The Adolescent

In the notes, Mirovich “finally declares to [Ivan Antonovich] that he is the emperor, that everything is possible for him. Visions of power.” “Everything is possible” – that is the link between Ivan Antonovich and the state of adolescence. “Visions of power” are certainly part of it in Arkady’s case. He has his “Rothschild idea” of achieving power by accumulating money. He also has a document sewn into his coat which he believes gives him power over certain people who are central to his life. He even tells himself that the consciousness of power is enough, without the need to exercise it, and declaims, “enough for me / Is the awareness of it,” quoting from Pushkin’s The Covetous Knight. Further on he comments:

They’ll say it’s stupid to live like that: why not have a mansion, an open house, gather society, exert influence, get married? But what would Rothschild be then? He’d become like everybody else. All the charm of the “idea” would vanish, all its moral force. As a child I had already learned by heart the monologue of Pushkin’s covetous knight; Pushkin never produced a higher idea than that! I’m also of the same mind now.

Dostoevsky himself reread Pushkin’s “little tragedy” during the summer of 1874, while staying at the German health spa of Ems and trying to start work on his new novel. “Please God only that I can begin the novel and draw up at least some plan,” he wrote to his wife. “Begi

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 theirinterrelationships 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 begi

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 ca

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 co

“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: