Summary of the book
Book X opens the Fourth Part with none of the three brothers at its center. Kolya Krasotkin, thirteen and nearly fourteen, finally visits Ilyusha Snegiryov, the boy he protected at school and later abandoned out of pride, and who is now dying. He arrives with a dog he has secretly trained, a toy cannon, and a repertoire of second-hand ideas, and everything he does before the sick boy is a show. Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov lets him show off, does not rebut any of his theses, and treats him as an equal. It is this treatment, more than any argument, that makes the boy confess what he feels. The book closes in Ilyusha's room, with the doctor's prognosis and the boy's request to be buried beside the stone. The question it leaves is what becomes of an adolescent who learned to speak before learning to feel, and what saves him is someone who simply listens to him.
Chapter I: Kolya Krasotkin
Chapter summary
The narrator introduces Kolya Krasotkin on a freezing morning at the beginning of November. The son of a civil servant's widow, Anna Fyodorovna, who has devoted herself entirely to him since he was eighteen, Kolya is small, strong, studious, daring, and has a reputation for courage. His mother, anxious, has chased the teachers and classmates to keep them from mistreating him, and this led the class to call him "Mama's darling," but he knew how to assert himself. He learned to order her about almost like a despot, and she lets herself be ordered. She only cannot bear the idea that her son loves her too little.
Analysis
The narrator shows the mother asking for affection and the son backing away in proportion to the request, not out of coldness: the request humiliates him in his own eyes. Each of her tears hardens him further, and the hardening, which she reads as lack of love, is the way he protects his own self-esteem. The trait returns in Chapter IV, applied to another boy.
The narrator dispels her mistake in a sentence:
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Chapter II: The Guardian of the Little Ones
Chapter summary
That Sunday, at eleven in the morning, Kolya Krasotkin is alone in the house, minding the two children of the tenant, a woman doctor: Kostya, seven, and Nastya, eight. The doctor's maid went into labor during the night, both mothers ran to the midwife, and the household maid went to the market. He has to go out on "a most important matter," which the narrator does not reveal, and he has already glanced several times at the little ones, who wait for him smiling. He overhears their discussion of where babies come from (Nastya rejects the story of the cabbage patch and invents theories; Kostya is puzzled that the maid had a child without being married) and concludes that they are dangerous people. He wants to be allowed to leave and promises to show them a little bronze cannon that really fires. The promise is a bargain: the children will not cry or make mischief, and he leaves with an easy mind.
Analysis
Chapter III: On the Way to the Captain
Chapter summary
At the corner of the square, Kolya Krasotkin whistles, and Smurov, eleven years old, from the preparatory class, slips out secretly, since his parents forbid him to walk with a "desperate." Smurov reports that Ilyusha Snegiryov is unwell, probably consumptive, that ten classmates visit the house every day, and that Captain Snegiryov hopes to bring him a puppy to console him. He also proposes making Ilyusha believe that Perezvon is the lost Zhuchka, and Kolya refuses: a schoolboy must abhor a lie, even for a good cause. Kolya despises the doctors and finds it strange that Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov has time for "sentimentalities" with the boys when his brother is to be tried the next day or the day after. Smurov observes that he himself is going to make up with Ilyusha:
Analysis
Chapter IV: Yuchka
Chapter summary
Leaning against the fence, Kolya Krasotkin rehearses the posture of someone who is not nervous. He has wanted to meet Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov for a long time. He has always feigned indifference when people spoke of him, and he fears looking like a child. He is short, a height that humiliates him (he measures himself on the wall at home every two months and grows little), and he thinks his face ugly, though it is pleasant, freckled, with a turned-up nose. Alyosha, who has given up the cassock and now wears a well-cut frock coat, appears quickly and comes out without a coat, with a cheerful face. He holds out his hand and says that everyone was waiting for him.
Before they go in, Kolya wants to explain "the case," and pours out the story. He defended Ilyusha Snegiryov in the preparatory class, when classmates mocked his clothes, and the boy began to obey him like a god. But Kolya, who declares himself an enemy of "calf-like tenderness," noticed the boy growing sentimental and wanted to harden him. He then discovered that Ilyusha, prompted by Smerdyakov, the servant of old Karamazov, had stuck a pin into a crumb of bread and tossed it to a yard dog, Zhuchka. The dog swallowed the bread, yelped, and ran off. Ilyusha confessed it to him in tears, repeating, "run and yelp." Kolya saw remorse in this, and to educate him he feigned greater indignation than he felt. He called him a scoundrel and said he was breaking off their agreement until he made up his mind.
Analysis
Chapter V: At Ilyusha's Bedside
Chapter summary
In the stuffy izba of the Snegiryovs, Ilyusha Snegiryov has been in bed for two weeks, beside the icon corner, and several boys visit him. Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov reconciled them with him one by one, without "calf-like tenderness," and the sick boy was moved to see his former enemies become friends. Kolya Krasotkin is missing, and his absence weighs on him most, because the quarrel with his only friend and protector is his bitterest memory. The captain has stopped drinking and trembles for his son. The mother, who used to laugh at her husband's antics, has fallen silent. And Katerina Ivanovna, after paying two hundred rubles and getting to know the family, supports everything, and has brought from Moscow, at great expense and "for another purpose," a famous doctor. Kolya had only let Smurov know the day before, and forbade him to announce the visit: he wanted to arrive by surprise.
Analysis
Chapter VI: Second-Hand Ideas
Chapter summary
While the doctor examines Ilyusha Snegiryov, Kolya Krasotkin and Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov are left alone in the vestibule, and Kolya, nervous, pours out what he rehearsed. He calls medicine a racket, and says he has long wanted to meet Alyosha, though he knows he is a mystic, because "contact with reality" will cure him. Alyosha asks of what, and Kolya answers: "God and all that stuff." Alyosha is surprised by the answer and asks whether Kolya does not believe in God. The boy, blushing, displays the formula of the educated deist:
Analysis
Chapter VII: Ilyusha's Request
Chapter summary
The doctor leaves the izba in his overcoat, with a look of disgust, and the captain follows him, bent over, asking for a word. The doctor replies that he is not God, tells them to prepare for everything, and, pressed, says that only the climate of Syracuse, in Sicily, could save the boy, and that the family should go to the Caucasus in spring and the mother afterward to Paris, to a psychiatric clinic. The captain shows with his arms the bare walls of the entrance, and the doctor retorts that this is none of his concern, that he only said what medicine offers as a last resort. Kolya Krasotkin, standing beside Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, cuts in to explain that Syracuse is in Sicily. At the doctor's nervous glance at the dog, he says loudly: "Don't worry, quack, my dog doesn't bite." He uses the word lekar', a crude term for "doctor," to insult him, as he will confess later, and he provokes the man's fury, who shouts that the boy should be whipped. Kolya lets out a threat that Perezvon may bite, and only stops when Alyosha threatens to break with him forever:
Analysis
Reading of the book
Analysis