The Adolescent

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 Great’s 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 Arkady’s 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 Pushkin’s The Covetous Knight. Further on he comments:

They’ll say it’s 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? He’d 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 Pushkin’s covetous knight; Pushkin never produced a higher idea than that! I’m also of the same mind now.

Dostoevsky himself reread Pushkin’s “little tragedy” during the summer of 1874, while staying at the German health spa of Ems and trying to start work on his new novel. “Please God only that I can begin the novel and draw up at least some plan,” he wrote to his wife. “Beginning is already half the affair.” But he read Pushkin instead and “grew intoxicated with ecstasy.” Here, clearly, is the origin of Arkady’s vision of power. And it is linked, through Pushkin, with the struggle between son and father. Mikhail Bakhtin notes in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics that, starting with The Gambler in 1866, The Covetous Knight “exercises a very fundamental influence on all of Dostoevsky’s subsequent works, especially on The Adolescent and The Brothers Karamazov.” The “Rothschild idea” is Arkady’s underground. “My idea is – my corner,” he says. “The whole goal of my ‘idea’ is – solitude . . . Yes, I’ve thirsted for power all my life, power and solitude.” The formula is perfect and reveals the extent of Arkady’s willed refusal of human communion. This refusal will be sorely tested in the course of the novel.

But if the phrase “everything is possible” suggests an abstract dream of power, it also describes adolescence in another way, as that state of uncertainty, ignorance, incompleteness, but also of richness and exuberance, in which everything is literally still possible. In fact, far more turns out to be possible than Arkady ever suspected. He keeps being astonished, keeps stumbling into situations he was unaware of, keeps speaking out of turn. This constant maladroitness sets the tone of the novel and also governs its events. This was the freshness and naïveté Dostoevsky was seeking, a sense of the world and the person being born at the same time.