. . . The reader will perhaps be horrified at the frankness of my confession and will ask himself simple-heartedly: how is it that the author doesnt blush? I reply that Im not writing for publication; Ill 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, its merely a device. My reader is a fantastic character.
Arkady also turns out to share some of the underground mans 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 its 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: its 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 Arkadys 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 mans 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 Greats 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 Arkadys 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 Pushkins The Covetous Knight. Further on he comments:
Theyll say its 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? Hed 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 Pushkins covetous knight; Pushkin never produced a higher idea than that! Im also of the same mind now.