The Adolescent

In the early 1870s, the radical satirist M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin declared that in Russia the family novel was dead: “The family, that warm and cosy element . . . which once gave the novel its content, has vanished from sight . . . The novel of contemporary man finds its resolution in the street, on the public way, anywhere but in the home.” In 1875, however, two novels began to appear serially in rival journals: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in the conservative Russian Messenger, and Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent in the populist Notes of the Fatherland. Though they have nothing else in common, both are family novels in excelsis. Their appearance at that time suggests that, far from having vanished from sight, the family was still the mirror of Russian social life, and the fate of the family was a key to Russia’s destiny.

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 landowner’s literature. It has said everything it had to say (magnificently in Leo Tolstoy). But this word, a landowner’s in the highest degree, was the last. A new word, replacing the landowner’s, 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 Tolstoy’s 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.”¹ What 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 Ivanov’s Freedom and the Tragic Life, Romano Guardini’s 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 Dostoevsky’s 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,”² simply 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 Dostoevsky’s 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 Dostoevsky’s later work. The Adolescent is up to something else.