The Adolescent narrates the story of Arkady Makarovich Dolgurky, the protagonist, who matures from a naive 19-year-old adolescent to a more understanding adult. Dostoevsky initially named the novel The Raw Youth – a fitting description of the protagonist. Arkady is an idealist. He sees things in black and white. There are no in-betweens for him. He cannot accept that both good and evil can exist in a person. This is where his torment begins. He expects a role model of perfection in his biological father, but the stories he hears about his father while growing up shake this idealistic view. Arkady struggles to reconcile with true human nature, and it takes a few disastrous incidents and embroiling himself in other people’s intrigues for him to gain a mature perspective on life.
Arkady has a strained relationship with his biological father, Versilov. The fact of illegitimacy weighs heavily on him. The societal discrimination due to his lack of social standing embitters him. He loves his father and imagines that he doesn’t blame his father for his social status, but his actions contradict thought. He loves his father, but at the same time, resents him. Arkady’s legitimacy was impossible, since his mother was already a married woman. But she leaves her legal husband to live with Versilov. This fact also troubles young Arkady, who views her mother as a model of virtue. His troubled mind tortures him and his “non-conventional” family. Family confrontation is at the center of the story. Through the love-hate relationship Arkady has with his father, Dostoevsky explores the decline of the family unit in Russia. Dostoevsky observed with pain the general chaos that was encroaching on Russian society, and he pinned it on family disunity. The generation gap created a strained relationship between the parents and children. The young thinking didn’t harmonize with the old. This drifted the two generations apart and led the young astray in Dostoevsky’s view.
The Adolescent is thematically powerful with Dostoevsky exploring the social degeneration, moral decline, and religious apathy. Dostoevsky was worried about the youth of Russia. He didn’t condone the moral decadence and the materialism of the youth, and was shocked by their increasing communist and nihilistic bent. Dostoevsky found his idealism in Christian love (which he emphatically advocated in The Idiot), and he was by no means happy to see how the Russian people were distancing themselves from the true principles of God. He also saw that Russia was slowly plunging into disorder and chaos, and pined for the old order of things when the Russian nobility was strong. Versilov’s fall as a master represented the social downfall of Russia. With the fall of the nobility was the fall of the firmly established order and principles, which Dostoevsky deplored.
Dostoevsky creates some interesting, well-developed characters in The Adolescent. They aren’t perfect, and it’s these very imperfections that make them interesting. The story is full of conflicts and intrigues. I have always admired Dostoevsky for his mastery in creating conflicts, and here, he does it in style by creating family frictions between real and accidental families, and forming a complex love tangle. Though the story was initially a little slow in pacing, it quickly turned into a page-turner. The choice of the first-person narrative, which is a rare feature in the Dostoevskian canon, also helped maintain the rapid movement of the story.
Dostoevsky’s writing is powerful. He addresses your inner self. That is why readers around the world and over time have connected strongly with his work. As in many celebrated novels, The Adolescent is also a powerfully written novel with potent themes. Though a few incoherencies were detected in the beginning chapters, soon this gave way to a solid flow that chained me fast to the story. It was an absolutely delightful and fascinating reading experience. I admit that I was initially skeptical, but Dostoevsky never stops pulling a surprise on you.
Rating: 4/5
