I. Kolya Krasotkin

It is the beginning of November. Here we have had a frost of some eleven degrees, and with it a glaze of ice. During the night a little dry snow has fallen on the frozen ground, and a wind, “dry and sharp,” lifts it and sweeps it along the dreary streets of our little town and especially over the market square. The morning is murky, but the light snow has stopped. Not far from the square, near the Plotnikovs’ shop, stands the small house, very neat both outside and in, of the official’s widow Krasotkina. The provincial secretary Krasotkin himself died very long ago, almost fourteen years back, but his widow, a little lady of thirty and still quite pretty to this day, is alive and lives in her neat little house “on her own capital.” She lives honestly and timidly; she has a tender, but rather cheerful character. She was left a widow at about eighteen, having lived with him only about a year and having just borne him a son. From that time on, from the very day of his death, she devoted herself entirely to bringing up this treasure of a boy of hers, Kolya, and though she had loved him to distraction all those fourteen years, she had certainly endured incomparably more suffering with him than she had lived through joys, trembling and dying of fear almost every day that he would fall ill, catch cold, get into mischief, climb up on a chair and fall off, and so on, and so on. And when Kolya began to go to school and then to our progymnasium, his mother threw herself into studying all the subjects along with him, so as to help him and go over his lessons with him; she threw herself into making the acquaintance of the teachers and their wives, she even petted Kolya’s schoolmates and fawned on them so that they would not touch Kolya, not laugh at him, not beat him. She carried it so far that the boys really did begin to laugh at him because of her and started teasing him with being a mama’s boy. But the boy managed to stand up for himself. He was a bold lad, “terribly strong,” as the rumor about him spread in his class and was soon established; he was agile, of a stubborn character, of a daring and enterprising spirit. He studied well, and there was even a rumor that in arithmetic and in world history alike he could trip up the teacher Dardanelov himself. But though the boy looked down on everyone, his little nose in the air, he was a good comrade and did not put on airs. He accepted the schoolboys’ respect as his due, but behaved in a friendly way. The main thing was that he knew the limit; he knew how to restrain himself when the occasion called for it, and in his relations with the authorities he never stepped over a certain last and sacred line, beyond which an offense can no longer be tolerated, turning into disorder, rebellion, and lawlessness. And yet he was very, very much inclined to get up to mischief at every convenient opportunity, mischief like the most ordinary little boy’s, and not so much to get up to mischief as to contrive something clever, pull off some marvel, cut an “extrafefer,” a bit of chic, to show off. The main thing was that he had a great deal of pride. He had even managed to put his mama in a subordinate relation to himself, acting on her almost despotically. And she did submit, oh, she had submitted long ago, and only could not on any account bear the one thought that her boy “did not love her enough.” It continually seemed to her that Kolya was “unfeeling” toward her, and there were times when, bathed in hysterical tears, she would begin to reproach him for his coldness. The boy did not like this, and the more heartfelt outpourings were demanded of him, the more unyielding he became, as if on purpose. But with him this happened not on purpose but involuntarily—such was his character. His mother was mistaken: he loved his mama very much, and only did not love “calf’s tenderness,” as he put it in his schoolboy language. After his father there remained a bookcase in which a few books were kept; Kolya loved to read and had already read some of them to himself. His mother was not troubled by this and only wondered at times how the boy, instead of going out to play, would stand for whole hours at the bookcase over some little book. And in this way Kolya had read a few things that he should not yet have been given to read at his age. However, of late, although the boy did not like to go beyond a certain line in his pranks, pranks had begun that frightened his mother in earnest—not immoral ones, to be sure, but desperate, reckless ones. Just this summer, in the month of July, during the vacation, it so happened that mama and her little son went to stay for a week in another district, seventy versts away, with a distant relative whose husband worked at a railway station (the very station, the one nearest our town, from which Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov set off for Moscow a month later). There Kolya began by looking the railway over in detail and studying the way things were run, understanding that he could show off his new knowledge among the schoolboys of his progymnasium when he got home. But there happened to be several other boys there just at that time, and he struck up an acquaintance with them; some of them lived at the station, others in the neighborhood—altogether some six or seven young people from twelve to fifteen years old had come together, and two of them happened to be from our little town too. The boys played together, got into mischief, and then, on the fourth or fifth day of the visit to the station, an utterly impossible bet of two rubles was made among the foolish youngsters, namely this: Kolya, who was almost the youngest of them all and therefore somewhat looked down on by the older ones, out of pride or out of shameless daring, proposed that at night, when the eleven o’clock train came, he would lie face down between the rails and stay there without moving while the train rushed over him at full steam. True, a preliminary study had been made, from which it turned out that one really could stretch out and flatten oneself lengthwise between the rails so that the train would, of course, rush past without touching the one lying there; but still, what it would be like to lie there! Kolya held firm that he would lie there. At first they laughed at him, called him a little liar and a braggart, but that only egged him on all the more. The main thing was that these fifteen-year-olds turned up their noses at him far too much and at first did not even want to count him as a comrade, being one of the “little ones,” which was already unbearably insulting. And so it was decided to set out in the evening to a spot a verst from the station, so that the train, after leaving the station, would have had time to get up its full speed. The boys gathered. The night that came was moonless, not just dark but almost black. At the proper hour Kolya lay down between the rails. The five others who had made the bet waited at the foot of the embankment beside the line, in the bushes, with sinking hearts, and finally in fear and with remorse. At last the train, having left the station, began to thunder in the distance. Two red lamps flashed out of the darkness, the approaching monster began to roar. “Run, get off the rails!” the boys, dying of fright, shouted to Kolya from the bushes, but it was already too late: the train bore down and rushed past. The boys threw themselves toward Kolya: he lay motionless. They began to pull at him, they began to lift him. He suddenly got up and silently went down the embankment. Once at the bottom, he announced that he had lain there as if unconscious on purpose, to frighten them, but the truth was that he really had lost consciousness, as he himself confessed afterward, a long time later, to his mama. In this way his fame as “a desperate one” was established forever. He came back home to the station as pale as a sheet. The next day he fell slightly ill with a nervous fever, but in spirit he was terribly cheerful, glad, and pleased. The incident became known not at once, but only in our town; it penetrated into the progymnasium and reached its authorities. But then Kolya’s mama threw herself into imploring the authorities on behalf of her boy, and it ended with the respected and influential teacher Dardanelov standing up for him and pleading for him, and the matter was left to lie, as though it had never happened at all. This Dardanelov, a bachelor and not old, had been passionately in love with Mrs. Krasotkina for many years already, and once, about a year ago, most respectfully and faint with fear and delicacy, he had ventured to offer her his hand; but she had refused flatly, considering consent a betrayal of her boy, although Dardanelov, by certain mysterious signs, perhaps even had some right to dream that he was not altogether repugnant to the charming but much too chaste and tender little widow. Kolya’s mad prank, it seems, broke the ice, and Dardanelov, for his intercession, was given a hint of hope, a distant one, it is true, but Dardanelov himself was a phenomenon of purity and delicacy, and so even that was enough for the time being to make his happiness complete. He loved the boy, though he would have considered it humiliating to curry favor with him, and treated him strictly and exactingly in class. But Kolya himself kept him at a respectful distance, prepared his lessons excellently, was second in the class, addressed Dardanelov drily, and the whole class firmly believed that Kolya was so strong in world history that he could “trip up” Dardanelov himself. And in fact Kolya once asked him the question: “Who founded Troy?”—to which Dardanelov answered only in general terms about peoples, their movements and migrations, about the depths of time, about fable, but who precisely had founded Troy, that is, precisely which persons, he could not answer, and he even found the question for some reason idle and untenable. But the boys were left firmly convinced that Dardanelov did not know who had founded Troy. As for Kolya, he had read about the founders of Troy in Smaragdov, which was kept in the bookcase his parent had left. It ended with even all the boys becoming interested at last in who precisely had founded Troy. But Krasotkin did not reveal his secret, and the glory of knowing remained his unshakably.

