The Adolescent (1875)

The novel opens with Arkady trying to find out what kind of man his father, Versilov, is.  Most of the tension of Part One revolves around Versilov’s character.  Is he a good guy or a bad guy?  Arkady really wants to know because he looks up to his father as someone to emulate, and he wants to make sure his faith is justified.  

But the more Arkady investigates, the harder it is to determine if the net morality of Versilov is good or bad.  He’s an incongruous mixture of both.  This means, on the whole, that Versilov isn’t a great ideal for Arkady to strive for.  In fact, Versilov reveals that he was hoping Arkady could be his ideal.  

The loss of his ideal sends Arkady spinning.  He can’t do without an ideal.  His interaction with Versilov only further laid bare the thirst Arkady has (and I, the reader, have) for an ideal.  To be without an ideal is unthinkable.  That’s how Lambert is.  He believes everyone’s a scoundrel, and this makes him the biggest scoundrel of all because he runs around trying to blackmail, scam, and rob everyone because, after all, they deserve it anyway.  Arkady quotes Versilov saying that “Othello killed Desdemona and then himself not because he was jealous, but because his ideal was taken from him.”

But where is Arkady to find an ideal?  As the book progresses, more and more characters demonstrate that many if not all people have what comes to be known as “breadth.”  Breadth means two things.  First, that people, even in their best actions, can have a carnivorousness mixed in right along side their virtue.  Lambert, as a career blackmailer, tells Arkady that he has seen the dark sides of people otherwise considered pillars of virtue: “You don’t know what they’re capable of!”    But secondly, breadth means that no one is too far gone to suddenly surprise us with sincere love.  Most of the characters in the novel, as soon as I’m ready to write them off as hopelessly selfish, suddenly gush unexpected goodness that was there all along.  This is most clearly seen in the merchant Skotoboinikov.  His greedy cruelty leads to the death of five children.  Just when I think this guy is hopelessly evil, he about faces and devotes his life to charity and to endless efforts to make reperations to the mother of these children.  Breadth means that there is in everyone a startlingly high capability for good and evil, simultaneously.  Arkady himself goes directly from helping a consumptive old woman to the most disreputable gambling den.

In the section of the novel that expounds on human breadth, I found myself thinking—this book better not stop there!  It’s not enough for me to just say humans are mysteriously broad.  We are, but, if that’s it, that’s unbearably depressing.

Dostoevsky agrees, and I think this is why he includes the character Vasin.  Vasin cynically finds all people the same.  Vasin does horrible things to people because he’s too indifferent to care all that much.  We must have an ideal!  To stop at breadth would lead me to Vasin’s horrific indifference.  

This phenomenon of breadth, however, makes people impossible to judge.  Arkady often finds himself in a position, when confronted with this strange mix of good and bad of those around him that he has lost the ability to evaluate them.  “A human being,” he says, “is such a complex machine that in some cases there’s no figuring him out.”  

What further complicates Arkady’s ability to judge the moral standing of the other characters is that he can’t do so without implicating himself.  When Arkady was trying to ascertain if Versilov was grooming for exploitation an impoverished young woman named Olya, Arkady ends up planting the idea in her that Versilov might be doing so, which contributes to her suicide.  In the effort to decipher Versilov’s darkness, Arkady implicates himself in it.  Later, when Arkady uncovers Versilov’s carnivorous infatuation for Katerina, a feeling that more resembles hate than love, Arkady discovers that same impulse within himself.  This deranged passion is captured when Arkady says to Katerina, “I couldn’t even have said how tall you were.  I saw you and just went blind.”

If there is such a thing as breadth in me, that means if I try to judge someone else for following an evil impulse, I find that I myself am implicated in my own judgement.  This concept is a working out of an idea Dostoevsky wrote about two years earlier in an essay called “Environment.”  In this essay, Dostoevsky claims that a court of law can only justly sentence a criminal if the jury also sentences themselves because the individual is responsible for the crime, and we all are responsible for a society that fosters the environment of crime.  According to Dostoevsky, judgement is only just if its conviction includes the judge.  

This is most powerfully demonstrated when Arkady starts making a scene about Versilov’s wrongs at Makar Ivanovich’s (Arkady’s stepfather’s) deathbed.  Makar Ivanovich has a frail heart and extreme distress could kill him.  When Arkady thoughtlessly brings that distress into the room, Versilov reproves him, and here’s how Arkady describes the tone of Versilov’s reproof:

“Extreme sadness, the most sincere, the fullest, was expressed in his features.  Most surprising of all was that he looked as if he were guilty: I was the judge, and he was the criminal.”

This moment is a great triumph for Versilov because he has the honesty to see that in this situation, he could justly reprove Arkady because he felt the full weight of his own implication in the reproof.

But to simply implicate oneself in all judgements is also grotesque.  The old Prince Sokolsky shows how this can go wrong.  Arkady describes him as “weak but tenderhearted” who “ended by beginning to suffer and blame himself alone for everything.”  Indeed, the more his loved ones misbehaved, the more he lost his mind.  We can’t stop here either!

Thankfully, the novel doesn’t stop here.  Right after the depth of Arkady’s humiliation and inner chaos, he encounters an ideal that anchors him.  This sequence is essential.  Arkady isn’t able to experience any sort of rebirth until he’s accused of being a thief in a gambling den—to be outcast from the society furthest from what’s noble.  

