The Brothers Karamazov

The beginning of November. We had eleven degrees of frost, and with that came sheet ice. During the night a bit of dry snow had fallen on the frozen ground, and the wind, “dry and sharp,”^[276] lifted it up and blew it over the dreary streets of our little town and especially over the marketplace. The morning was dull, but it had stopped snowing. Near the marketplace, close to Plotnikov’s shop, stood a small house, very clean both inside and out, belonging to the widow of the official Krasotkin. Provincial secretary Krasotkin had died long ago, almost fourteen years before, but his widow, thirty years old and still a comely little lady, was alive and lived “on her own means” in her clean little house. She lived honestly and timidly, was of tender but quite cheerful character. She had lost her husband when she was eighteen, after living with him only for about a year and having just borne him a son. Since then, since the very day of his death, she had devoted herself entirely to the upbringing of her treasure, her boy Kolya, and though she had loved him to distraction all those fourteen years, she had of course endured incomparably more suffering than joy on account of him, trembling and dying of fear almost every day lest he become ill, catch cold, be naughty, climb on a chair and fall off, and so on and so forth. When Kolya started going to school and then to our high school, his mother threw herself into studying all the subjects with him, in order to help him and tutor him in his lessons, threw herself into acquaintances with his teachers and their wives, was sweet even to Kolya’s schoolboy friends, fawning on them so that they would not touch Kolya, would not laugh at him or beat him. She went so far that the boys indeed began laughing at him because of her and began teasing him for being a mama’s boy. But the lad knew how to stand up for himself. He was a brave boy, “terrifically strong,” according to the rumor spread about him and quickly established in his class; agile, persistent in character, bold and enterprising in spirit. He was a good student, and there was even a rumor that in both mathematics and world history he could show up the teacher, Dardanelov, himself. Yet, though he looked down on everyone and turned up his nose at them, the boy was still a good friend and not overly conceited. He accepted the schoolboys’ respect as his due, but behaved in a comradely way. Above all, he knew where to draw the line, could restrain himself when need be, and in relation to the authorities never overstepped that final and inscrutable limit beyond which a misdeed turns into disorder, rebellion, and lawlessness, and can no longer be tolerated. Yet he never minded getting into mischief at the first opportunity, any more than the worst boy, not so much for the sake of mischief as to do something whimsical, eccentric, to add some “extra spice,” to dazzle, to show off. Above all, he was extremely vain. He even managed to make his mama submit to him and treated her almost despotically. And she submitted, oh, she had submitted long ago, and the only thing she simply could not bear was the thought that the boy “had little love for her.” She imagined all the time that Kolya was “unfeeling” towards her, and there were occasions when, flooding herself with hysterical tears, she would begin to reproach him with his coldness. The boy did not like it, and the more heartfelt effusions she demanded of him, the more unyielding he became, as if deliberately. Yet it was not deliberate on his part, but involuntary—such was his nature. His mother was mistaken: he loved her very much, only he did not like “sentimental slop,” as he said in his schoolboy’s language. His father had left behind a bookcase in which a few books were kept; Kolya loved reading and had already read several of them on his own. His mother was not troubled by that, and only marveled sometimes at how the boy, instead of going out to play, would spend hours standing by the bookcase poring over some book. And it was thus that Kolya had read certain things that he should not have been given to read at his age. Of late, in any case, though the boy did not like to overstep a certain line in his pranks, there began to be some pranks that genuinely frightened his mother—not immoral ones, true, but desperate, daredevilish. Just that summer, in July, during the holidays, it so happened that the mama and her boy had gone to spend a week in another district, forty-five miles away, with a distant relative whose husband worked at a railway station (the same station, the one closest to our town, from which Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov left for Moscow a month later). There Kolya began by looking over the railroad in detail, studying the procedures, realizing that he would be able to show off his new knowledge among the boys in his school. But just then a few other boys turned up with whom he made friends; some of them lived at the station, others