Текст книги "The Adolescent"

TRANSLATORS’ NOTES

LIST OF PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

Russian names are composed of first name, patronymic (from the father’s first name), and family name. Formal address requires the use of first name and patronymic; diminutives (Arkasha, Lizochka, Sonya) are commonly used among family and intimate friends. The following is a list of the principal characters in The Adolescent, with diminutives and epithets. In Russian pronunciation, the stressed vowel is always long and unstressed vowels are very short.

Dolgorúky, Arkády Makárovich (Arkásha, Arkáshenka, Arkáshka): the adolescent, “author” of the novel.

–, Makár Ivánovich: his legal father.

–, Sófya Andréevna (Sónya, Sophie): his mother.

–, Lizavéta Makárovna (Líza, Lízochka, Lizók): his sister.

Versílov, Andréi Petróvich: natural father of Arkady and Liza.

–, Ánna Andréevna: Versilov’s daughter by his first marriage.

–, Andréi Andréevich: the kammerjunker, Versilov’s son by his first marriage.

Akhmákov, Katerína Nikoláevna (Kátya): young widow of General Akhmakov.

–, Lýdia (no patronymic): her stepdaughter. Sokólsky, Prince Nikolái Ivánovich: the old prince, Mme. Akhmakov’s father.

Prutkóv, Tatyána Pávlovna: the “aunt,” friend of the Versilov family.

Sokólsky, Prince Sergéi Petróvich (Seryózha): the young prince, no relation to Prince Nikolai Ivanovich.

Lambért, Mauríce: schoolfriend of Arkady’s, a Frenchman.

Verdáigne, Alphonsíne de (Alphonsina, Alphonsinka): Lambert’s girlfriend.

Dárya Onísimovna (no family name; her name changes to Nastásya Egórovna in Part Three): mother of the young suicide Ólya (diminutive of Ólga).

Vásin, Grísha (diminutive of Grigóry; no patronymic): friend of Arkady’s.

Stebelkóv (no first name or patronymic): Vasin’s stepfather. Pyótr Ippolítovich (no last name): Arkady’s landlord. Nikolái Semyónovich (no last name): Arkady’s tutor in Moscow.

–, Márya Ivánovna: Nikolai Semyonovich’s wife. Trishátov, Pétya [i.e., Pyótr] (no patronymic): the pretty boy. Andréev, Nikolái Semyónovich: le grand dadais.

Semyón Sídorovich (Sídorych; no last name): the pockmarked one.

A NOTE ON THE TOPOGRAPHY OF ST. PETERSBURG

The city was founded in 1703 by a decree of the emperor Peter the Great and built on the delta of the river Neva, which divides into three main branches – the Big Neva, the Little Neva, and the Nevka – as it flows into the Gulf of Finland. On the left bank of the Neva is the city center, where the Winter Palace, the Senate, the Admiralty, the Summer Garden, the theaters, and the main thoroughfares such as Nevsky Prospect, Bolshaya Millionnaya, and Bolshaya Morskaya are located. On the right bank of the Neva before it divides is the area known as the Vyborg side; the right bank between the Nevka and the Little Neva is known as the Petersburg side, where the Peter and Paul Fortress, the oldest structure of the city, stands; between the Little Neva and the Big Neva is Vassilievsky Island. To the south, some fifteen miles from the city, is the suburb of Tsarskoe Selo, where the empress Catherine the Great built an imposing palace and many of the gentry had summer houses.

TRANSLATIONS OF DOSTOEVSKY

BY PEVEAR AND VOLOKHONSKY

The Adolescent(2003)

The Idiot(2002)

Demons(1994)

Notes from Underground(1993)

Crime and Punishment(1992)

The Brothers Karamazov(1990)

INTRODUCTION

In the early 1870s, the radical satirist M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin declared that in Russia the family novel was dead: “The family, that warm and cosy element . . . which once gave the novel its content, has vanished from sight . . . The novel of contemporary man finds its resolution in the street, on the public way, anywhere but in the home.” In 1875, however, two novels began to appear serially in rival journals: Tolstoy’s Anna Kareninain the conservative Russian Messenger, and Dostoevsky’s The Adolescentin the populist Notes of the Fatherland. Though they have nothing else in common, both are family novels in excelsis. Their appearance at that time suggests that, far from having vanished from sight, the family was still the mirror of Russian social life, and the fate of the family was a key to Russia’s destiny.

