Kolya the Precocious
Kolya, almost the youngest and, therefore, rather patronised by the older boys, suggested out of sheer bravado that that evening, when the eleven o'clock train was due, he should lie face down between the rails and remain there, without moving, while the train passed over him at full speed… At first they laughed at him and called him a liar and a braggart, but this only heightened his resolve. The point was that those fifteen year olds had turned their noses up at him once too often...
At last the train chugged in the distance, pulling out of the station. Twin red headlights winked in the dark, the approaching monster began to rumble. 'Run, get off the track!' the boys, dying from terror, shouted to Kolya from the bushes, but it was already too late; the train leapt upon him and tore past. The boys rushed to Kolya; he lay motionless. They started to tug him and tried to lift him. Suddenly, he got up and, without a word, walked down the embankment. At the bottom of the embankment he declared that he had deliberately lain there as if unconscious to frighten them, but the truth was, as he admitted much later to his mother, that he really had lost consciousness. Thus he acquired for ever a reputation as a 'desperado'.Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book X Chapter 1
Stalin kept it by his bedside table; Sigmund Freud called it ‘the most magnificent novel ever written’; Dostoevsky’s epic novel The Brothers Karamazov is a book (to quote Samuel Werenfels) in quo quaerit sua dogmata quisque, invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua (in which everyone seeks their beliefs, and everyone finds them).
Apparently my writing often involves rehabilitating ostensibly bad people; perhaps I see something of myself in my subjects.
Today the subject of my rehabilitation effort is Kolya Krasotkin, a minor character who appears mostly in Book X of the Brothers Karamazov. Kolya is a precocious teenager, he has the flaws of a precocious teenager, and so he’s useful for thinking about where precocious teenagers go wrong, and where they can go right. Precocious teenagers are an important cohort: I used to be one, and perhaps you were (or are!) one too. People are the same in all times and places; Kolya lives amongst us.
After the death of his father, Kolya’s eighteen-year-old mother was left with a newborn son, and enough money to get by. Kolya’s mother was so devoted to her beloved son that the other children called him "mummy's little boy”. But mummy’s boy was talented: smart and strong, he was feared by the rest of the class, and even a match for his schoolmaster. Kolya isn’t likeable: he’s an arrogant, insecure show-off who bullies or dismisses those around him.
And yet I think he’s a sympathetic character, albeit one going through a transition; all his flaws contain the seeds of self-improvement. Kolya is a larval genius. He struggles to be born.
I’ll start with the bear case on Kolya; then I’ll discuss the critical conversation with Alyosha in which he recognises his own flaws; finally, I’ll talk about Kolya in the general sense. What’s his deal?
Kolya is nasty. He takes advantage of his mother; he calls his mother’s servant Agafya “you old bag” and “you silly old woman”; in the market, he mocks the peasants, and he’s capricious and dismissive towards his schoolboy minions.
Kolya is a show-off. At various points, Kolya claims to be a socialist, then an atheist, and finally a sceptic. Talking to one of his classmates, he puts on airs and graces: "Boy, abhor falsehood, that's the first thing! Even in a good cause, that's the second thing." In the schoolroom, he reveals that he knows the name of founder of Troy - and revels in the fact that his schoolmaster and the rest of his class don’t, using this as a way to assert his superiority over them. And when the doctor suggests sending the consumptive Ilyusha to Syracuse, Kolya takes this as an opportunity to show off his knowledge:
“Syracuse - it's in Sicily,” Kolya interjected loudly, by way of explanation.
Kolya is dismissive. His desire to show off his knowledge almost always manifests itself in putting someone else down. He’s got it in for doctors:
[Kolya] “Money-grubbers.”
[Smurnov] “Who?”
[Kolya] “Doctors are charlatans - generally speaking and as individuals, of course, I reject medical science. It's a useless pursuit.”
"Do you really think so? You have to agree that the medical profession's a disgrace, Karamazov."
“Don't worry, quack, my dog won't bite you,” Kolya interposed loudly... He had said 'quack' instead of 'doctor' quite deliberately, and as he himself said later, “I said it to insult him.”
Elsewhere, he manages to insult women, Napoleon, and America in the space of three sentences.
“I may have mentioned Tatiana, but that doesn't mean I'm at all in favour of the emancipation of women. I admit that a woman is an inferior being and must obey. Les femmes tricottent, as Napoleon said,” Kolya smiled for some reason, “and at least on that score, I fully share the conviction of that pseudo-great man. I too for example consider that to leave one's homeland for America is base - worse than base - stupid. Why go to America when here too one can do so much for humanity?”
Of course, thirteen-year-old Kolya hasn’t actually been invited to America: but as in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky uses America as an hypothetical outlet for the Russian characters, a Quixotic escape from the framing of the novel.
Ironically, the first time I read this passage in May 2022, I was about to land at SFO. Is it really so base to leave one’s homeland for America? I’ll get back to you on that one.
And above all, Kolya is insecure. With the schoolboys, he can hide this; but with Alyosha, the 20-year old younger Karamazov brother, it all comes out. Ahead of their meeting, Kolya was extremely nervous about his physical appearance.
So this moment was important: above all, he must not lose face, must try and be grown-up: “If not, he'll think I'm only thirteen and take me for a kid like the others. And what are those boys to him? I'll ask him when we get to know each other better. Still, it's a pity I'm so short. Tuzikov is younger than me, but he's half a head taller. Anyway, I've got an intelligent face, I'm not good-looking, I know I have a horrible face, but it's an intelligent one. And I mustn't seem too keen; if I'm to friendly straight away, he'll think... Oh, that would be simply dreadful!...”
Thus Kolya fretted, trying with all his might to maintain an air of the utmost insouciance. What troubled him most of all was his small stature, not his 'ugly' face, just his size. At home he had kept a record of his height since the previous year, with a pencil on a wall in the corner, and every two months he went there in a state of expectation and measured himself to see how much he had grown. But alas, he had grown very little, and this threw him into despair at times. As for his face, it was not at all 'ugly; on the contrary, it was quite nice-looking, pale with freckles... “Have I really got an intelligent face?” he mused sometimes, doubting even this.
During their conversation, his intellectual insecurity comes out as well. Kolya cites some revolutionary verse - and immediately regrets it:
“What if he finds out that I've only got that one copy of The Bell [a revolutionary magazine] in my father's bookcase, and that I haven't read anything else on the subject?” Kolya thought momentarily and shuddered.
The best example of Kolya’s insecurity comes from a longer passage. I think it’s pretty relatable. Kolya is an archetype.
[Alyosha:] “What, you don't believe in God?”
[Kolya:] “On the contrary, I've got nothing against God. Of course, God is only a hypothesis... but... I admit that He is necessary to maintain order... for worldwide order and so on... and if He didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent Him,” Kolya added, beginning to blush.
He suddenly imagined that Alyosha would now think that he was trying to show off his erudition and prove how 'grown-up' he was.“I don't want to show off how erudite I am in front of him at all,” thought Kolya indignantly. And he suddenly felt very angry.
“I must admit, I can't stand getting involved in that kind of argument,” he said quickly. “When all's said and done, one can love mankind without believing in God, don't you think? After all, Voltaire didn't believe in God, but he loved mankind, didn't he?” (I'm doing it again!' he thought to himself.)
“Voltaire did believe in God, but not much, and I don't think he loved mankind that much, either,” Alyosha spoke softly, in a restrained and totally natural manner, as though he were talking to someone of his own age or even someone much older. What surprised Kolya most of all was Alyosha's apparent lack of conviction in his own opinion of Voltaire, and it seemed as though Alyosha was leaving it to him, little Kolya, to make up his own mind.
“Have you read Voltaire?” Alyosha concluded.
“No, not exactly... but I did read Candide, in an old, absolutely dreadfully funny translation...” ('There I go again!')
“And did you understand it?”
“Oh yes, everything... that is... why on earth do you think I wouldn't understand it? Of course, it has a lot of dirty bits... Of course, I understand that it's a philosophical novel and that it was written to promote an idea...” Kolya totally lost his train of thought. “I'm an incorrigible socialist, Karamazov,” he broke off suddenly, for no apparent reason.
“Socialist?” laughed Alyosha. “At your age? You're only thirteen, aren't you?”
Kolya winced.
“Firstly, I'm fourteen, not thirteen, I'll be fourteen in two weeks,” he spluttered, “and secondly, I don't see what on earth my age has got to do with it. It's a question of my convictions, isn't it, not my age?”
“When you're older you'll see for yourself what an influence age has on convictions. Also, I notice you're not using your own words,” Alyosha replied discreetly and calmly, but Kolya interrupted him heatedly.
It’s worth pointing out that Alyosha is himself only twenty! This all reminds me of a passage from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (possibly the greatest shibboleth on the internet?):
The Muggle world had a population of six billion and counting. If you were one in a million, there were seven of you in London and a thousand more in China. It was inevitable that the Muggle population would produce some eleven-year-olds who could do calculus - Harry knew he wasn't the only one. He'd met other prodigies in mathematical competitions. In fact he'd been thoroughly trounced by competitors who probably spent literally all day practising maths problems and who'd never read a science-fiction book and who would burn out completely before puberty and never amount to anything in their future lives because they'd just practised known techniques instead of learning to think creatively. (Harry was something of a sore loser.)"
Eliezer Yudkowsky, HPMOR, Chapter 6
This is a bad look for Harry - he’s a sore loser, lacking self-awareness. But the first time I read this passage, I felt seen. Yudkowsky expresses an emotion I’d always felt and never read written down. A negative emotion, to be sure - but one common to many precocious teenagers.
In the passage above, we see Kolya’s precocious intellect, his reading, but above all his insecurity; and Alyosha sees him too. Alyosha recognises his flaws, and so Kolya reflects on those flaws.
Alyosha is smart; but more importantly, he’s the avatar of goodness and Christian faith in the novel:
Yet he loved people: it seems that he lived his whole life with an absolute faith in people, though no one ever thought of him as simple or naïve. There was something in him that said, and made you believe (and this was so throughout his life), that he did not wish to sit in judgement on others and would never take it upon himself to censure anyone. He seemed willing to tolerate licence in everything without any kind of opprobrium, though he would often be overcome by bitter sadness. And such was his capacity for tolerance that, from his very earliest youth, nothing seemed able either to scandalize or frighten him.
Although Alyosha points out Kolya’s failings, he reaffirms his underlying goodness: twice in the chapter, he says "you've got a delightful character, but it's been warped”; in Russian, that’s вы прелестная натура, хотя и извращенная.
This is reminiscent of Book IV Chapter 2, where Alyosha is talking to his own father Fyodor Karamazov: “You’re not wicked, just a little muddled”. In Russian, that’s Не злой вы человек, а исковерканный; Avsey translates the word iskaverkanniy as “muddled”; Garnett has it as “distorted”; another interpretation is that it means “profoundly damaged, put out of shape, bent, crooked, distorted, mangled.”
Alyosha can see the good in anyone - even the most profoundly damaged. And Fyodor Karamazov really is iskaverkanniy; he’s evil and broken, a wicked old man. But Kolya isn’t: he’s young, and there’s plenty of hope for his future.
Alyosha’s “absolute faith in people” contrasts strongly with his brother Ivan’s pessimism about human nature (of which more later). This is the same Ivan who, in Book XII Chapter 5, utters the immortal line: "Who wouldn't like to kill his father?" Dostoevsky, I believe, agrees with Ivan; what do you think?
In response to Alyosha’s statement of faith, Kolya makes a long and remarkably self-reflective confession. First, he admits to some intellectual failings:
“Well, I admit I was talking nonsense, perhaps. Sometimes I'm terribly childish, and when I'm pleased about something I get carried away and start talking all kinds of nonsense.”
