| Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Adolescent," a work ignored by both critics and readers, marks a fundamental literary challenge: it problematizes traditional scholarly approaches by embracing an aesthetics of chaos. The thesis offers a revision of this aesthetic problem by orienting the work's chaos as a fundamental engagement with the problem of "self and other," which is crucial to many of the significant works of 20th century philosophy, including Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time," Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness," and Mikhail Bakhtin's "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity." While "The Adolescent's" artistic response mirrors all three thinkers, I argue that the novel's protagonist, in a radical revision of the confession, specifically anticipates Bakhtin's central concept of the self as "unfinalizable" in a world of others who are "finalizable." This is achieved through the confession: the protagonist, Arkady Dolgoruky, maintains an unfinalizable "alibi" or "loophole" that allows him to "escape" the other. My analysis adopts Bakhtin's logic by focusing on three main problems of Arkady's loophole of unfinalizability: the loophole of language, the self's unfinalizable body in space and, finally, the extratemporality of the self. Bakhtin's early philosophical work acts as an ideal blueprint for understanding "The Adolescent" because it exposes unfinalizability as the underlying architectonic of the novel's chaos. In comparing Dostoevsky's novel and Bakhtin's early work, I uncover the novel's confession not as Dostoevsky's failure but as a radical example of an intentional anti-art. |