Tolstoy defied the radicals by portraying the ordered life of his own class, the hereditary aristocracy, and the tragedy of its disruption – that is, by looking back at a world which, as Dostoevsky saw, had become a fantasy. “But you know,” Dostoevsky wrote to his friend Apollon Maikov, “this is all landowner’s literature. It has said everything it had to say (magnificently in Leo Tolstoy). But this word, a landowner’s in the highest degree, was the last. A new word, replacing the landowner’s, does not exist yet.” In The Adolescent, which he conceived in part as an answer to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky found that new word, portraying what he calls the “accidental family” of his time, the reality behind Tolstoy’s grand “mirage.” In Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, Konstantin Mochulsky draws the ultimate conclusion about the family chronicle as Dostoevsky conceived it. The main theme of The Adolescent, he writes, is “ the problem of communion: man is determined by his character, but his fate is defined in freedom, in spite of his character. The influence of one personality on another is limitless; the roots of human interaction go down into metaphysical depths; the violation of this organic collectivity is reflected in social upheavals and political catastrophes.” ¹What Saltykov-Shchedrin saw taking place on the public way had its cause in what was taking place in the fundamental unity of the family, which could still serve as the image of Russian society in its inner, spiritual dimension.

The Adolescentis the fourth of the five major novels that Dostoevsky wrote after the turning point of Notes from Underground(1864). These novels in their sequence represent an ascending movement from “underground” towards the cold, clear light at the end of The Brothers Karamazov. The Adolescentis the next-to-last step in this ascent. And yet it is the least known of the five novels, the least discussed in the vast critical literature on Dostoevsky, simply omitted, for instance, from such major readings of his work as Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Freedom and the Tragic Life, Romano Guardini’s Der Mensch und der Glaube(“Man and Fate”), and the essays of the philosopher Lev Shestov. In The Mantle of the Prophet, the final volume of his critical biography of Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank refers to The Adolescentrather dismissively as “a curious hybrid of a novel” and “something of an anomaly among the great creations of Dostoevsky’s last period.” He finds that it lacks “the collision of conflicting moral-spiritual absolutes that invariably inspired his best work.” Edward Wasiolek, editor and annotator of The Notebooks for“ A Raw Youth,” ²simply calls it “a failure.”

It is true that The Adolescentlacks the dark intensity of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and Demons, the mephitic atmosphere, the whiff of brimstone that many readers consider Dostoevsky’s essence. It is very different in tone from the preceding novels. But that difference is a sign of its special place in the unity of Dostoevsky’s later work. The Adolescentis up to something else.

The distinctive tone of the novel is set by the adolescent narrator himself, that is, by the fact of his being an adolescent, speaking in the first person and writing as an amateur. Dostoevsky’s notebooks show how carefully he weighed the question of point of view, and with what effect in mind. In September 1874, during the early stages of planning the novel, he notes: “In the first personit would be much more original, and show more love; also, it would require more artistic skill, and would be terribly bold, and shorter, easier to arrange; moreover, it would make the character of [the adolescent] as the main figure of the novel much clearer . . .” And a little further on: “A narrative in the first personis more original by virtue of the fact that the [adolescent] may very well keep skipping, in ultra-naïve fashion . . . to all kinds of anecdotes and details, proper to his development and immaturity, but quite impossible for an author conducting his narrative in regular fashion.” A few days later, he repeats: “In the first personit would be more naïve, incomparably more original, and, in its deviations from a smooth and systematic narrative, even more delightful.”

Dostoevsky had considered writing both Crime and Punishmentand The Idiotin the first person, but had abandoned the idea. He came back to it in The Adolescent, which is his only novel with a first-person protagonist after Notes from Underground. The two have more than a little in common. For instance, both narrators, though they are constantly aware of the reader, deny any literary or artistic purpose and claim to be writing only for themselves. “I, however, am writing only for myself,” asserts the man from underground, “and I declare once and for all that even if I write as if I were addressing readers, that is merely a form, because it’s easier for me to write that way. It’s a form, just an empty form, and I shall never have any readers. I have already declared as much . . .” The adolescent, Arkady Dolgoruky, begins his “notes” with the declaration that he is “not writing for the same reason everyone else writes, that is, for the sake of the reader’s praises.” Later he says:

. . . The reader will perhaps be horrified at the frankness of my confession and will ask himself simple-heartedly: how is it that the author doesn’t blush? I reply that I’m not writing for publication; I’ll probably have a reader only in some ten years, when everything is already so apparent, past and proven that there will no longer be any point in blushing. And therefore, if I sometimes address the reader in my notes, it’s merely a device. My reader is a fantastic character.

