The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a huge, ambitious novel and at first I felt like I was adrift in a small boat on a vast, unfathomable ocean. Eventually, though, I got my bearings and I surrendered to the thrill and pleasure of it. In a way it is unlike any other novel by Dostoyevsky and yet it has echoes of all of them and a foreshadowing too of his last, great masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov.

These are the “notes” of Arkady Dolgoruky, writing of events that occurred one year earlier when he was just 19 years old. Writing in the first person and trying to preserve the truthfulness of his immature impressions as he sets out to meet his “accidental family”, Dolgoruky is like a teenage version of the narrator in Notes From The Underground. He rebels against the socialist ideology of Russian intellectuals in the mid nineteenth century with its insistence on rationalism and the idea that people will do what is morally right simply because it is logical to act in a way that is for the greater good of society. As we all know, people are not like that. They are selfish, passionate and perverse. Dolgoruky has his own agenda. He wants to become as rich as Rothschild. But he also yearns for something more spiritual. He would like to be able to look up to his father, who is a landowner, and much of the novel is about the relationship that develops between father and son as Dolgoruky confronts his father in St Petersburg and unravels the details of his mysterious past. Dolgoruky is learning as he goes and at the end of the novel he is much wiser and more settled. So one aspect of the ambitiousness of this novel is how it seeks to convey that process of adolescent self-discovery, of bewilderment and error, through a first person narrative where the narrator has, now, in the present, a different perspective from what he had then during the events of the story. You can only properly appreciate this technical achievement of the novel when you read it for a second or third time because there is so much else going on in it.

I will not try to comment on the plot. Some people say it is melodramatic as if that’s a failing. Well, maybe it is but I love melodrama and I particularly love Dostoyevsky’s melodrama. The story really comes alive in the last two hundred pages as all the strands of the plot come together and build towards a sensational climax. To return to the oceanic metaphor, it is like a tidal surge that sweeps you up and hurtles you towards the shore.

This is one of Dostoyevsky’s greatest gifts to humanity, works that allows us to experience the exhilaration and thrill of reading. You have to be careful not to rip the pages because you know, even while you are racing through them, that you are going to come back and read them again because the ideas are so deep and the characterisations are so fundamentally truthful.

But there are flashes of brilliance earlier in the novel too. When Dolgoruky acquires some money and starts gambling he is like the narrator of The Gambler. Of course, Dostoyevsky was a gambler too, and he brings to this section of the story first-hand knowledge of how it feels to be an addict and how you rationalise your addiction and give it, also, an aesthetic dimension, as if you are doing something beautiful. These are the ineluctable Dostoyevskian themes. Heightened sensibility, passion, addiction, and the contradictions in our natures that make us at once sublime and shameful.

I really enjoyed the conclusion of the novel too, a sort of calm reflection on events by Arkady’s former tutor. It puts everything into context and is funny in a dry, novelistic sort of way. In fact there is quite a lot of dry humour in the novel. I do not usually think of Dostoyevsky as being funny. But he is clearly a very self-conscious artist and creator. None of his effects are “accidental”. And occasionally he will let you glimpse the artist behind the art, his dry, self-conscious sense of humour, as he sets the events of his story into some wry perspective, using his unsuspecting and immature narrator as a tool.

But there is a real seriousness of purpose here, in the conclusion, as in the rest of the novel. The author never loses sight of the spiritual dimension. Though we may at times despise Dolgoruky, we cannot dismiss him because he is like all of us. Yes, I say that even though I am a woman and I nearly dropped the book in disgust at the way Dolgoruky talks about women. I forgive him that even though I am not a Christian.

I may not be a Christian but I certainly have room in my heart for one strange, gentle, irritable, patriotic, prejudiced, epileptic and holy Russian Orthodox believer in Christ who can do a word-perfect imitation of adolescence. God bless you, Fyodor Mikhailovich! Rest in peace.

Oh, but for the record, women are not snakes.