A NOTE ON THE TOPOGRAPHY OF ST. PETERSBURG
The city was founded in 1703 by a decree of the emperor Peter the Great and built on the delta of the river Neva, which divides into three main branches – the Big Neva, the Little Neva, and the Nevka – as it flows into the Gulf of Finland. On the left bank of the Neva is the city center, where the Winter Palace, the Senate, the Admiralty, the Summer Garden, the theaters, and the main thoroughfares such as Nevsky Prospect, Bolshaya Millionnaya, and Bolshaya Morskaya are located. On the right bank of the Neva before it divides is the area known as the Vyborg side; the right bank between the Nevka and the Little Neva is known as the Petersburg side, where the Peter and Paul Fortress, the oldest structure of the city, stands; between the Little Neva and the Big Neva is Vassilievsky Island. To the south, some fifteen miles from the city, is the suburb of Tsarskoe Selo, where the empress Catherine the Great built an imposing palace and many of the gentry had summer houses.
TRANSLATIONS OF DOSTOEVSKY
BY PEVEAR AND VOLOKHONSKY
The Adolescent (2003)
The Idiot (2002)
Demons (1994)
Notes from Underground (1993)
Crime and Punishment (1992)
The Brothers Karamazov (1990)
INTRODUCTION
In the early 1870s, the radical satirist M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin declared that in Russia the family novel was dead: “The family, that warm and cosy element . . . which once gave the novel its content, has vanished from sight . . . The novel of contemporary man finds its resolution in the street, on the public way, anywhere but in the home.” In 1875, however, two novels began to appear serially in rival journals: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in the conservative Russian Messenger, and Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent in the populist Notes of the Fatherland. Though they have nothing else in common, both are family novels in excelsis. Their appearance at that time suggests that, far from having vanished from sight, the family was still the mirror of Russian social life, and the fate of the family was a key to Russia’s destiny.
Tolstoy defied the radicals by portraying the ordered life of his own class, the hereditary aristocracy, and the tragedy of its disruption – that is, by looking back at a world which, as Dostoevsky saw, had become a fantasy. “But you know,” Dostoevsky wrote to his friend Apollon Maikov, “this is all landowner’s literature. It has said everything it had to say (magnificently in Leo Tolstoy). But this word, a landowner’s in the highest degree, was the last. A new word, replacing the landowner’s, does not exist yet.” In The Adolescent, which he conceived in part as an answer to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky found that new word, portraying what he calls the “accidental family” of his time, the reality behind Tolstoy’s grand “mirage.” In Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, Konstantin Mochulsky draws the ultimate conclusion about the family chronicle as Dostoevsky conceived it. The main theme of The Adolescent, he writes, is “the problem of communion: man is determined by his character, but his fate is defined in freedom, in spite of his character. The influence of one personality on another is limitless; the roots of human interaction go down into metaphysical depths; the violation of this organic collectivity is reflected in social upheavals and political catastrophes.”1 What Saltykov-Shchedrin saw taking place on the public way had its cause in what was taking place in the fundamental unity of the family, which could still serve as the image of Russian society in its inner, spiritual dimension.
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-naive 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 naive, 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
