Sinners In Chaos

A RAW YOUTH (615 pp.) -- Fyodor Dostoevsky-- Introduction by Alfred Kazin--Dial ($3.50).

The Life of a Great Sinner was the title that Dostoevsky gave to a vast novel for which he made reams of notes but which he never managed to write. Instead, members of A Great Sinner's huge projected cast of characters kept escaping prematurely from their creator's notebooks and showing up in his completed works. Some of them became prominent people in The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov; a few (including the Great Sinner himself, in his young manhood) became part of A Raw Youth, least known of Dostoevsky's major novels. Published first in 1875, A Raw Youth has been out of, print in the U.S. for over 50 years, save for a 1923 limited edition.

Readers need not be too surprised by this neglect: A Raw Youth reads like a congestion of rubbery, raw material. Dostoevsky himself recognized this and argued that it was hard to give "artistic finish" to characters who were struggling in transition--i.e., in 19th Century Russia's changeover from a land of seigneurs and serfs to a modern, industrially minded nation, distinguished (in Dostoevsky's opinion) by "general lawlessness and chaos."

Jove Is Serene. Youthful Hero Arkady Dolgoruky (who tells the story) is the abandoned bastard son of an aristocratic father and a serf girl. Arkady is ambitious to make himself "not simply rich, but as rich as Rothschild." Once he has become a multimillionaire, Arkady reckons, he will be able to afford the two things he most craves: a life apart from the contemptible world, and a sublime sense of power. "With the thunderbolts in his hands," Arkady poetically muses, "Jove is serene."

When baby-Jove Arkady descends on St. Petersburg to win his thunderbolts, he gets smacked around by as wild a gang of personalities as ever smudged the pages of a Russian novel. They range from desperate male & female aristocrats, struggling frenziedly to retain their power and money, to hordes of sly, ice-hard usurers, pimps and blackmailers. The never-ending battle between these two groups is fought out in luxurious palaces, in squalid lodging houses, and cafes filled with the thick stench of "burned meat, restaurant napkins, and tobacco."

Somewhere in between the old and the new regimes wander the disillusioned intellectuals. They talk endlessly about European culture, Rousseau, God and Utopia --and then sadly reach for their revolvers and shoot themselves. Or they find themselves, as Arkady does, sucked in either by the commercials or the aristocrats, and bewailing the loss of their ideals. Among these lost ideals: the women of St. Petersburg, who fight with the savagery of harpies for marriage and security.

Out of this gallery emerge two of Dostoevsky's most brilliant creations. One is aged Prince Sokolsky, a kindly, nutty, wealthy widower who loves to toy with the idea of marrying again--and is dumfounded to learn that his rapacious heirs are plotting to have him shut up in an asylum. The other is Versilov, Arkady's father, a shrewd but patient man who well comprehends the feelings of insult and injury that seethe inside his illegitimate son.

Hold Your Nose, Close Your Eyes.

Versilov, calm and complex, also represents the resilient man who, in an age of chaos, manages somehow not to be destroyed, protecting himself and his ideals of honor and love with a hotchpotch armory of friendly tolerance, extreme reserve, silence, outbursts of passion and generosity, unyielding pride and unexpected humbleness. Like Dostoevsky himself, Versilov desires to love God and his neighbor--and is suspicious of such desires ("Very proud people like to believe in God, especially those who despise other people. . . . They turn to God to avoid doing homage to man [because] to do homage to God is not so humiliating"). When his unhappy son cries: "I want to know what I'm to do and how I'm to live!", calm Father Versilov advises him:

"Dear boy, to love people as they are is impossible. And yet we must. And therefore do them good . . . holding your nose and shutting your eyes. . . . Endure evil from them . . . know how to despise them even when they are good, for most often it is in that they are base. . . . Anyone who's not quite stupid can't live without despising himself. ... To love one's neighbor and not despise him ... is impossible. -. . . 'Love for humanity' must be understood as love for that humanity which you have yourself created in your soul . . . and which, therefore, never will be in reality."

"Never will be?"

"My dear boy . . . that's not my fault.

I was not consulted at the Creation."

Handbook for the Future. Today in Russia Dostoevsky's works are officially permitted, but not encouraged for mass reading. This fact, coupled with the novel's own complexities, has caused A Raw Youth to be neglected in its motherland. Dostoevsky himself hoped that his cumbersome novel would have somewhat more survival value. In a kind of confession of failure he wrote at the end of it: "When the angry strife of the day has passed . . . then a future artist will discover beautiful forms for depicting past lawlessness and chaos! Then such [works as this] so long as they are sincere . . . will be of use. . . . They will preserve at any rate some faithful traits by which one may guess what may have lain hidden in the heart of some raw youth of that troubled time. . . ."

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