The Adolescent

Thus “adolescence” also determines the compositional method of the novel, which is characteristic of Dostoevsky’s later work in general. Bakhtin was the first to define it clearly:

The fundamental category in Dostoevsky’s mode of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but coexistence and interaction. He saw and conceived his world primarily in terms of space, not time. Hence his deep affinity for the dramatic form. Dostoevsky strives to organize all available meaningful material, all material of reality, in one time-frame, in the form of a dramatic juxtaposition, and he strives to develop it extensively . . . For him, to get one’s bearings on the world meant to conceive all its contents as simultaneous, and to guess at their interrelationships in the cross-section of a single moment.

The action of The Adolescent covers a period of some four months, but each of its three parts takes place in only three days: the 19th to 21st of September, the 15th to 17th of November, and “three fateful days” in December. Nothing takes shape over time; everything is already there and only waiting to be revealed. Arkady writes his notes a year after the start of events, and it is then that his real awakening occurs, as he says himself : “On finishing my notes and writing the last line, I suddenly felt that I had reeducated myself precisely through the process of recalling and writing down.” In a notebook entry for 18 September 1874, Dostoevsky settled the problem of the lapse between the events and the time of writing. He had been considering a space of five years, but decided: “. . . better make it a year. In the tone of the narrative, the whole impact of a recent shock would still be apparent, and a good many things would still remain unclear, yet at the same time there would be this first line: ‘A year, what a tremendous interval of time!’” All through the novel, Dostoevsky plays with fine humor on this “adolescent” sense of time, the double view of “what I was” and “what I am now,” meaning “now that so much time has passed.” The Russia of the 1870s thus appears as the sum of all the conflicts and contradictions that enter Arkady’s consciousness in the space of those few days, as he comes to understand them, and insofar as he comes to understand them, a year later.

This simultaneity and juxtaposition of events in an extremely restricted time frame leads to a downplaying of the importance of the linear plot – the fabula, as he liked to call it – in Dostoevsky’s novels. In The Adolescent the intrigue turns on the document sewn into Arkady’s coat. It is melodramatic and highly improbable, and Dostoevsky exploits it to the last drop. But it is not what the novel is about.

Near the beginning of the first notebook for The Adolescent, Dostoevsky wrote and underlined: “Disintegration is the principal visible idea of the novel.” Later, after establishing a new plan, he returned to the same theme: “Title of the novel: ‘Disorder.’ The whole idea of the novel is to demonstrate that we have now general disorder, disorder everywhere and wherever you go, in society, in business, in guiding ideas (of which, for that very reason, there aren’t any), in convictions (which, for the same reason, we don’t have), in the disintegration of the family unit.” Arkady Makarovich Dolgoruky is the illegitimate son of a bankrupt landowner by the name of Andrei Petrovich Versilov. He has been raised by foster parents and tutors, has seen his mother, a peasant woman from Versilov’s estate, two or three times in his life and his father only once. His legal father, the peasant Makar Dolgoruky, he has never seen. On graduating from high school in Moscow, he goes to Petersburg, armed with his “Rothschild idea,” to meet his family and above all to confront Versilov, whose love he longs for and of whose disgrace and wrongdoing he has all sorts of notions and even some evidence.

As father, husband, and lover, Versilov is the center of a complicated “accidental” family made up of his legitimate children by his deceased wife, his illegitimate children, Arkady and Liza, and their mother Sofya Andreevna, whom he lives with but cannot marry because her husband, Makar Dolgoruky, is still alive. There is also the so-called “aunt,” Tatyana Pavlovna, who acts as a sort of fairy godmother to them all. Konstantin Mochulsky comments on the shift in emphasis from Dostoevsky’s previous novel: