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 landowners literature. It has said everything it had to say (magnificently in Leo Tolstoy). But this word, a landowners in the highest degree, was the last. A new word , replacing the landowners, 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 Tolstoys 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. 1What 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 Ivanovs Freedom and the Tragic Life , Romano Guardinis 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 Dostoevskys 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 , 2simply 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 Dostoevskys 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 Dostoevskys 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. Dostoevskys 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 its easier for me to write that way. Its 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 readers praises. Later he says: