I. Коля Красоткин

We had had a frost of some eleven degrees, and with it an icy glaze over everything.

A little dry snow had fallen on the frozen ground in the night, and a wind 'dry and sharp' lifts it and sweeps it along the dreary streets of our little town, and most of all across the marketplace.

The morning is murky, but the snowfall has stopped.

Not far from the square, close by the Plotnikovs' shop, stands the small house — very clean, both outside and in — of the widow Krassotkina, an official's wife.

Krassotkin himself, a provincial secretary, had died a very long time ago, almost fourteen years back, but his widow — a woman of thirty, and still quite a pretty little thing — is alive and lives in her tidy little house 'on her own capital.'

She lives honestly and timidly, of a tender disposition, yet cheerful enough.

She had been left a widow at about eighteen, after living with her husband only about a year and having just borne him a son.

From that time on, from his very death, she devoted her whole self to the upbringing of this little treasure of hers, the boy Kolya, and though she had loved him without measure all those fourteen years, she had, of course, endured incomparably more suffering with him than she had ever lived to enjoy in gladness, trembling and dying of fear almost every day lest he fall ill, catch cold, get into mischief, climb up on a chair and tumble off, and so on, and so on.

When Kolya began going to school and then to our preparatory gymnasium, his mother flung herself into studying all the subjects together with him, so as to help him and coach him on his lessons; she flung herself into getting to know the teachers and their wives, and even fawned upon Kolya's schoolmates, the schoolboys, ingratiating herself with them so that they would not pick on Kolya, or jeer at him, or beat him.

She carried it so far that the boys really did begin, because of her, to mock him, and took to teasing him with being a mama's boy.

But the boy knew how to stand up for himself.

He was a bold lad, 'frightfully strong,' as the rumor about him swept through the class and quickly took hold; he was nimble, of a stubborn character, and of a daring, enterprising spirit.

He did well at his studies, and there was even a rumor going around that in both arithmetic and world history he could best the teacher Dardanelov himself.

But though the boy looked down on everyone, his little nose in the air, he was nonetheless a good comrade and did not put on airs.

He accepted the schoolboys' respect as his due, but bore himself in a friendly way.

Above all, he knew where to draw the line, knew how to rein himself in when the occasion called for it, and in his dealings with those in authority never overstepped a certain final and sacred boundary, beyond which a misdeed can no longer be tolerated, turning into disorder, mutiny, and lawlessness.

And yet he was very, very far from averse to playing the prankster at every convenient opportunity — to playing the prankster like the most reckless of urchins — and not so much to mere pranks as to contriving something, working some marvel, dishing out a bit of 'extra pepper,' some flash, some showing off.

Above all, he was very vain.

He even managed to put his own mama into a subordinate position toward himself, ruling over her almost despotically.

And she submitted — oh, she had submitted long ago — and the one thing she simply could not bear, for anything in the world, was the mere thought that her boy 'loved her too little.'

It seemed to her endlessly that Kolya was 'unfeeling' toward her, and there were times when she, dissolving in hysterical tears, would begin to reproach him for his coldness.

The boy did not like this, and the more heartfelt outpourings were demanded of him, the more — as if on purpose — he grew unyielding.

But this happened in him not on purpose but involuntarily — such, after all, was his nature.

His mother was mistaken: he loved his mama very much; what he did not love was only 'calf-like tendernesses,' as he put it in his schoolboy idiom.

After his father there remained a cabinet in which a few books were kept; Kolya loved to read and had already read some of them on his own.

His mother was not troubled by this and only marveled sometimes that the boy, instead of going off to play, would stand for hours on end by the cabinet over some book or other.

And in this way Kolya read a thing or two that ought not yet to have been given him to read at his age.

Of late, however, though the boy did not like to carry his pranks past a certain known line, there began pranks that frightened his mother in earnest — not, it is true, anything immoral, but desperate ones, daredevil ones.