Arkady also turns out to share some of the underground man’s opinions, for instance about rational egoism and social progress. At a meeting of young radicals, he delivers a perfect “underground” tirade:

Things are not at all clear in our society, gentlemen. I mean, you deny God, you deny great deeds, what sort of deaf, blind, dull torpor can make me act this way [i.e. nobly], if it’s more profitable for me otherwise? You say, “A reasonable attitude towards mankind is also to my profit”; but what if I find all these reasonablenesses unreasonable, all these barracks and phalansteries? What the devil do I care about them, or about the future, when I live only once in this world? Allow me to know my own profit myself: it’s more amusing. What do I care what happens to this mankind of yours in a thousand years, if, by your code, I get no love for it, no future life, no recognition of my great deed? No, sir, in that case I shall live for myself in the most impolite fashion, and they can all go to blazes!

The unaware reader would find it hard to tell which of the two is speaking.

But the differences between them are far more important. And the main difference is precisely Arkady’s adolescence. The underground man is trapped in the endless alternation of “Long live the underground!” and “Devil take the underground!” and has sat in his corner like that for forty years. Arkady Dolgoruky is young, fresh, resilient. Time and again he falls asleep after some disastrous blunder or crushing humiliation, sleeps soundly and dreamlessly, and wakes up feeling heartier than ever. The underground man is inwardly fixed; Arkady is all inner movement, constantly going beyond himself. His experiences do not bind him as the underground man’s do; they liberate him.

Why did Dostoevsky come to give such a privileged place to adolescence in his work? A brief sketch jotted down in his notebook sometime in October or November of 1867, years before he began writing The Adolescent, may suggest an answer. Among plans that would later be realized, we find a heading all in capitals, “A THOUGHT (POEM) / THEME WITH THE TITLE: ‘THE EMPEROR,’” followed by two pages of notes for a story based on the strange life of the Russian emperor Ivan VI, better known as Ivan Antonovich, who lived from 1740 to 1764. Ivan Antonovich was the son of Peter the Great’s niece, the empress Anna Ivanovna. She died the year he was born, and he was immediately proclaimed emperor, but he never reigned. In 1741 Elizaveta Petrovna, the daughter of Peter the Great, seized the throne and had the one-year-old emperor imprisoned in the Schlüsselburg fortress, where he remained until 1764, when a certain Lieutenant Mirovich attempted to restore him to the throne by means of a coup. The plot failed, and Ivan Antonovich was killed.

As his notes make clear, what interested Dostoevsky was not so much the historical episode as the thought of this boy growing up in complete isolation from the world: “Underground, darkness, a young man not knowing how to speak, Ivan Antonovich, almost twenty years old. Description of his nature. His development. He develops by himself, fantastic frescoes and images, dreams, a young girl (in a dream). He imagines her, having seen her from the window. Elementary notions of all things. Extravagant imagination . . .” And then the catastrophic confrontation of this isolated consciousness with reality. Dostoevsky made only a few notes for the story and never came back to it, but in imagining the situation of Ivan Antonovich, he was preparing himself for the portrayal of Prince Myshkin, Alyosha Karamazov, and, above all, Arkady Dolgoruky.

In the notes, Mirovich “finally declares to [Ivan Antonovich] that he is the emperor, that everything is possible for him. Visions of power.” “Everything is possible” – that is the link between Ivan Antonovich and the state of adolescence. “Visions of power” are certainly part of it in Arkady’s case. He has his “Rothschild idea” of achieving power by accumulating money. He also has a document sewn into his coat which he believes gives him power over certain people who are central to his life. He even tells himself that the consciousness of power is enough, without the need to exercise it, and declaims, “enough for me / Is the awareness of it,” quoting from Pushkin’s The Covetous Knight. Further on he comments:

They’ll say it’s stupid to live like that: why not have a mansion, an open house, gather society, exert influence, get married? But what would Rothschild be then? He’d become like everybody else. All the charm of the “idea” would vanish, all its moral force. As a child I had already learned by heart the monologue of Pushkin’s covetous knight; Pushkin never produced a higher idea than that! I’m also of the same mind now.

