The Adolescent Read Free

whole goal of my ‘idea’ is – solitude . . . Yes, I’ve thirsted for power all my life, power and solitude.” The formula is perfect and reveals the extent of Arkady’s willed refusal of human communion. This refusal will be sorely tested in the course of the novel.
    But if the phrase “everything is possible” suggests an abstract dream of power, it also describes adolescence in another way, as that state of uncertainty, ignorance, incompleteness, but also of richness and exuberance, in which everything is literally still possible. In fact, far more turns out to be possible than Arkady ever suspected. He keeps being astonished, keeps stumbling into situations he was unaware of, keeps speaking out of turn. This constant maladroitness sets the tone of the novel and also governs its events. This was the freshness and naïveté Dostoevsky was seeking, a sense of the world and the person being born at the same time.
    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