But there was something besides Nekrasovs 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 Arkadys 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. Arkadys 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 Arkadys 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 Arkadys notes that is, on Dostoevskys 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
UNABLE TO RESTRAIN myself, I have sat down to record this history of my first steps on lifes career, though I could have done as well without it. One thing I know for certain: never again will I sit down to write my autobiography, even if I live to be a hundred. You have to be all too basely in love with yourself to write about yourself without shame. My only excuse is that Im not writing for the same reason everyone else writes, that is, for the sake of the readers praises. If I have suddenly decided to record word for word all that has happened to me since last year, then I have decided it as the result of an inner need: so struck I am by everything that has happened. I am recording only the events, avoiding with all my might everything extraneous, and above allliterary beauties. A literary man writes for thirty years and in the end doesnt know at all why he has written for so many years. I am not a literary man, do not want to be a literary man, and would consider it base and indecent to drag the insides of my soul and a beautiful description of my feelings to their literary marketplace. I anticipate with vexation, however, that it seems impossible to do entirely without the description of feelings and without reflections (maybe even banal ones): so corrupting is the effect of any literary occupation on a man, even if it is undertaken only for oneself. The reflections may even be very banal, because something you value yourself will quite possibly have no value in a strangers eyes. But this is all an aside. Anyhow, here is my preface; there wont be anything more of its kind. To business; though theres nothing trickier than getting down to some sort of businessmaybe even any sort.
II
I BEGIN, THAT IS, I would like to begin my notes from the nineteenth of September last year, that is, exactly from the day when I first met . . .
But to explain whom I met just like that, beforehand, when nobody knows anything, would be banal; I suppose even the tone is banal: having promised myself to avoid literary beauties, I fall into those beauties with the first line. Besides, in order to write sensibly, it seems the wish alone is not enough. I will also observe that it seems no European language is so difficult to write in as Russian. I have now reread what Ive just written, and I see that Im much more intelligent than what Ive written. How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him? Ive noticed that about myself more than once in my verbal relations with people during this last fateful year and have suffered much from it.