The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (easy to read books for adults list .txt) 📕

Kolya Krassotkin

IT was the beginning of November. There had been a hard frost,

eleven degrees Reaumur, without snow, but a little dry snow had fallen

on the frozen ground during the night, and a keen dry wind was lifting

and blowing it along the dreary streets of our town, especially

about the marketplace. It was a dull morning, but the snow had

ceased.

Not far from the marketplace, close to Plotnikov’s shop, there

stood a small house, very clean both without and within. It belonged

to Madame Krassotkin, the widow of a former provincial secretary,

who had been dead for fourteen years. His widow, still a

nice-looking woman of thirty-two, was living in her neat little

house on her private means. She lived in respectable seclusion; she

was of a soft but fairly cheerful disposition. She was about

eighteen at the time of her husband’s death; she had been married only

a year and had just borne him a son. From the day of his death she had

devoted herself heart and soul to the bringing up of her precious

treasure, her boy Kolya. Though she had loved him passionately those

fourteen years, he had caused her far more suffering than happiness.

She had been trembling and fainting with terror almost every day,

afraid he would fall ill, would catch cold, do something naughty,

climb on a chair and fall off it, and so on and so on. When Kolya

began going to school, the mother devoted herself to studying all

the sciences with him so as to help him, and go through his lessons

with him. She hastened to make the acquaintance of the teachers and

their wives, even made up to Kolya’s schoolfellows, and fawned upon

them in the hope of thus saving Kolya from being teased, laughed at,

or beaten by them. She went so far that the boys actually began to

mock at him on her account and taunt him with being a “mother’s

darling.”

But the boy could take his own part. He was a resolute boy,

“tremendously strong,” as was rumoured in his class, and soon proved

to be the fact; he was agile, strong-willed, and of an audacious and

enterprising temper. He was good at lessons, and there was a rumour in

the school that he could beat the teacher, Dardanelov, at arithmetic

and universal history. Though he looked down upon everyone, he was a

good comrade and not supercilious. He accepted his schoolfellows’

respect as his due, but was friendly with them. Above all, he knew

where to draw the line. He could restrain himself on occasion, and

in his relations with the teachers he never overstepped that last

mystic limit beyond which a prank becomes an unpardonable breach of

discipline. But he was as fond of mischief on every possible

occasion as the smallest boy in the school, and not so much for the

sake of mischief as for creating a sensation, inventing something,

something effective and conspicuous. He was extremely vain. He knew

how to make even his mother give way to him; he was almost despotic in

his control of her. She gave way to him, oh, she had given way to

him for years. The one thought unendurable to her was that her boy had

no great love for her. She was always fancying that Kolya was

“unfeeling” to her, and at times, dissolving into hysterical tears,

she used to reproach him with his coldness. The boy disliked this, and

the more demonstrations of feeling were demanded of him, the more he

seemed intentionally to avoid them. Yet it was not intentional on

his part but instinctive-it was his character. His mother was

mistaken; he was very fond of her. He only disliked “sheepish

sentimentality,” as he expressed it in his schoolboy language.

There was a bookcase in the house containing a few books that

had been his father’s. Kolya was fond of reading, and had read several

of them by himself. His mother did not mind that and only wondered

sometimes at seeing the boy stand for hours by the bookcase poring

over a book instead of going to play. And in that way Kolya read

some things unsuitable for his age.

Though the boy, as a rule, knew where to draw the line in his

mischief, he had of late begun to play pranks that caused his mother

serious alarm. It is true there was nothing vicious in what he did,

but a wild mad recklessness.

It happened that July, during the summer holidays, that the mother

and son went to another district, forty-five miles away, to spend a

week with a distant relation, whose husband was an official at the

railway station (the very station, the nearest one to our town, from

which a month later Ivan Fyodorovitch Karamazov set off for Moscow).

There Kolya began by carefully investigating every detail connected

with the railways, knowing that he could impress his schoolfellows

when he got home with his newly acquired knowledge. But there happened

to be some other boys in the place with whom he soon made friends.

Some of them were living at the station, others in the

neighbourhood; there were six or seven of them, all between twelve and

fifteen, and two of them came from our town. The boys played together,

and on the fourth or fifth day of Kolya’s stay at the station, a mad

bet was made by the foolish boys. Kolya, who was almost the youngest

of the party and rather looked down upon by the others in consequence,

was moved by vanity or by reckless bravado to bet them two roubles

that he would lie down between the rails at night when the eleven

o’clock train was due, and would lie there without moving while the

train rolled over him at full speed. It is true they made a

preliminary investigation, from which it appeared that it was possible

to lie so flat between the