Freaking-Out with Fyodor

By Otto Friedrich

THE ADOLESCENT by Fyodor Dosfoevsky. A new translation by Andrew R. MacAndrew. 585 pages. Doubleday. $10.

To judge by the red-blue-green-gold psychedelic dust jacket, the emphasis on "a new translation," and the streamlined title (it used to be A Raw Youth), one might conclude that the world's greatest novelist is somehow becoming obsolete. For today's readers, apparently, Dostoevsky needs to be dressed up in motley and passed off as an expert on the generation gap or the counterculture. Indeed, the jacket blurb describes this 97-year-old novel as a work of "extraordinary timeliness."

Undeniably, the traditional translation by Constance Garnett (done in 1916) had a quality of oak paneling and stained-glass windows (not to say cobwebs), and Professor MacAndrew's new version is brisk and straightforward. A typical Garnett phrase like "bother the fellow" has become "the hell with him." And those elaborate patronymics have disappeared, so that Tatyana Pavlovna is now simply Mrs. Prutkov. But in his effort to be up-to-date, MacAndrew also afflicts us with such colloquialisms as "know-how" and "twerp." Mrs. Garnett's simple statement, "Don't be angry, Prince, I'll leave you," turns into "Take it easy, Prince, I'll make myself scarce."

Is this really necessary? Should a 19th century novel try to read like a 20th century novel? Do Bach's harpsichord preludes really sound better on a Moog synthesizer? Does a modern-dress version of Hamlet really make Shakespeare seem modern, and therefore by implication better? More relevant? Is any new translation really going to cast a new light on Dostoevsky's least popular major novel?

Gibberish. Even the author admitted he had thrown together "enough material for four novels." Turgenev described A Raw Youth as "sour stuff--the stench of the sickroom, unprofitable gibberish." And on the occasion of this new edition, John Updike condemns the novel for a "penetrating badness that casts doubt over even the peaks of an author's accomplishment."

They are all wrong. The novel has never been popular because it is long, repetitious and confusing. But it is a marvelous book, fully worthy of the master who had just finished The Possessed and was soon to write The Brothers Karamazov. It is true that it attempts to portray "an age of the golden mean and insensitivity, of a cult of ignorance and idleness ... and of a longing for the readymade." But its greatness lies not in its timeliness but in its transcendence over time.

The Adolescent's two principal themes are universal: the search for the father and the search for a meaning in life. They tormented Dostoevsky with a special force, for he was endlessly haunted by the revelation, at age 17, that his feared and hated father had been murdered by a band of his own serfs, including several whose daughters the elder Dostoevsky had molested. Patricide ultimately became the core of The Brothers Karamazov. Before confronting that, however, Dostoevsky had to write "this first trial flight of my thoughts."

"I took an innocent soul," he explained, "yet one already touched with the terrible possibility of corruption." This is the young Arkady, illegitimate son of an aristocrat named Versilov, reared in loneliness in a series of boarding schools, and fiercely aware of his bastardy. He is struggling for an "idea" to which he can devote his life. But first he must come to an understanding with the father he hardly knows, and this father, Versilov, has already passed beyond all "ideas" into a kind of religion of despair. The son is what many of us once were: passionate, deluded, selfish, idealistic. The father is what many of us will become: shrewd, equivocal, weary, compassionate. Father and son argue, they fight, they even compete over the same woman (neither one succeeding), and finally they are reconciled.

And the next popular attraction may be entitled "Raskolnikov's Rip-Off."

Otto Frledrich

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