The Adolescent Read Free Page A

to demonstrate that we have now general disorder, disorder everywhere and wherever you go, in society, in business, in guiding ideas (of which, for that very reason, there aren’t any), in convictions (which, for the same reason, we don’t have), in the disintegration of the family unit.” Arkady Makarovich Dolgoruky is the illegitimate son of a bankrupt landowner by the name of Andrei Petrovich Versilov. He has been raised by foster parents and tutors, has seen his mother, a peasant woman from Versilov’s estate, two or three times in his life and his father only once. His legal father, the peasant Makar Dolgoruky, he has never seen. On graduating from high school in Moscow, he goes to Petersburg, armed with his “Rothschild idea,” to meet his family and above all to confront Versilov, whose love he longs for and of whose disgrace and wrongdoing he has all sorts of notions and even some evidence.
    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 novel:
    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