Dostoevsky himself reread Pushkin’s “little tragedy” during the summer of 1874, while staying at the German health spa of Ems and trying to start work on his new novel. “Please God only that I can begin the novel and draw up at least some plan,” he wrote to his wife. “Beginning is already half the affair.” But he read Pushkin instead and “grew intoxicated with ecstasy.” Here, clearly, is the origin of Arkady’s vision of power. And it is linked, through Pushkin, with the struggle between son and father. Mikhail Bakhtin notes in Problems ofDostoevsky’s Poetics that, starting with The Gamblerin 1866, The Covetous Knight“exercises a very fundamental influence on all of Dostoevsky’s subsequent works, especially on The Adolescentand The Brothers Karamazov.” The “Rothschild idea” is Arkady’s underground. “My idea is – my corner,” he says. “The whole goal of my ‘idea’ is – solitude . . . Yes, I’ve thirsted for power all my life, power and solitude.” The formula is perfect and reveals the extent of Arkady’s willed refusal of human communion. This refusal will be sorely tested in the course of the novel.

But if the phrase “everything is possible” suggests an abstract dream of power, it also describes adolescence in another way, as that state of uncertainty, ignorance, incompleteness, but also of richness and exuberance, in which everything is literally still possible. In fact, far more turns out to be possible than Arkady ever suspected. He keeps being astonished, keeps stumbling into situations he was unaware of, keeps speaking out of turn. This constant maladroitness sets the tone of the novel and also governs its events. This was the freshness and naïveté Dostoevsky was seeking, a sense of the world and the person being born at the same time.

Thus “adolescence” also determines the compositional method of the novel, which is characteristic of Dostoevsky’s later work in general. Bakhtin was the first to define it clearly:

The fundamental category in Dostoevsky’s mode of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but coexistenceand interaction. He saw and conceived his world primarily in terms of space, not time. Hence his deep affinity for the dramatic form. Dostoevsky strives to organize all available meaningful material, all material of reality, in one time-frame, in the form of a dramatic juxtaposition, and he strives to develop it extensively . . . For him, to get one’s bearings on the world meant to conceive all its contents as simultaneous, and to guess at their interrelationships in the cross-section of a single moment.

The action of The Adolescentcovers a period of some four months, but each of its three parts takes place in only three days: the 19th to 21st of September, the 15th to 17th of November, and “three fateful days” in December. Nothing takes shape over time; everything is already there and only waiting to be revealed. Arkady writes his notes a year after the start of events, and it is then that his real awakening occurs, as he says himself : “On finishing my notes and writing the last line, I suddenly felt that I had reeducated myself precisely through the process of recalling and writing down.” In a notebook entry for 18 September 1874, Dostoevsky settled the problem of the lapse between the events and the time of writing. He had been considering a space of five years, but decided: “. . . better make it a year. In the tone of the narrative, the whole impact of a recent shock would still be apparent, and a good many things would still remain unclear, yet at the same time there would be this first line: ‘A year, what a tremendous interval of time!’” All through the novel, Dostoevsky plays with fine humor on this “adolescent” sense of time, the double view of “what I was” and “what I am now,” meaning “now that so muchtime has passed.” The Russia of the 1870s thus appears as the sum of all the conflicts and contradictions that enter Arkady’s consciousness in the space of those few days, as he comes to understand them, and insofar as he comes to understand them, a year later.

This simultaneity and juxtaposition of events in an extremely restricted time frame leads to a downplaying of the importance of the linear plot – the fabula, as he liked to call it – in Dostoevsky’s novels. In The Adolescentthe intrigue turns on the document sewn into Arkady’s coat. It is melodramatic and highly improbable, and Dostoevsky exploits it to the last drop. But it is not what the novel is about.

Near the beginning of the first notebook for The Adolescent, Dostoevsky wrote and underlined: “ Disintegration is the principal visible idea of the novel.” Later, after establishing a new plan, he returned to the same theme: “Title of the novel: ‘Disorder.’ The whole idea of the novel is to demonstrate that we have now general disorder, disorder everywhere and wherever you go, in society, in business, in guiding ideas (of which, for that very reason, there aren’t any), in convictions (which, for the same reason, we don’t have), in the disintegration of the family unit.” Arkady Makarovich Dolgoruky is the illegitimate son of a bankrupt landowner by the name of Andrei Petrovich Versilov. He has been raised by foster parents and tutors, has seen his mother, a peasant woman from Versilov’s estate, two or three times in his life and his father only once. His legal father, the peasant Makar Dolgoruky, he has never seen. On graduating from high school in Moscow, he goes to Petersburg, armed with his “Rothschild idea,” to meet his family and above all to confront Versilov, whose love he longs for and of whose disgrace and wrongdoing he has all sorts of notions and even some evidence.

