The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s

Chapter Three: The Adolescent : Remaking the Noble Family Novel

101 Chapter Three The Adolescent: Remaking the Noble Family Novel SINCE THE MOMENT OF ITS FIRST PUBLICATION in the pages of Fatherland Notes, The Adolescent has been the subject of critical misunderstanding , condemnation, and neglect. The first negative reviews began to appear in the thick journals and newspapers after the publication of the novel’s first installment in January 1875.1 The work has been marginalized in Dostoevsky scholarship ever since, frequently excluded from studies of Dostoevsky’s novels, and treated as the author’s least successful work.2 Among the negative criticism of the novel, one review stands out in its perspicacity, its assessment of the novel’s success on its own terms, and its contextualization of the author’s creative aims against the backdrop of the contemporary Russian novel. This fictional review, which comments on the “notes” that form the main part of The Adolescent, can be found within the frame of the novel itself (13:452–55). The Adolescent is presented as the autobiographical “notes” (zapiski) of Arkady Dolgoruky, the illegitimate son of the landowner Versilov and his former serf Sophia. Ostensibly written a year after the events they relate, the “notes” provide an account of the adolescent’s relations with his “accidental family.” Abandoned at an early age in a Moscow boarding school, Arkady moves to Petersburg on completion of his studies, is reunited with his family, and becomes embroiled in the plots and subplots of his father Versilov and his various legitimate and illegitimate offspring. The Adolescent is thus possessed of a dual structure; it is a work within a work, the “notes” of the adolescent Arkady contained within the novel of Dostoevsky.3 The autobiographical notes are bounded by a fictional frame that constitutes the novel’s hermeneutic key, a letter from the adolescent’s Moscow landlord Nikolai Semyonovich containing a critical reading of the adolescent’s “notes” and a treatise on the problems of the contemporary Russian novel. Nikolai Semyonovich sees in the illegitimate Arkady’s notes a rejection of the Russian novel’s traditional values and preoccupations.4 He observes that throughout its history the Russian novel has taken for its subject the family life and values of the hereditary nobility, an ideal novelistic subject epitomized in Readings 102 Pushkin’s evocation of the “traditions of the Russian family” in Eugene Onegin .5 By contrast, Arkady has created himself as a new kind of novelistic hero, a “member of an accidental family,” who typifies the “general disorder” of the contemporary moment. Nikolai Semyonovich’s letter articulates many of the complaints about the Russian novelistic tradition that Dostoevsky had been making in his notebooks and letters since the late 1860s. It also gets to the core of the difficulties facing the novelist who seeks to give artistic form to social “formlessness.” Contemplating Arkady’s status as “accidental” hero, Nikolai Semyonovich considers the starkly different creative choices open to the contemporary novelist. He can follow in the footsteps of Pushkin and Tolstoy and take for his subject the “finished forms of honor and duty” of the Russian nobility. Or he can take his hero from an accidental family and thus depict the contemporary moment in all its disorder. In the first case, the novelist risks losing fidelity to contemporary reality and falling into the “historical genre,” creating “an artistically finished picture of a Russian mirage.” In the second, the novel may take on the very formlessness it seeks to represent, collapsing under the weight of its fragmented subject. While such a novel would demonstrate in its very unfinished quality a fidelity to the fragmented reality of the contemporary moment, it might lack artistic shape and in its very disintegration threaten the future of novelistic form itself. The fragmentary nature of Arkady’s “notes” demonstrates his commitment to the second path. Conscious of his own nostalgia for the literary certainties of the past enshrined in the works of Pushkin and Tolstoy and anxious to retain the memory of their “beautiful order,” Nikolai Semyonovich is troubled by the formlessness of Arkady’s disordered narrative. Nonetheless, his reading of Arkady’s autobiography forces him to acknowledge that the traditional Russian novel has had its day. In Arkady’s notes he sees the seeds of a new kind of novel, one that marks a decisive break with the Russian novel’s own generic history. Nikolai Semyonovich’s review of Arkady’s autobiography sets the adolescent up as a representative hero for the chaotic historical moment of the 1870s...