The Adolescent

As in Demons, the action is concentrated around the hero, but the personality of Versilov is revealed differently than the personality of Stavrogin. The hero of Demons is connected with the other characters only ideologically; the personality of Versilov includes in itself the entire history of his family; it is organically collective.³ Stavrogin is the ideological center of the novel; Versilov is the vital center.

“The crisis of communion,” as Mochulsky says, “is shown in that organic cell from which society grows – in the family.” Within and around Versilov’s accidental family, Dostoevsky juxtaposes all the “material of reality” in Russian society at that time. “The novel contains all the elements,” he wrote in his notebook as early as September 1874, and he specifies:

The civilized and desperate, idle and skeptical higher intelligentsia – that’s [Versilov].

Ancient Holy Russia – Makar’s family.

What is holy, good about new Russia – the aunt.

A [great] family gone to seed – the young Prince (a skeptic, etc.)

High society – the funny and the abstractly ideal type.

The young generation – the [adolescent], all instinct, knows nothing.

Vasin – hopelessly ideal.

Lambert – flesh, matter, horror, etc.

If we add the swindler Stebelkov, the revolutionary populists (particularly the gentle suicide Kraft), and the young widow Akhmakov and her father, we will have a virtually complete list of the characters in The Adolescent. Together they make up an image of the general disorder, the “Russian chaos,” that was Dostoevsky’s main preoccupation in all his great novels.

Versilov is the “vital center” of the novel, and the essence of the disorder is reflected in him, but he is always Versilov as seen by his son, and thus he remains an elusive, mysterious, contradictory figure. Arkady’s perception of him is constantly changing, going to extremes of condemnation and adoration, owing to his own ignorance and naıvete’. But the contradictions are not only in Arkady’s perception, but in Versilov himself. As Mochulsky observes: “Versilov the philosopher-deist and bearer of the idea of ‘all-unity,’ and Versilov shattered by two loves – are one and the same man . . . Versilov suffers from all the infirmities of contemporary civilization: everything shifts, wavers, and doubles in his consciousness; ideas are ambiguous, truths – relative, faith – unbelief.” By letting the adolescent do the talking, Dostoevsky is able to present two dramas at once: the drama of Versilov’s life as the gradual revelation of the divided consciousness of his time, and the drama of Arkady’s coming to consciousness of precisely that drama, in himself as well as in Versilov. Arkady calls it “breadth,” as will Mitya Karamazov (“No, man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him down. Devil knows even what to make of him, that’s the thing!”). Olga Meerson, in her excellent study of Dostoevsky’s Taboos , calls it “the many-storiedness of any human soul.”

Dostoevsky has left us several portraits of liberal idealists from the generation of the 1840s – Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky in “A Nasty Anecdote,” Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky in Demons, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov in The Brothers Karamazov – but the portrait of Versilov is by far the fullest, the most serious and searching. He was not invented out of nothing; among his prototypes were two of the most important figures of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life: Alexander Herzen (1812–70) and Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev (1794– 1856). Herzen, the illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, attended Moscow University, where he joined a socialist circle and became an opponent of serfdom. He wrote several novels, was sent to internal exile for his views, and in 1847, having inherited a large fortune from his father, left Russia forever. The failure of the French revolution of 1848 disillusioned him with the West, and he lamented the death of Europe in a collection of letters entitled From the Other Shore (1850). Versilov shares his “nobleman’s yearning” and his sorrow. Versilov also speaks with Arkady about a “high cultural type” that has developed only in Russia, calling it “the type of universal suffering for all” – a phrase that had been applied to Herzen by the critic Nikolai Strakhov. Versilov’s “breadth” is also reminiscent of Herzen, who was both an aristocrat and a socialist, a defender of the workers and a connoisseur of beauty, an unbeliever but with a great nostalgia for Christianity, a permanent exile who repeatedly proclaimed his love of Russia.