The Brothers Karamazov

After the incident on the railway, a certain change took place in Kolya’s relations with his mother. When Anna Fyodorovna (Krasotkin’s widow) learned of her boy’s deed, she almost went out of her mind with horror. She had such terrible hysterical fits, which continued intermittently for several days, that Kolya, now seriously frightened, gave her his solemn word of honor that such pranks would never be repeated. He swore on his knees before an icon and he swore by his father’s memory, as Mrs. Krasotkin demanded, and the “manly” Kolya himself burst into tears like a six-year-old boy, from “feelings,” and all that day both mother and son kept falling into each other’s arms, sobbing and shaking. The next day Kolya woke up as “unfeeling” as ever, yet he grew more silent, more modest, more stern, more thoughtful. True, about a month and a half later, he was again caught in a prank, and his name even became known to our justice of the peace, but this was a prank of a very different sort, even a silly and funny one, and it turned out that he had not perpetrated it himself, but just happened to be mixed up in it. But of that another time. His mother went on trembling and suffering, and Dardanelov’s hopes increased more and more in measure with her anxiety. It should be noted that Kolya understood and figured out this side of Dardanelov, and, naturally, deeply despised him for his “feelings”; previously he had even been tactless enough to display his contempt before his mother, remotely hinting to her that he understood what Dardanelov was up to. But after the incident on the railway, he changed his behavior in this respect as well: he allowed himself no more hints, not even the remotest, and began to speak more respectfully of Dardanelov in his mother’s presence, which the sensitive Anna Fyodorovna understood at once with boundless gratitude in her heart, but at the same time, the slightest, most inadvertent mention of Dardanelov, even from some unaccustomed guest, if it was in Kolya’s presence, would make her blush all over with embarrassment, like a rose. And at such moments Kolya would either look frowning out the window, or study his face in the tips of his boots, or shout fiercely for Perezvon, a rather big, shaggy, and mangy dog he had acquired somewhere about a month before, dragged home, and for some reason kept secretly indoors, not showing him to any of his friends. He tyrannized over him terribly, teaching him all sorts of tricks and skills, and drove the poor dog so far that he howled in his absence, when he was away at school, and when he came home, squealed with delight, jumped madly, stood on his hind legs, fell down and played dead, and so on; in short, he did all the tricks he had been taught, not on command, but solely from the ardor of his rapturous feelings and grateful heart.

Incidentally, I have forgotten even to mention that Kolya Krasotkin was the same one whom the boy Ilyusha, already known to the reader, son of the retired captain Snegiryov, stabbed in the thigh with a penknife, defending his lather, whom the schoolboys taunted with “whiskbroom.”

Chapter 2: Kids