In short, its one of those long stories that are very boring to begin, and it would be much better if we talked about other things, and still better if we were silent about other things.
All you want to do is be silent.
My friend, remember that to be silent is good, safe, and beautiful.
Beautiful?
Of course. Silence is always beautiful, and a silent person is always more beautiful than one who talks.
These are dialogues of innocence and experience. The examples could be multiplied many times. Olga Meerson has shown that the question of speaking or keeping silent is of central importance in The Adolescent . Arkady learns to respect the silences of others. He finally comes to understand, as Meerson says, that he has no choice but to keep silent about the scandalousness of this fallen world and of himself in it. The taboo on paying attention to this scandalousness is absolute because nobody imposes it on the character-narrator; he simply begins to perceive it as the only means for survival moral, spiritual, psychological, or narrational. He learns the meaning of tactfulness, of attention, of not judging others; he learns the meaning of forgiveness. That is the beginning of his struggle for order in the disordered world around him.
When The Adolescent started to appear in Notes of the Fatherland in 1875, it caused considerable amazement. The journal, under the influence of the critic N. K. Mikhailovsky, had become the organ of the populists, who abandoned the extreme rationalism and negation of the nihilists of the 1860s and preached a going to the land and the communal values of the Russian peasantry. The editor of the journal at that time was the poet and publicist Nikolai Nekrasov, an old acquaintance of Dostoevskys and his longtime ideological opponent. Dostoevskys devastating attack on the nihilists in Demons (1871 72) had turned most of the radical intelligentsia against him. Though they may have had a lingering respect for him as the prisoner of Omsk, who had served a ten-year term of hard labor and exile for his own antigovernment activities, they hardly expected to find him in their company. On the other hand, the publication of The Adolescent in such an extreme-left journal brought accusations of betrayal and opportunism from Dostoevskys conservative friends, many of whom abandoned him. What explains
this apparent switch of loyalties?
In April 1874, when Dostoevsky offered Mikhail Katkov, editor of The Russian Messenger , the plan for a new novel, Katkov turned it down. (Only later did Dostoevsky learn that Katkov already had a big novel coming in Tolstoys Anna Karenina , for which he was paying twice as much as Dostoevsky had asked.) Then, quite unexpectedly, Nekrasov came to him and offered to take the novel for Notes of the Fatherland . Dostoevskys wife wrote in her memoirs: My husband was very glad to renew friendly relations with Nekrasov, whose talent he rated very highly. Though she added that Fyodor Mikhailovich could in no case give up his fundamental convictions. He remained somewhat skeptical of this sudden interest from his former enemies, and vowed that he would not concede a line to their tendency, but in the end Nekrasovs enthusiastic response to the first parts won him over. All night I sat and read, I was so captivated, the poet told him. And what freshness, my dear fellow, what freshness you have! . . . Such freshness no longer exists in our age, and not one writer has it. Thirty years before, Nekrasov had greeted Dostoevskys first novel, Poor Folk , with the same enthusiasm and had been largely responsible for his initial success. This closing of the circle must have moved Dostoevsky deeply.
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 Nekrasovs 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 Nekrasovs death, he speaks of a dark side to the poets life, which he foretold in one of his earliest poems. And he quotes three stanzas describing the young provincials 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 Ive got a million.
This was the adolescent poets dream of power. Money, Dostoevsky writes, that was Nekrasovs 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.