Who He Is
Kolya Krasotkin is a boy of thirteen, nearly fourteen, the son of a civil servant's widow, Anna Fyodorovna, who devoted herself entirely to him from the age of eighteen and whom he has learned to order about almost like a despot (ch. I of Book X). He is small and strong, studious, bold, and has a reputation for courage and recklessness: in the summer, to be counted as an equal among boys of twelve to fifteen, he bet two rubles that he would lie face down between the rails with the eleven o'clock train passing over him (ch. I of Book X). He appears briefly in ch. III of Book IV, as the schoolmate whom Ilyusha Snegiryov wounded in the thigh with a penknife, and the whole of Book X is dedicated to him. He is the only friend and protector of Ilyusha at school, whom he abandoned out of pride weeks earlier and whom he sees again only when the boy is dying (ch. IV of Book X). The trait that defines him is the fear of seeming small: he measures himself against the wall of his home, avoids being asked his age, and covers over with adult ideas, heard but not examined, what he does not yet know how to feel (ch. VI of Book X).
Trajectory
In ch. I of Book X the narrator presents him on a freezing morning in early November, and the mother, who by surrounding the teachers so that they would not mistreat him made him be called a mama's boy, serves as the key to the rest. The narrator dismisses her mistake in one sentence:
Мать ошибалась: маму свою он очень любил, а не любил только «телячьих нежностей», как выражался он на своем школьническом языке, His mother was wrong: he loved his mother very much, and only did not like "calf-like tenderness," as he put it in his schoolboy language.
On the most famous occasion, that of the rails, the motive comes in two versions that the narrator lets stand:
Коля, почти изо всех младший, а потому несколько презираемый старшими, из самолюбия или из беспардонной отваги, предложил, что он, ночью, когда придет одиннадцатичасовой поезд, ляжет между рельсами ничком, Kolya, the youngest of nearly all of them, and therefore somewhat despised by the older boys, out of vanity or out of reckless daring, proposed that at night, when the eleven o'clock train came, he would lie face down between the rails.
The chapter also tells that he asked Dardanelov, a teacher in love with the widow, who founded Troy, and that he already knew the answer, taken from Smaragdov on his father's bookshelf, and kept it as a secret. For a month he has had a shaggy, mangy dog, Perezvon, whom he trains in secret.
In ch. II of Book X he stands guard over the two children of the lodger, Kostya and Nastya, and parries his classmates' teasing, who call him the little ones' pony:
что он делает это для «пузырей», потому что их любит, а в чувствах его никто не смеет у него спрашивать отчета, that he does it for the "little bubbles," because he loves them, and that no one has the right to ask him to account for his feelings.
In ch. III of Book X he meets Smurov on the corner and gives him lessons in free spirit: he says he is a socialist, repeating an idea of the seminarian Rakitin, lies to a peasant that at school one gets beaten, and invents a riddle to make the market women fight. When Smurov names what he is going to do, make peace with Ilyusha, he rejects the expression:
Мириться? Смешное выражение. Я, впрочем, никому не позволяю анализировать мои поступки, Make peace? A ridiculous expression. Besides, I do not allow anyone to analyse my actions.
In ch. IV of Book X, leaning against the fence of the captain's house, he tells Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov how he broke off the pact with Ilyusha. He learned that the boy, prompted by Smerdyakov, had stuck a pin into a piece of bread and thrown it to a yard dog, Zhuchka, and, to harden himself, he pretended greater indignation than he felt:
чем он нежнее, тем становлюсь еще хладнокровнее, нарочно так поступаю, таково мое убеждение, the more tender he is, the colder I become; I do this on purpose, that is my conviction.
Then came the humiliation of Ilyusha's father, called a sponge by the classmates; Kolya saw it from ten paces away, nearly intervened, and took the penknife in his thigh without moving. He told no one and, when Ilyusha fell ill, did not go to forgive him because, he says, he had private intentions.
In ch. V of Book X he returns to his dying friend with Perezvon, who is the lost Zhuchka, found by him through the signs that Ilyusha had described to him, and the scene joins what he has of most genuine and most showy. Alyosha asks him, with reproach, whether he only went to train the dog who had been missing for weeks:
Я хотел показать его во всем блеске!, I wanted to show him off in all his glory!
In the same scene he tells the story of the goose, in which he got a young man to drive the cart over the bird's neck and, before the justice of the peace, defended himself as one who merely floats an idea:
я только выразил основную мысль и говорил лишь в проекте, I merely expressed the basic idea and spoke only in the abstract.
In ch. VI of Book X, alone with Alyosha in the vestibule, he delivers what he has rehearsed: medicine is a racket, God is a necessary hypothesis for the order of the world, Christ would join the revolutionaries.
бог есть только гипотеза… но… я признаю, что он нужен, для порядка… для мирового порядка и так далее… и если б его не было, то надо бы его выдумать, God is only a hypothesis... but... I admit that he is needed, for order... for the world order and so on... and if he did not exist, one would have to invent him.
я не против Христа. Это была вполне гуманная личность, и живи он в наше время, он бы прямо примкнул к революционерам и, может быть, играл бы видную роль… Это даже непременно, I am not against Christ. He was a thoroughly humane personality, and if he lived in our time, he would straightaway join the revolutionaries and perhaps play a prominent role... It is even certain.
