death, he speaks of a dark side to the poet’s life, which he foretold in one of his earliest poems. And he quotes three stanzas describing the young provincial’s arrival in the capital – “The lights of evening lighting up, / There was wind and soaking rain / . . . on my shoulders a wretched sheepskin, / In my pocket fifteen groats” – and ending:

No money, no rank, no family,

Short of stature and funny looking,

Forty years have passed since then –

In my pocket I’ve got a million.

This was the adolescent poet’s dream of power. “Money,” Dostoevsky writes, “that was Nekrasov’s demon! . . . His was a thirst for a gloomy, sullen, segregated security with a view to dependence on no one.” This soul that sympathized with all of suffering Russia also had its “Rothschild idea” and its underground – the same “breadth” that Arkady Dolgoruky was alarmed to discover not only in Versilov but in himself.

But there was something besides Nekrasov’s invitation that drew Dostoevsky to Notes of the Fatherland. He was anxious not to lose touch with the younger generation, and saw that the shift in revolutionary ideology from nihilism to populism might allow for more inner movement in the youth of the seventies and offer a chance of reconciliation. In the last years of his life, Dostoevsky tried repeatedly to act as a mediator among the conflicting factions, generations, and classes in Russia, hoping that a restoration of communion might still be possible in that disintegrating world. That is the significance of Arkady’s role in The Adolescent, and of his final attempt to become an “all-reconciler.”

The tonal range of this high and serious comedy is remarkably broad, bordering at times on tragedy and at other times on farce. Dostoevsky was able to place himself unerringly in the mind and even the unconscious of a green nineteen-year-old and maintain his voice consistently. Arkady’s leitmotif is the word “stupid” – the perfect adolescent word, repeated in countless variations: his fear of looking stupid, of saying something stupid, his judgments of the stupidity of other people, their stupid ideas, their stupid feelings, their stupid curtains. The play on “Dolgoruky” – the name of an ancient Russian princely family, while Arkady is not a prince but “simply Dolgoruky,” and illegitimate at that – runs through the whole novel, coming to a hilarious climax in the police station. At the beginning of his notes, Arkady mentions that in Moscow he “lodged in the quarters of the unforgettable Nikolai Semyonovich.” In the epilogue, Nikolai Semyonovich, who has read through the manuscript at Arkady’s request, mockingly returns this rather pompous epithet to him: “And never, my unforgettable Arkady Makarovich, could you have employed your leisure time more usefully . . .” (Incidentally, he has just seen himself described as “something of a cold egoist, but unquestionably an intelligent man.”)

The epilogue gives the crowning touch to this formal play. In it the “unforgettable” Nikolai Semyonovich, as requested, gives his reflections on Arkady’s notes – that is, on Dostoevsky’s novel, minus the epilogue. He comments on its themes – the present disorder, the longing for “seemliness,” the lack of “beautiful finished forms” – and discusses the problems facing the contemporary Russian novelist (with allusions to both War and Peace and Anna Karenina). After a rather perceptive characterization of Versilov, he observes: “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.” Dostoevsky is, of course, precisely that novelist of the unfinished, the unfinalized, of possible exaggerations and oversights, who can only “guess . . . and be mistaken.”

Richard Pevear

PART ONE

Chapter One

I