That very summer, in the month of July, during the holidays, it happened that mother and son went off to stay for a little week in another district, some seventy versts away, with a distant kinswoman whose husband worked at a railway station (the very station nearest our town, the one from which Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov would set out for Moscow a month later).

There Kolya began by inspecting the railway in every detail and studying its workings, understanding that with this new knowledge of his he could shine, once he returned home, among the schoolboys of his gymnasium.

But there happened to be just then several other boys as well, with whom he fell in; some of them lived at the station, others nearby — in all, of young folk between twelve and fifteen years old, some six or seven gathered together, and of these two happened to be from our little town as well.

The boys played and made mischief together, and there, on the fourth or fifth day of the visit at the station, a most impossible wager of two rubles was struck among this foolish youth — namely: Kolya, almost the youngest of them all and therefore somewhat despised by the elder ones, out of vanity or out of brazen daring, proposed that he, at night, when the eleven-o'clock train came in, would lie face down between the rails and lie there motionless while the train roared over him at full steam.

True, a preliminary study had been made, from which it emerged that one really could stretch out and flatten oneself lengthwise between the rails in such a way that the train, of course, would rush over without touching the one lying there — but, all the same, to lie there!

Kolya insisted firmly that he would lie there.

At first they laughed at him, called him a little liar and a braggart, but that only egged him on the more.

The main thing was that these fifteen-year-olds had turned up their noses at him too haughtily and at first had even refused to count him as a comrade, as a 'little one,' which was already unbearably insulting.

And so it was decided to set out toward evening, a verst from the station, so that the train, having pulled away from the station, would already have built up its full speed.

The boys gathered.

The night that came was moonless — not so much dark as almost black.

At the appointed hour Kolya lay down between the rails.

The other five, who had laid the wager, waited with sinking hearts — and at last in terror and remorse — down below the embankment, in the bushes beside the line.

At last the train thundered in the distance, having pulled out from the station.

Two red lanterns flashed out of the darkness, and the approaching monster came roaring on.

'Run, run, get off the rails!' the boys, dying of fear, shouted to Kolya from the bushes — but it was already too late: the train bore down and tore past.

The boys rushed to Kolya: he lay motionless.

They began to tug at him, started to lift him up.

Suddenly he rose and walked down the embankment in silence.

Having come down, he announced that he had deliberately lain as if unconscious in order to frighten them, but the truth was that he had in fact lost consciousness, as he himself confessed afterward, long after, to his mama.

In this way the reputation of a 'desperate fellow' attached itself to him forever.

He came back home to the station pale as a sheet.

The next day he fell slightly ill with a nervous fever, but in spirit he was frightfully cheerful, glad, and content.

The affair did not come to light at once, but only later, in our town; it made its way into the gymnasium and reached the ears of its authorities.

But here Kolya's mama threw herself into pleading with the authorities on behalf of her boy, and it ended with the respected and influential teacher Dardanelov standing up for him and interceding for him, so the matter was let drop, as if it had never happened at all.

This Dardanelov, a bachelor and not an old man, had been passionately and for many years now in love with Madame Krassotkina, and once already, about a year before, had ventured — most respectfully, and dying of fear and delicacy — to offer her his hand; but she had refused flatly, considering that to consent would be a betrayal of her boy, although Dardanelov, by certain mysterious signs, might even, perhaps, have had some right to dream that he was not altogether repugnant to the charming but all too chaste and tender little widow.

Kolya's mad prank seems to have broken the ice, and for his intercession Dardanelov was given a hint of hope — a distant one, true — but then Dardanelov himself was a phenomenon of purity and delicacy, and so even that much was, for the time being, enough for the fullness of his happiness.

He loved the boy, though he would have thought it demeaning to curry favor with him, and treated him strictly and exactingly in class.

But Kolya, for his part, kept him too at a respectful distance, prepared his lessons splendidly, was second in his class, addressed Dardanelov drily, and the whole class firmly believed that in world history Kolya was so strong that he could 'best' Dardanelov himself.