Alyosha asks with whose fool he has been spending time, and the name that comes is that of Rakitin, with the attribution to Belinsky, which Kolya had not read properly. Kolya suddenly asks whether Alyosha despises him; Alyosha answers that it only pains him to see a charming nature already perverted by so much coarseness, and the boy confesses the mechanism:
О Карамазов, я глубоко несчастен. Я воображаю иногда бог знает что, что надо мной все смеются, весь мир, и я тогда, я просто готов тогда уничтожить весь порядок вещей, Oh Karamazov, I am deeply unhappy. Sometimes I imagine God knows what, that everyone laughs at me, the whole world, and then I am simply ready to destroy the whole order of things.
Alyosha gives the evil the name of vanity, without laughing, and Kolya, moved, says that their conversation sounds like a declaration of love and asks whether that is ridiculous:
Знаете, Карамазов, наше объяснение похоже на объяснение в любви, — каким-то расслабленным и стыдливым голосом проговорил Коля. — Это не смешно, не смешно?, You know, Karamazov, our explanation is like a declaration of love, Kolya said in a limp and bashful voice. It is not ridiculous, is it, not ridiculous?
In ch. VII of Book X he insults the Moscow doctor, calling him a quack, in the name of the humiliated Ilyusha and the captain, and stops only when Alyosha threatens to break with him:
Лекарь, есть только одно существо в целом мире, которое может приказывать Николаю Красоткину, это вот этот человек [...] ему повинуюсь, Quack, there is only one being in the whole world who can give orders to Nikolai Krasotkin, and it is this man [...] to him I obey.
In the same chapter he stands beside Ilyusha when the boy asks his father to bury him beside the stone and to come and see him there with Kolya and with Perezvon, and he runs out into the street crying, no longer caring about anything.
In ch. III of the Epilogue, at the head of about twelve boys at the gate, he asks Alyosha the question that has consumed him for four nights: is Mitya innocent. He says he would envy him if he perished as an innocent victim of the truth, and that he wanted to die for all humanity. Beside the stone of Ilyusha, after Alyosha's speech about good memory, he asks, without pose:
неужели и взаправду религия говорит, что мы все встанем из мертвых, и оживем, и увидим опять друг друга, и всех, и Илюшечку?, is it really true that religion says we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyushechka?
And it is he who closes the novel with the shout of the boys:
И вечно так, всю жизнь рука в руку! Ура Карамазову!, And may it always be so, hand in hand all our lives! Hurrah for Karamazov!
Themes Embodied
Kolya is the case of a secondhand Reason: God as hypothesis, socialism, Voltaire and Belinsky serve him as armour against the fear of being ridiculous (ch. VI of Book X), and the same armour makes him mistreat those he loves, because it leads him to leave Ilyusha for weeks in pain in order to make a glorious return (ch. V of Book X), to insult the doctor in a gesture that reads both as loyalty to Ilyusha and as the pose of a defender (ch. VII of Book X), and to train the dog instead of visiting his friend (ch. V of Book X). The book places him beside real Suffering, that of the boy who dies and that of the captain, and leaves the distance in plain view.
What Kolya wants is an audience, and what he fears is the audience laughing. The scene with the dog shows both sides: his love for Ilyusha is real and the effect is true, the boy cries out with happiness, but Kolya reaches him only through the spectacle and does not see what the weeks of waiting cost (ch. V of Book X). Alyosha does not rebut any of his theses; he treats him as an equal and lets the confession come out, and it is that treatment which disarms him (ch. VI of Book X). The obedience that Kolya declares to him in ch. VII of Book X is the first moment in which he accepts being commanded, something his mother never obtained (ch. I of Book X).
Divergent Readings
The book stages two readings of Kolya, and neither is refuted. Alyosha reads him as an enchanting nature whose illness is vanity, which has spread through a whole generation:
В это самолюбие воплотился черт и залез во всё поколение, именно черт, In this vanity the devil has incarnated himself and crept into the whole generation, the devil himself.
Kolya himself, in the confession of ch. VI of Book X, reads himself as someone who imagines the world laughing at him and would be ready to destroy the order of things.
On the first reading, what Kolya does wrong, the goose, the dog, the doctor, is a symptom of a common illness, and what he learns from Alyosha cures him, or begins to cure him: the question without pose beside the stone would be the result (ch. III of the Epilogue). On the second, the defence of the goose, that of someone who throws out the thesis and refuses the effect (ch. V of Book X), is the one Ivan will have before Smerdyakov (ch. VIII of Book XI), and the destruction Kolya imagines in the confession just does not yet have the goose's power to grow. In favour of the first, the Epilogue shows a question he would not have asked in Book X. In favour of the second, in the same Epilogue he still says that he wanted to die for all humanity and that our names may perish, and Alyosha is startled by so much shame.
Relationships
- Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov: the adult he had been looking for for a month without having seen him, to whom he declares obedience (ch. VII of Book X) and from whom he receives the name of the evil and the order to be different (ch. VI of Book X).
- Ilyusha Snegiryov: the friend and protege whom he hardened, abandoned and sees again dying (ch. IV of Book X, ch. V of Book X); at the funeral he stands at the head of the boys (ch. III of the Epilogue).
- Rakitin: the source of the ideas he repeats, and from whom he says he differs on points such as America and the role of women (ch. VI of Book X).
- Smerdyakov: the servant who, in the story Kolya tells Alyosha, instructs Ilyusha to hide the pin in the bread (ch. IV of Book X).