A Russian Adrian Mole

‘Have you ever heard of this?’ A friend of mine handed over a substantial paperback she’d discovered in a bookshop – The Adolescent by Dostoyevsky. ‘No, I haven’t,’ I said, puzzled because I thought I was familiar with most of his work.

All right, admit it, you’ve never heard of it either – although maybe I underestimate the Slightly Foxed readership. Wondering how many other people had never heard of the novel, I put the question to several well-read acquaintances, none of whom recognized it. One or two suggested there might be another writer called Dostoyevsky. A third pointed out that the title might be different in another translation – maybe it was just Crime and Punishment under another name. And indeed, there are other translations. But no one had ever heard of The Teenager by Dostoyevsky either. Someone surmised that it was possibly an early work, dismissed by critics as being immature and of no significance. I Googled, and there it was, The Adolescent, written between The Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. So it was no dud attempt early in the novelist’s career. It was written when he was at the height of his powers. Why had no one seemingly ever heard of it? Hermann Hesse apparently loved it. One early critic said it was a bad book, not up to Dostoyevsky’s usual standard. But was that enough to condemn it to oblivion? I picked up a copy in a half-hearted way, already predisposed to dislike it. Nobody’s heard of it. It can’t be as good as his other work or we’d all know about it. It’s a Bildungsroman. Sigh. (What an ugly word Bildungsroman is, although recent additions to the English language, ‘blog’, ‘podcast’ and ‘chatbot’, run it a close second.) Anyway, here I am to redeem Dostoyevsky’s book. As soon as I dipped into The Adolescent I felt as if the Ancient Mariner was tugging at my sleeve, forcing me to listen to a compelling voice that was also subversively humorous. Perhaps no one had expected Dostoyevsky to turn his hand to a comic novel, experimental in form, at this point in his career, but there is a hint of humour even in the opening sentence: ‘Unable to hold back, I’ve sat down to record the story of my first steps on life’s path, when I could actually get by without doing so.’ The young narrator is Arkady Dolgoruky, the illegitimate son of a landowner and a serf. His mother now lives with the landowner, Andrei Petrovich Versilov, though still legally married to a peasant, Makar Dolgoruky. Arkady makes it clear that what we are reading are his ‘Notes’. He is about to embark on his ‘Petersburg’ novel but this isn’t it. We are soon thrown into the turbulence of adolescent moods, swinging from arrogant to obsequious, sullen to ecstatic. It was not long before I realized we were in the presence, albeit at greater length and in more depth, of a Russian Adrian Mole, that amusing, petulant, self-absorbed character who also thought of himself as an intellectual and an outsider. ‘I’ve now read through what I’ve just written and see that I’m a lot more intelligent than appears from my writing’ says Arkady. ‘So what have I actually said? I haven’t expressed a hundredth part of it. I feel that it’s all come out as petty, crass, superficial and even somewhat more juvenile than my years.’ Arkady longs for a meaningful relationship with his biological father. He is also restless and looks forward to leaving home and realizing his dream. He has an idea, a big idea, which he finally reveals to us. ‘My idea is to become a Rothschild.’ This is the polar opposite of themes in The Demons, Dostoyevsky’ previous novel, about socialist and anarchist revolutionaries. We follow Arkady’s tortuous relationships with his mother, his sister, his biological father, his legal father, step-siblings, aunt, schoolfriends and various acquaintances. In true adolescent fashion, he blows hot and cold with them all. Here is an example of his tangled feelings about his mother:

She may be the only one I love yet I torment her. But my anger didn’t abate and I suddenly began to cry from anger. She thought I was crying from tenderness and leaned over to kiss me. I grudgingly put up with it but truly hated her at that moment. But also I always loved Mama . . .

The book is divided into three parts. Because it was written for serialization, nearly every chapter ends with a cliffhanger. A rollercoaster series of events is seen through Arkady’s eyes: two suicides, threat of a duel, recurring gambling debts, eavesdropping, betrayal and blackmail. But the main thrust of the story is that Arkady and his biological father Versilov have become infatuated with the same woman, Katerina Akhmakova. She had once written a letter claiming that her father was demented and should be in an asylum. If he ever found out, her father would disinherit her. By chance, Arkady has come into possession of the letter. He holds on to it, sometimes intending to destroy it, sometimes intending to give it to Katerina in the hope that this will secure her affections. There follows a brilliant scene in which Versilov opens his heart to his illegitimate son, allowing their relationship to develop the sort of depth that Arkady has always craved. Arkady spills the beans about his feelings for Katerina. His father, for his part, tells him that he is no longer in love with her. So it is profoundly shocking when, the next day, Versilov proposes marriage to Katerina. After this, the plot takes so many twists and turns that I must confess I sometimes got lost, but even so I couldn’t escape the excitement as we hurtled towards catastrophe. However, there is one aspect of the book which, to my knowledge, makes it unlike anything else written by Dostoyevsky. From the outset, with wry humour and playful irony, he gives us a lesson on what it is to be a writer – the challenges and pitfalls involved. It’s a feat of post-modernism even before modernism arrived. Arkady tells us: ‘If in my notes I sometimes address a reader, it’s just a device.’ Later he outlines an experience shared by many writers:

I may have done a bad thing in sitting down to write. There’s infinitely more inside me than what I have expressed in words. An idea, even if a bad one, is always more profound while it’s still within you, but when put into words – it’s largely ridiculous and dishonourable. I’m trying to write the whole truth and it’s terribly hard.

He acknowledges another sort of challenge for a writer: ‘Still, it’s extremely hard to describe someone’s face. I’m not at all good at it.’ However, he solves this problem elsewhere with the wonderful sentence: ‘There was something in his face that I didn’t really want to have in mine.’ And then Dostoyevsky points to the problem of structure and what to put where. As Arkady says:

Incidentally, as I bring this ‘new character’ on to the scene in my ‘Notes’ I’ll briefly cite his service record which, by the way, is of no significance. It’s just to make things clearer to the reader and because I can’t see where else I’d put this record as the story unfolds.

And then, outrageously, he introduces a character he can’t be bothered to describe, reminding writers that we don’t need to include every detail:

He’s not worth describing and I wasn’t on friendly terms with him, on the whole. But he was, for various reasons equally not worth mentioning, in a position to give me the address of a man I desperately needed to see.

Tolstoy once complained that Dostoyevsky was an untidy writer. But the sheer energy, voltage and depth of his psychological insights make a degree of slapdashery worthwhile. And sometimes, those insights still resonate: ‘I’ve marvelled a thousand times at this aptitude in man – predominantly in the Russian, I believe – to nurture in his soul the loftiest ideals alongside the most abject vileness . . .’ After we have been catapulted to the final catastrophe, there is an epilogue to calm us down. Arkady sends the ‘Notes’ to his mentor in Moscow. The mentor returns them with some advice to the would-be novelist on the Russian novel. And here we seem to be as close as possible to hearing Dostoyevsky’s own voice speaking through the mentor and giving his opinion on the art of the novel. The mentor says that writers from the nobility (Turgenev and Tolstoy, for instance) have the advantage of a family life shaped by beautiful forms and stable traditions. This is only a historical version of life ‘which would be an artistically accomplished representation of a Russian mirage that really existed – so long as the reader didn’t guess it was a mirage’. But Dostoyevsky did not come from the nobility, and he explored the lives of fractured, accidental families, the insulted and the humiliated. The mentor continues: ‘But what is a writer to do if he does not want to write in a purely historical genre and longs for what is current? He must guess and . . . make mistakes.’ One hundred and fifty or so years later, I would not count The Adolescent as a mistake.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Pauline Melville 2025