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.
The gradual emergence of Versilov in Arkady’s consciousness is the overarching story of The Adolescent. It is varied by a number of inset stories, a technique that Dostoevsky would use even more extensively in The Brothers Karamazov. These are all spoken stories, each in a voice quite distinct from Arkady’s written notes: the tragic story of the young student Olya told by her mother; the comic story of the big stone told by Arkady’s landlord, Pyotr Ippolitovich; the three stories told by Makar Dolgoruky; and Versilov’s account of his dream of the golden age and the last days of mankind. Coming from experiences very different from Arkady’s, they form a counterpoint and something of a corrective to his “first person adolescent” point of view, as does the epilogue written by Arkady’s former tutor, Nikolai Semyonovich.
Makar Dolgoruky, the wanderer, is himself an inset figure in the novel. He appeared suddenly and as if fully formed in Dostoevsky’s early notes, and he also appears suddenly in Arkady’s life, to die just as Arkady “resurrects.” He is Dostoevsky’s only full-length portrait of a Russian peasant, a slightly idealized figure out of the past of “Holy Russia,” an image of peasant piety and strength, of mirth, and of spiritual beauty. In his notes, Dostoevsky worked especially on his voice, filling several pages with characteristic phrases and expressions, full of “scriptural sweetness” and cast in the half-chanting cadences of peasant speech. Makar Dolgoruky is the antithesis of Versilov. Arkady bears his name only by chance, but the old man becomes a spiritual father for him. After meeting him for the first time and talking with him only briefly, the adolescent bursts out feverishly: “I’m glad of you. Maybe I’ve been waiting for you a long time. I don’t love any of them; they have no seemliness . . . I won’t go after them, I don’t know where I’ll go, I’ll go with you . . .” But later he makes the same declaration to Versilov, when the latter finally seems to welcome him as his son: “‘Now I have no need for dreams and reveries, now you are enough for me! I will follow you!’ I said, giving myself to him with all my soul.” Arkady stands between these two fathers, these embodiments of two very different Russias. He loses one and in the end saves the life of the other.
In the beginning, Arkady says of Versilov: “I absolutely had to find out the whole truth in the very shortest time, for I had come to judge this man.” He learns in the course of the novel that it is very difficult to judge something as complex, as “many-storied,” as another person, that what he – and we, too, of course – would have considered a moral failing may in fact be a higher kind of virtue. At one point, for instance, Versilov advises him: “My friend, always let a man lie a little – it’s innocent. Even let him lie a lot. First, it will show your delicacy, and second, you’ll also be allowed to lie in return – two enormous profits at once. Que diable! one must love one’s neighbor!” The moral condemnation of lying is unexpectedly displaced by Christ’s second commandment, and Versilov’s ironic tone is only a cover for his sincerity. Again, Arkady thinks – as most of us do – that honesty implies speaking everything out, but when he asks Versilov to explain something during one of their conversations, Versilov demurs:
“In short, it’s – one of those long stories that are very boring to begin, and it would be much better if we talked about other things, and still better if we were silent about other things.”
“All you want to do is be silent.”
“My friend, remember that to be silent is good, safe, and beautiful.”
“Beautiful?”
“Of course. Silence is always beautiful, and a silent person is always more beautiful than one who talks.”
These are dialogues of innocence and experience. The examples could be multiplied many times. Olga Meerson has shown that the question of speaking or keeping silent is of central importance in The Adolescent. Arkady learns to respect the silences of others. He finally comes to understand, as Meerson says, “that he has no choice but to keep silent about the scandalousness of this fallen world and of himself in it. The taboo on paying attention to this scandalousness is absolute because nobody imposes it on the character-narrator; he simply begins to perceive it as the only means for survival – moral, spiritual, psychological, or narrational.” He learns the meaning of tactfulness, of attention, of not judging others; he learns the meaning of forgiveness. That is the beginning of his struggle for order in the disordered world around him.
When The Adolescent started to appear in Notes of the Fatherland in 1875, it caused considerable amazement. The journal, under the influence of the critic N. K. Mikhailovsky, had become the organ of the populists, who abandoned the extreme rationalism and negation of the nihilists of the 1860s and preached a “going to the land” and the communal values of the Russian peasantry. The editor of the journal at that time was the poet and publicist Nikolai Nekrasov, an old acquaintance of Dostoevsky’s and his longtime ideological opponent. Dostoevsky’s devastating attack on the nihilists in Demons (1871– 72) had turned most of the radical intelligentsia against him. Though they may have had a lingering respect for him as the “prisoner of Omsk,” who had served a ten-year term of hard labor and exile for his own “antigovernment” activities, they hardly expected to find him in their company. On the other hand, the publication of The Adolescent in such an extreme-left journal brought accusations of betrayal and opportunism from Dostoevsky’s conservative friends, many of whom abandoned him. What explains this apparent switch of loyalties?
In April 1874, when Dostoevsky offered Mikhail Katkov, editor of The Russian Messenger, the plan for a new novel, Katkov turned it down. (Only later did Dostoevsky learn that Katkov already had a big novel coming in – Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for which he was paying twice as much as Dostoevsky had asked.) Then, quite unexpectedly, Nekrasov came to him and offered to take the novel for Notes of the Fatherland. Dostoevsky’s wife wrote in her memoirs: “My husband was very glad to renew friendly relations with Nekrasov, whose talent he rated very highly.” Though she added that “Fyodor Mikhailovich could in no case give up his fundamental convictions.” He remained somewhat skeptical of this sudden interest from his former enemies, and vowed that he “would not concede a line to their tendency,” but in the end Nekrasov’s enthusiastic response to the first parts won him over. “All night I sat and read, I was so captivated,” the poet told him. “And what freshness, my dear fellow, what freshness you have! . . . Such freshness no longer exists in our age, and not one writer has it.” Thirty years before, Nekrasov had greeted Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk, with the same enthusiasm and had been largely responsible for his initial success. This closing of the circle must have moved Dostoevsky deeply.
In fact, Nekrasov even has a certain presence in The Adolescent. The figure of Makar Dolgoruky is based in part on the description of the old peasant wanderer in Nekrasov’s poem “Vlas,” as Dostoevsky signals by having Versilov quote a line from it when he first describes Makar to Arkady. Dostoevsky had written an admiring article on “Vlas” in 1873, a year before he began work on the novel. But there is another more hidden presence. Towards the end of the tribute he wrote in 1877 on the occasion of Nekrasov’s death, he speaks of a dark side to the poet’s life, which he foretold in one of his earliest poems. And he quotes three stanzas describing the young provincial’s arrival in the capital – “The lights of evening lighting up, / There was wind and soaking rain / . . . on my shoulders a wretched sheepskin, / In my pocket fifteen groats” – and ending:
No money, no rank, no family,
Short of stature and funny looking,
Forty years have passed since then –
In my pocket I’ve got a million.
