The Adolescent

I’ve been reading Dostoyevsky for over thirty years and it still amazes me that it’s taken me so long to track down this novel. I read all the better known novels some time around 1988 and I’ve reread them all at least once or twice since, along with the novellas, short stories and diaries. I confess to being a big fan of Dostoyevsky, despite his problematic side. What’s that problematic side? Anti-semitic, anti-Polish and, for some people most problematic of all, the shift from idealistic socialist to curmudgeonly conservative. The saving grace in Dostoyevsky’s case is that it took a firing squad and years of forced labour in Siberia to wring the idealism out of him. Unlike many writers from relatively privileged backgrounds, Dostoyevsky did experience genuine hardship and suffering, and that’s one thing I do admire about him.Anyway, I finally tracked down a copy of this novel that I’d never read before. The narrator and central character is Arkady Dolgoruky, a young man with what must have been an unusual background by Victorian standards. Not only is he illegitimate, his mother is married to a man – Dolgoruky – who has given him his surname and patronymic, but his real father is someone else entirely. He has a younger sister in the same situation (same father and mother) and an older half-brother and half-sister (same father, different mother) and they’re both legitimate. To add to the hero’s woes, the man who gave him his name is a former serf but people associate the name Dolgoruky with a noble family. So when he introduces himself as Dolgoruky, they often say, “Prince Dolgoruky?” Eventually he comes to delight in saying words to the effect of, “No, I’m a bastard and the Dolgorukys I belong to are the peasant branch.”The novel is essentially about an abandoned son trying to discover who and what his real father is and yearning to form a filial relationship with him. This is Dostoyevsky of course. His father, Versilov, is a strange one. Amoral, a womaniser, some kind of liberal idealist (or liberal when it comes to his own behaviour). It soon becomes very doubtful whether young Arkady is ever going to understand this man, or be understood by him. As usual Dostoyevsky makes use of all the props and themes of Victorian melodrama: secret documents whose contents could destroy a family, swindlers and con artists, eavesdropping, corrupt servants who betray their masters….What raises this novel from melodrama to work of genius is Dostoyevsky’s fascination for mental illness, self-destruction, honour and truth and the way he presents them as the bedrock of our humanity. If you’ve enjoyed The Idiot or The Devils, you’ll love this.I normally read Dostoyevsky in Penguin Classics editions (they have commissioned at least two newer translations of Crime and Punishment since I first read it, and one of The Brothers Karamazov) but for some mystifying reason they have never touched this novel, so I had to settle for the hardback edition from the Everyman Library. This is an American translation, but despite that it generally reads well. There is an informative introduction and a useful set of footnotes.

Buy it. Read it. Enjoy it.

Very pleased with product

I have no complaints..,it went smoothly