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.
The distinctive tone of the novel is set by the adolescent narrator himself, that is, by the fact of his being an adolescent, speaking in the first person and writing as an amateur. Dostoevsky’s notebooks show how carefully he weighed the question of point of view, and with what effect in mind. In September 1874, during the early stages of planning the novel, he notes: “In the first person it would be much more original, and show more love; also, it would require more artistic skill, and would be terribly bold, and shorter, easier to arrange; moreover, it would make the character of [the adolescent] as the main figure of the novel much clearer . . .” And a little further on: “A narrative in the first person is more original by virtue of the fact that the [adolescent] may very well keep skipping, in ultra-naïve fashion . . . to all kinds of anecdotes and details, proper to his development and immaturity, but quite impossible for an author conducting his narrative in regular fashion.” A few days later, he repeats: “In the first person it would be more naïve, incomparably more original, and, in its deviations from a smooth and systematic narrative, even more delightful.”
Dostoevsky had considered writing both Crime and Punishment and The Idiot in the first person, but had abandoned the idea. He came back to it in The Adolescent, which is his only novel with a first-person protagonist after Notes from Underground. The two have more than a little in common. For instance, both narrators, though they are constantly aware of the reader, deny any literary or artistic purpose and claim to be writing only for themselves. “I, however, am writing only for myself,” asserts the man from underground, “and I declare once and for all that even if I write as if I were addressing readers, that is merely a form, because it’s easier for me to write that way. It’s a form, just an empty form, and I shall never have any readers. I have already declared as much . . .” The adolescent, Arkady Dolgoruky, begins his “notes” with the declaration that he is “not writing for the same reason everyone else writes, that is, for the sake of the reader’s praises.” Later he says:
. . . The reader will perhaps be horrified at the frankness of my confession and will ask himself simple-heartedly: how is it that the author doesn’t blush? I reply that I’m not writing for publication; I’ll probably have a reader only in some ten years, when everything is already so apparent, past and proven that there will no longer be any point in blushing. And therefore, if I sometimes address the reader in my notes, it’s merely a device. My reader is a fantastic character.
Arkady also turns out to share some of the underground man’s opinions, for instance about rational egoism and social progress. At a meeting of young radicals, he delivers a perfect “underground” tirade:
Things are not at all clear in our society, gentlemen. I mean, you deny God, you deny great deeds, what sort of deaf, blind, dull torpor can make me act this way [i.e. nobly], if it’s more profitable for me otherwise? You say, “A reasonable attitude towards mankind is also to my profit”; but what if I find all these reasonablenesses unreasonable, all these barracks and phalansteries? What the devil do I care about them, or about the future, when I live only once in this world? Allow me to know my own profit myself: it’s more amusing. What do I care what happens to this mankind of yours in a thousand years, if, by your code, I get no love for it, no future life, no recognition of my great deed? No, sir, in that case I shall live for myself in the most impolite fashion, and they can all go to blazes!
The unaware reader would find it hard to tell which of the two is speaking.
But the differences between them are far more important. And the main difference is precisely Arkady’s adolescence. The underground man is trapped in the endless alternation of “Long live the underground!” and “Devil take the underground!” and has sat in his corner like that for forty years. Arkady Dolgoruky is young, fresh, resilient. Time and again he falls asleep after some disastrous blunder or crushing humiliation, sleeps soundly and dreamlessly, and wakes up feeling heartier than ever. The underground man is inwardly fixed; Arkady is all inner movement, constantly going beyond himself. His experiences do not bind him as the underground man’s do; they liberate him.
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.