After the incident on the railway a certain change took place in Kolya’s relations with his mother. When Anna Fyodorovna (the widow Krasotkina) learned of her little son’s great deed, she nearly lost her mind from horror. Such terrible fits of hysterics came over her, going on intermittently for several days, that Kolya, frightened seriously now, gave her his honest and noble word that such pranks would never be repeated. He swore on his knees before the icon, and swore by the memory of his father, as Mrs. Krasotkina herself demanded, and the “manly” Kolya himself burst into tears like a six-year-old boy, from “feelings,” and mother and son kept throwing themselves into each other’s arms all that day and weeping and shaking. The next day Kolya woke up as “unfeeling” as before; however, he became more silent, more modest, more stern, more thoughtful. True, a month and a half later he was caught again in a certain prank, and his name even became known to our justice of the peace, but the prank was of quite another sort, even a funny and silly one, and it was not he himself, as it turned out, who committed it; he merely found himself mixed up in it. But about that some other time. His mother went on trembling and suffering, while Dardanelov, in proportion to her alarms, took more and more hope. It must be noted that Kolya understood and saw through Dardanelov on this side and, it goes without saying, despised him deeply for his “feelings”; before, he had even had the indelicacy to show this contempt of his in front of his mother, hinting to her distantly that he understood what Dardanelov was after. But after the incident on the railway he changed his behavior on this score too: he no longer permitted himself hints, not even the most distant ones, and began to speak of Dardanelov more respectfully in his mother’s presence, which the sensitive Anna Fyodorovna at once understood with boundless gratitude in her heart; but on the other hand, at the slightest, most chance word about Dardanelov, even from some outside visitor, if Kolya happened to be present, she would suddenly flush all over with shame, like a rose. And at such moments Kolya would either look frowning out of the window, or examine whether his boots had started to gape, or fiercely call Perezvon, a shaggy, rather large and mangy dog which a month or so ago he had suddenly acquired from somewhere, dragged into the house, and for some reason kept secret in the rooms, showing it to none of his schoolmates. And he tyrannized over it terribly, teaching it all sorts of tricks and sciences, and brought the poor dog to such a state that it howled without him when he was away at classes, and when he came home it squealed with rapture, leaped about like a mad thing, sat up and begged, fell to the ground and pretended to be dead, and so on; in a word, it showed all the tricks it had been taught, no longer on demand, but solely from the ardor of its rapturous feelings and its grateful heart.

By the way: I forgot to mention that Kolya Krasotkin was the very boy whom the boy Ilyusha, already known to the reader, the son of the retired staff captain Snegiryov, had stabbed in the thigh with a penknife, standing up for his father, whom the schoolboys had teased as a “wisp of bast.”