As father, husband, and lover, Versilov is the center of a complicated “accidental” family made up of his legitimate children by his deceased wife, his illegitimate children, Arkady and Liza, and their mother Sofya Andreevna, whom he lives with but cannot marry because her husband, Makar Dolgoruky, is still alive. There is also the so-called “aunt,” Tatyana Pavlovna, who acts as a sort of fairy godmother to them all. Konstantin Mochulsky comments on the shift in emphasis from Dostoevsky’s previous novel:

As in Demons, the action is concentrated around the hero, but the personality of Versilov is revealed differently than the personality of Stavrogin. The hero of Demonsis connected with the other characters only ideologically; the personality of Versilov includes in itself the entire history of his family; it is organically collective. ³Stavrogin is the ideological centerof the novel; Versilov is the vital center.

“The crisis of communion,” as Mochulsky says, “is shown in that organic cell from which society grows – in the family.” Within and around Versilov’s accidental family, Dostoevsky juxtaposes all the “material of reality” in Russian society at that time. “The novel contains all the elements,” he wrote in his notebook as early as September 1874, and he specifies:

The civilized and desperate, idle and skeptical higher intelligentsia – that’s [Versilov].

Ancient Holy Russia – Makar’s family.

What is holy, good about new Russia – the aunt.

A [great] family gone to seed – the young Prince (a skeptic, etc.)

High society – the funny and the abstractly ideal type.

The young generation – the [adolescent], all instinct, knows nothing.

Vasin – hopelessly ideal.

Lambert – flesh, matter, horror, etc.

If we add the swindler Stebelkov, the revolutionary populists (particularly the gentle suicide Kraft), and the young widow Akhmakov and her father, we will have a virtually complete list of the characters in The Adolescent. Together they make up an image of the general disorder, the “Russian chaos,” that was Dostoevsky’s main preoccupation in all his great novels.

Versilov is the “vital center” of the novel, and the essence of the disorder is reflected in him, but he is always Versilov as seen by his son, and thus he remains an elusive, mysterious, contradictory figure. Arkady’s perception of him is constantly changing, going to extremes of condemnation and adoration, owing to his own ignorance and naıvete’. But the contradictions are not only in Arkady’s perception, but in Versilov himself. As Mochulsky observes: “Versilov the philosopher-deist and bearer of the idea of ‘all-unity,’ and Versilov shattered by two loves – are one and the same man . . . Versilov suffers from all the infirmities of contemporary civilization: everything shifts, wavers, and doubles in his consciousness; ideas are ambiguous, truths – relative, faith – unbelief.” By letting the adolescent do the talking, Dostoevsky is able to present two dramas at once: the drama of Versilov’s life as the gradual revelation of the divided consciousness of his time, and the drama of Arkady’s coming to consciousnessof precisely that drama, in himself as well as in Versilov. Arkady calls it “breadth,” as will Mitya Karamazov (“No, man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him down. Devil knows even what to make of him, that’s the thing!”). Olga Meerson, in her excellent study of Dostoevsky’s Taboos, calls it “the many-storiedness of anyhuman soul.”

Dostoevsky has left us several portraits of liberal idealists from the generation of the 1840s – Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky in “A Nasty Anecdote,” Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky in Demons, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov in The Brothers Karamazov – but the portrait of Versilov is by far the fullest, the most serious and searching. He was not invented out of nothing; among his prototypes were two of the most important figures of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life: Alexander Herzen (1812–70) and Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev (1794– 1856). Herzen, the illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, attended Moscow University, where he joined a socialist circle and became an opponent of serfdom. He wrote several novels, was sent to internal exile for his views, and in 1847, having inherited a large fortune from his father, left Russia forever. The failure of the French revolution of 1848 disillusioned him with the West, and he lamented the death of Europe in a collection of letters entitled From the Other Shore(1850). Versilov shares his “nobleman’s yearning” and his sorrow. Versilov also speaks with Arkady about a “high cultural type” that has developed only in Russia, calling it “the type of universal suffering for all” – a phrase that had been applied to Herzen by the critic Nikolai Strakhov. Versilov’s “breadth” is also reminiscent of Herzen, who was both an aristocrat and a socialist, a defender of the workers and a connoisseur of beauty, an unbeliever but with a great nostalgia for Christianity, a permanent exile who repeatedly proclaimed his love of Russia.

