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 noveclass="underline"
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.
The biographical parallels of Versilov and Chaadaev are even more striking, and in fact, during the earliest stages of his work on The Adolescent, Dostoevsky gave the name of Chaadaev to his protagonist. Chaadaev was a friend and slightly older contemporary of Pushkin’s, a Guards officer of the high nobility, a handsome, intelligent, and spirited man, who took part in the Napoleonic campaigns of 1812 and the occupation of Paris, resigned his commission in 1821, and wandered in Europe before returning to Russia. In 1836, the publication of the first of his Philosophical Letters Written to a Lady (there were eight letters in all, written in French) caused an enormous scandal by its sharp criticism of Russia’s backwardness and isolation among the nations of Europe, which he blamed partly on the Orthodox Church. The shock was so great that the emperor Nicholas I had Chaadaev declared mad, forbade the publication of the remaining letters, and kept their author under permanent surveillance until his death. But the Letters circulated in manuscript, and in 1862 the first three were published in Paris, where Dostoevsky bought and read them. Dostoevsky also knew Herzen’s admiring portrait of Chaadaev in his book of reflections and reminiscences, My Past and Thoughts (1852 – 55). In Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, Jacques Catteau lists the convergent details of Chaadaev’s and Versilov’s biographies:
Both are handsome and are pampered by women who admire them, protect them, and try to curb their prodigality. Both are inordinately proud, unconsciously egotistical, and of a wounding casualness. Both are remarkably intelligent and witty, profound and ironic. They have the same manners of the spoiled aristocrat, and the refined elegance of the dandy. They served in the same Guards regiment, haughtily refused to fight a duel, wandered for a long time in Europe, and underwent the fascination of Catholicism. Both fell in love with a whimsical and sick young girl . . . before becoming infatuated with a woman who reminds them of a world that is nobler and less empty than their own . . .
We might add that Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letters are addressed to a lady, while Versilov is referred to ironically at one point as a “women’s prophet.” Versilov is a complex and original figure, not simply an amalgam of his prototypes, but he is one deeply rooted in the intellectual and spiritual life of the Russian intelligentsia.