At this time, Arkady recalls a memory.  These significant memories from childhood that suddenly and graciously come to mind are essential to Dostoevsky’s conception of rebirth.  Dostoevsky himself had such an experience, which he relates in “The Peasant Marey.”  When he was in prison, he remembered the kindness a peasant had shown him when he was a boy, and the recalling of this memory changed Dostoevsky’s perspective toward his fellow prisoners.  Dostoevsky, in his famous speech about Pushkin, also says that these memories are the source of Tatyana’s strength in Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin.  And in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha’s final injunction to his boy-disciples is to “remember”—to remember the goodness they experienced in their hearts when they loved their dying friend, that this memory would be useful to their future development.  Dostoevsky seems to believe that a key agent of change in moments of great transformation often involves a recalling of a precious memory from childhood.

Such is the case for Arkady.  He suddenly remembers his mother coming to visit him at his boarding school where he was much abused.  He showed little love for his mother at the time because his shame before his abusers prevented him.  But recalling this incident, he sees how much he did and does love his mother and how much his mother loves him.

What prevented Arkady from showing his mother his love was that he wanted to prove to his bullying classmates that he was not a “lackey.”  He didn’t want to show how poor and needy he was.  This motivation demonstrates another interesting theme of the novel—the relationship between class distinctions and one’s own moral self-appraisal.  

Language has a tendency to blur the lines between levels of class and levels of morality.  We can see this in our own language in the fact that the word “villain” used to signify someone who was lower class.  This is also seen in words like “noble.”  I suppose it’s natural for us to use our class labels metaphorically to distinguish levels in our inner life.  C.S. Lewis writes about this phenomenon at length in his Studies in Words.  

The same equivocation is happening with Arkady.  His self-conception is greatly influenced by the fact that he is the illegitimate son of a nobleman.  He (and his classmates) see this as a state of almost moral humiliation, especially since his birth was the result of exploitative adultry of a master against one of his servants.  Much of the carnivorous side of Arkady is characterized by a desire to prove to others that he is not a “lackey” morally.  Showing how much he missed his mother in front of the others would be, in his mind, to expose a sort of inner poverty that he found degrading.

But when he has his most degrading experience—humiliatingly shoved by the fiancé of the woman he’s obsessed with, and then thrown out of a gambling den—this obsessive desire to prove himself is hopelessly defeated, and so for a moment, he is relieved of that desire, which gives his mind space to recast that old memory and to notice the love that was always there inside him.

After this memory, Arkady has an encounter with his step-father, Makar Ivanovich.  In this encounter, Arkady finally finds a more reliable ideal.  But how is that possible?  Is Makar Ivanovich an exception to the rule of breadth?  Has he somehow succeeded in being all-good?

No.  The ideal associated with Makar Ivanovich works differently than the one Arkady was hoping to find in Versilov.  Arkady goes out of his way to describe his step-father’s weakness, which Makar himself is acutely aware.  It’s difficult to precisely describe how the ideal functions within Makar.  It is him, but it also isn’t.  It seems to hover over him.  His very weakness seems to strengthen its effect.  He has peace with his weakness because of the mysterious availability of this inner resource.  He has the something that Arkady lacks, the something that Arkady desperately wants.  Arkady labels this something “seemliness.”

Almost as soon as Arkady tastes this ideal, he assumes it as his own.  At first he wants to escape the others, so as not to have his “seemliness” tainted by them.  But before long, Arkady finds himself drawn back into the drama.  He seems to do so at least partly out of his old desire to prove to them his importance, which he sees as having been raised by his newly acquired “seemliness.”  He wants to show them that he is seemlier than them.  

This tension between Arkady’s desire for his new ideal of seemliness and his desire to prove to others that he is seemly forks Arkady’s path into two distinct possibilities.  At Arkady’s crisis, two characters make their entrance into the action: Arkady’s stepfather, Makar Ivanovich, and Arkady’s old bully-classmate, Lambert.  The novel’s goodness centers around Makar, and the novels evil centers around Lambert.  Thus Arkady has before him a choice between good and evil.  

The drama of Part Three revolves around the fact that Arkady knows that Lambert is disgusting, he knows that Lambert is luring him into a trap, he knows that Lambert just wants to use him, but, step by step, Arkady wades into the filth anyway because he wants to show them that he’s someone to be reckoned with.  The great irony here is that the act of trying to prove himself not a “lackey,” with no will or character, is the very thing which causes him to become one.  This wish is what plays him into Lambert’s hands.  Arkady’s confidence that he’s smarter and better than Lambert is exactly what makes him Lambert’s dupe.  Once Arkady tastes “seemliness,” he becomes intoxicated with it and thinks it can cancel out his own “breadth.”  He forgets that key to Makar Ivanovich’s seemliness is the awareness of one’s inability to stand above breadth. 

Most of the tension driving Part Three is that Arkady possesses a letter that, if Lambert gets hold of it, could ruin Katerina.  While I’m reading, I’m practically shouting to Arkady, “Don’t do it,” but he keeps getting nearer and nearer.  When he finally decides that he’s going to do it, his motives are surprising.  His first motive is that he desires to save Versilov from his destructive obsession with Katerina.  

Trying to save goes even worse than trying to judge.  Saving implies that one can be the source of the ideal, which is to lose Makar Ivanovich’s characteristic awareness of weakness.  Tellingly, Arkady soon admits that saving Versilov isn’t his only motive.  He also wants to ruin Katerina out of his vengeful, jealous infatuation with her.  That Arkady has both of these motives is significant.  Just as judging implicates himself in the judgement, so saving implicates himself in the need to be saved.  Both are muscular attempts to hold oneself above “breadth,” which means to blind oneself to one’s own capacity for evil, which is to move closer to evil.  If someone is unwilling to acknowledge that fire can burn, they are more likely to be careless around fire, and so are more likely to get burned.  

Arkady does not save Versilov, yet Versilov is saved and Katerina is not ruined.  Versilov is saved by the very consequences that Arkady is trying to prevent, showing that one can most easily receive the ideal when they most feel their need of it.