The Adolescent

In the beginning, Arkady says of Versilov: “I absolutely had to find out the whole truth in the very shortest time, for I had come to judge this man.” He learns in the course of the novel that it is very difficult to judge something as complex, as “many-storied,” as another person, that what he – and we, too, of course – would have considered a moral failing may in fact be a higher kind of virtue. At one point, for instance, Versilov advises him: “My friend, always let a man lie a little – it’s innocent. Even let him lie a lot. First, it will show your delicacy, and second, you’ll also be allowed to lie in return – two enormous profits at once. Que diable! one must love one’s neighbor!” The moral condemnation of lying is unexpectedly displaced by Christ’s second commandment, and Versilov’s ironic tone is only a cover for his sincerity. Again, Arkady thinks – as most of us do – that honesty implies speaking everything out, but when he asks Versilov to explain something during one of their conversations, Versilov demurs:

“In short, it’s – one of those long stories that are very boring to begin, and it would be much better if we talked about other things, and still better if we were silent about other things.”

“All you want to do is be silent.”

“My friend, remember that to be silent is good, safe, and beautiful.”

“Beautiful?”

“Of course. Silence is always beautiful, and a silent person is always more beautiful than one who talks.”

These are dialogues of innocence and experience. The examples could be multiplied many times. Olga Meerson has shown that the question of speaking or keeping silent is of central importance in The Adolescent. Arkady learns to respect the silences of others. He finally comes to understand, as Meerson says, “that he has no choice but to keep silent about the scandalousness of this fallen world and of himself in it. The taboo on paying attention to this scandalousness is absolute because nobody imposes it on the character-narrator; he simply begins to perceive it as the only means for survival – moral, spiritual, psychological, or narrational.” He learns the meaning of tactfulness, of attention, of not judging others; he learns the meaning of forgiveness. That is the beginning of his struggle for order in the disordered world around him.

When The Adolescent started to appear in Notes of the Fatherland in 1875, it caused considerable amazement. The journal, under the influence of the critic N. K. Mikhailovsky, had become the organ of the populists, who abandoned the extreme rationalism and negation of the nihilists of the 1860s and preached a “going to the land” and the communal values of the Russian peasantry. The editor of the journal at that time was the poet and publicist Nikolai Nekrasov, an old acquaintance of Dostoevsky’s and his longtime ideological opponent. Dostoevsky’s devastating attack on the nihilists in Demons (1871– 72) had turned most of the radical intelligentsia against him. Though they may have had a lingering respect for him as the “prisoner of Omsk,” who had served a ten-year term of hard labor and exile for his own “antigovernment” activities, they hardly expected to find him in their company. On the other hand, the publication of The Adolescent in such an extreme-left journal brought accusations of betrayal and opportunism from Dostoevsky’s conservative friends, many of whom abandoned him. What explains this apparent switch of loyalties?

In April 1874, when Dostoevsky offered Mikhail Katkov, editor of The Russian Messenger, the plan for a new novel, Katkov turned it down. (Only later did Dostoevsky learn that Katkov already had a big novel coming in – Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for which he was paying twice as much as Dostoevsky had asked.) Then, quite unexpectedly, Nekrasov came to him and offered to take the novel for Notes of the Fatherland. Dostoevsky’s wife wrote in her memoirs: “My husband was very glad to renew friendly relations with Nekrasov, whose talent he rated very highly.” Though she added that “Fyodor Mikhailovich could in no case give up his fundamental convictions.” He remained somewhat skeptical of this sudden interest from his former enemies, and vowed that he “would not concede a line to their tendency,” but in the end Nekrasov’s enthusiastic response to the first parts won him over. “All night I sat and read, I was so captivated,” the poet told him. “And what freshness, my dear fellow, what freshness you have! . . . Such freshness no longer exists in our age, and not one writer has it.” Thirty years before, Nekrasov had greeted Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk, with the same enthusiasm and had been largely responsible for his initial success. This closing of the circle must have moved Dostoevsky deeply.