in the neighborhood—about six or seven youths altogether, between twelve and fifteen years old, and two of them happened to be from our town. The boys played together, pulled pranks together, until on the fourth or fifth day of the visit at the station the foolish youngsters made up a most impossible wager, for two roubles—that is: Kolya, who was almost the youngest of all and was therefore somewhat despised by the older boys, out of vanity or reckless bravado, offered to lie face down between the rails that night when the eleven o’clock train came, and to lie there without moving while the train passed over him at full steam. It is true that a preliminary examination had been carried out, which showed that it was indeed possible to stretch out and flatten oneself down between the rails, so that the train, of course, would pass over without touching the person lying there, but still, how would it feel to lie there! Kolya firmly maintained that he would do it. At first they laughed at him, called him a liar, a braggart, but that only egged him on even more. Above all, those fifteen-year-olds turned up their noses too much, and did not even want to be friends with him at first, but regarded him as “a little boy,” which was insufferably offensive. And so it was decided to go that evening to a spot about half a mile from the station, so that the train would have time to get up full speed after pulling out of the station. The boys met together. It was a moonless night, not just dark but almost pitch black. When the time came, Kolya lay down between the rails. The other five boys who were in on the wager waited with sinking hearts, and finally with fear and remorse, below the embankment, in the bushes near the road. At last there came the chugging of the train pulling out of the station. Two red lights flashed through the darkness, they heard the thunder of the approaching monster. “Run, run away from the rails!” the boys, dying with terror, shouted to Kolya from the bushes, but it was too late: the train loomed up and flew by. The boys rushed to Kolya: he lay without moving. They began pulling at him, lifting him up. Suddenly he rose and went silently down the embankment. When he got down he announced that he had pretended to be unconscious on purpose to frighten them, but the truth was that he had indeed fainted, as he himself later confessed long afterwards to his mama. Thus his reputation as a “desperado” was finally established forever. He returned home to the station white as a sheet. The next day he fell slightly ill with a nervous fever, but was in terribly joyful spirits, pleased and delighted. The incident became known in our town, though not at once, penetrated the high school, and reached the authorities. But at this point Kolya’s mama rushed to plead with the authorities on her boy’s behalf, and in the end got Dardanelov, a respected and influential teacher, to stand up and speak for him, and the case was set aside, as if it had never happened. This Dardanelov, a bachelor and not yet an old man, had for many years been passionately in love with Mrs. Krasotkin, and once already, about a year before, had ventured, most reverently, and sinking with fear and delicacy, to offer her his hand; but she flatly refused him, considering that acceptance would be a betrayal of her boy, though Dardanelov, from certain mysterious signs, even had, perhaps, some right to dream that he was not altogether repugnant to the lovely, but too chaste and sensitive, widow. Kolya’s mad prank seemed to have broken the ice, and Dardanelov, in return for his intercession, received a hint with regard to his hopes, though a very remote one; but Dardanelov himself was a miracle of purity and sensitivity, and therefore it sufficed at the time for the fullness of his happiness. He loved the boy, though he would have considered it humiliating to seek his favor, and in class he treated him sternly and demandingly. But Kolya also kept him at a respectful distance, prepared his lessons excellently, was second in his class, addressed Dardanelov drily, and the whole class firmly believed that Kolya was so strong in world history that he could even “show up” Dardanelov himself. And indeed Kolya had once asked him the question “Who founded Troy?”—to which Dardanelov gave only a general answer about peoples, their movements and migrations, about the remoteness of the times, about fable telling, but who precisely had founded Troy—that is, precisely which persons—he could not say, and even found the question for some reason an idle and groundless one. But this only left the boys convinced that Dardanelov did not know who had founded Troy. As for Kolya, he had learned about the founders of Troy in Smaragdov,^[277] whose history was in the bookcase left by his father. The upshot of it was that all the boys became interested finally in who precisely had founded Troy, but Krasotkin would not give away his secret, and the glory of his knowledge remained unshakably his own.