The biographical parallels of Versilov and Chaadaev are even more striking, and in fact, during the earliest stages of his work on The Adolescent, Dostoevsky gave the name of Chaadaev to his protagonist. Chaadaev was a friend and slightly older contemporary of Pushkin’s, a Guards officer of the high nobility, a handsome, intelligent, and spirited man, who took part in the Napoleonic campaigns of 1812 and the occupation of Paris, resigned his commission in 1821, and wandered in Europe before returning to Russia. In 1836, the publication of the first of his Philosophical Letters Written to a Lady(there were eight letters in all, written in French) caused an enormous scandal by its sharp criticism of Russia’s backwardness and isolation among the nations of Europe, which he blamed partly on the Orthodox Church. The shock was so great that the emperor Nicholas I had Chaadaev declared mad, forbade the publication of the remaining letters, and kept their author under permanent surveillance until his death. But the Letters circulated in manuscript, and in 1862 the first three were published in Paris, where Dostoevsky bought and read them. Dostoevsky also knew Herzen’s admiring portrait of Chaadaev in his book of reflections and reminiscences, My Past and Thoughts(1852 – 55). In Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, Jacques Catteau lists the convergent details of Chaadaev’s and Versilov’s biographies:

Both are handsome and are pampered by women who admire them, protect them, and try to curb their prodigality. Both are inordinately proud, unconsciously egotistical, and of a wounding casualness. Both are remarkably intelligent and witty, profound and ironic. They have the same manners of the spoiled aristocrat, and the refined elegance of the dandy. They served in the same Guards regiment, haughtily refused to fight a duel, wandered for a long time in Europe, and underwent the fascination of Catholicism. Both fell in love with a whimsical and sick young girl . . . before becoming infatuated with a woman who reminds them of a world that is nobler and less empty than their own . . .

We might add that Chaadaev’s Philosophical Lettersare addressed to a lady, while Versilov is referred to ironically at one point as a “women’s prophet.” Versilov is a complex and original figure, not simply an amalgam of his prototypes, but he is one deeply rooted in the intellectual and spiritual life of the Russian intelligentsia.

The gradual emergence of Versilov in Arkady’s consciousness is the overarching story of The Adolescent. It is varied by a number of inset stories, a technique that Dostoevsky would use even more extensively in The Brothers Karamazov. These are all spoken stories, each in a voice quite distinct from Arkady’s written notes: the tragic story of the young student Olya told by her mother; the comic story of the big stone told by Arkady’s landlord, Pyotr Ippolitovich; the three stories told by Makar Dolgoruky; and Versilov’s account of his dream of the golden age and the last days of mankind. Coming from experiences very different from Arkady’s, they form a counterpoint and something of a corrective to his “first person adolescent” point of view, as does the epilogue written by Arkady’s former tutor, Nikolai Semyonovich.

Makar Dolgoruky, the wanderer, is himself an inset figure in the novel. He appeared suddenly and as if fully formed in Dostoevsky’s early notes, and he also appears suddenly in Arkady’s life, to die just as Arkady “resurrects.” He is Dostoevsky’s only full-length portrait of a Russian peasant, a slightly idealized figure out of the past of “Holy Russia,” an image of peasant piety and strength, of mirth, and of spiritual beauty. In his notes, Dostoevsky worked especially on his voice, filling several pages with characteristic phrases and expressions, full of “scriptural sweetness” and cast in the half-chanting cadences of peasant speech. Makar Dolgoruky is the antithesis of Versilov. Arkady bears his name only by chance, but the old man becomes a spiritual father for him. After meeting him for the first time and talking with him only briefly, the adolescent bursts out feverishly: “I’m glad of you. Maybe I’ve been waiting for you a long time. I don’t love any of them; they have no seemliness . . . I won’t go after them, I don’t know where I’ll go, I’ll go with you . . .” But later he makes the same declaration to Versilov, when the latter finally seems to welcome him as his son: “‘Now I have no need for dreams and reveries, now you are enough for me! I will follow you!’ I said, giving myself to him with all my soul.” Arkady stands between these two fathers, these embodiments of two very different Russias. He loses one and in the end saves the life of the other.