Who amongst us…
Then he admits moral failings: he neglected his friend Ilyusha:
“It was pride that kept me from coming, egoistical pride and a base delight in power which I've been unable to rid myself of all my life, no matter how hard I try. I see that now, in many ways, I'm a scoundrel, Karamazov!”
And finally, he really opens up:
“And then .... when I was saying, "If God didn't exist it would be necessary to invent him" I imagined I was trying too hard to show off my erudition, especially as I'd got the phrase out of a book. But I swear to you that I was showing off not out of vanity, but out of... I don't know, out of joy, it was from joy, as God is my witness... although I admit it's a deeply shameful thing to be forcing one's joy on others.I know that. But now I'm convinced that you don't despise me, and I imagined it all. Oh, Karamazov, I'm so deeply unhappy. Sometimes I imagine God knows what, that everyone, everyone in the world is laughing at me, and then I feel like causing havoc.”
“And you torment those around you,” smiled Alyosha.
“Yes, I torment those around me, particularly my mother. Tell me Karamazov, do I seem very ridiculous now?”
But Alyosha rejects ridicule as something to be feared:
“All gifted people these days are awfully afraid of looking ridiculous, and it makes them unhappy.
…
You're like all of them,” concluded Alyosha, “that is, you're like a lot of people, only you don't have to be like them, like everyone, that's all.”[Kolya] “Even in spite of the fact that everyone's like that?”
“Yes, despite the fact that everyone's like that. You alone won't be like that. In fact, you aren't like everyone: you didn't flinch just now from admitting not only to base actions but also to ridiculous ones. And who admits to such things these days? No one, and people no longer feel the need to judge themselves. Don't be like that, like everyone; even if you have to stand alone and are the only one who's different, nevertheless, don't be like that.”
“Magnificent! I wasn't wrong about you. You have the power to console.
…
Oh, how I love and esteem you at this moment, precisely because you too admit to being ashamed of something! Because you are just like me!” Kolya exclaimed in an excess of enthusiasm. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes sparkling....
You know, what delights me most of all is that you treat me as an equal. But we're not equal, no, we're not equal, you're higher!”
This is a really special passage; it barely needs a gloss. Kolya admits to his flaws; Alyosha and Dostoevsky sensitively, sympathetically unpack the causes of those flaws; and as Tolstoy puts it in War and Peace, tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.
What a freeing idea: you don’t have to be like everyone, even in spite of the fact that everyone’s like that.
It’s easy to dislike Kolya. But Dostoevsky gives us hope for his future. For perhaps the first time in his life, Kolya the self-aware confesses his flaws to another.
He’s not yet a reformed character; just a few pages later, he rudely denigrates Ilyusha’s doctor, exactly as he did before and during his conversation with Alyosha. This isn’t a Road to Damascus moment. But he’s starting down that path.
Kolya has to work out what it means to be an intellectual, and what it means to be a man. In doing so, I think he has two big challenges. He’s got to figure out his status, and he needs to mature intellectually.
Keith Johnstone’s book Impro changed the way that I think about conversations, by introducing the idea of status. Johnstone was an acting teacher, and he noticed that actors often struggled to act out everyday scenes in a believable way. To make sense of that phenomenon, he set out a theory of behaviour as a status game. I’ve written about this idea before:
Johnstone’s insight was that high-status and low-status are not adjectives, but verbs. Status is something people do, and they do it all the time. Despite what you might think, it’s impossible to be neutral - every single action either raises or lowers your status. At the heart of these ‘status games’ is what Johnstone called the see-saw principle - if my status goes up, yours goes down. Once you start interpreting actions as raising or lowering status, you can see the effects everywhere.
Since status is a verb, it can be done well or badly; Kolya does it badly. Inexperienced, he doesn’t yet know when or how to play high and low status, and so he keeps getting it wrong. He needs to work on his soft skills. Thirteen-year-old Kolya is a prime case of “never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence”.
Kolya is also learning to be an intellectual; but as the passages below show, he’s not there yet.
[Kolya:] “On the contrary, I've got nothing against God. Of course, God is only a hypothesis... but... I admit that He is necessary to maintain order... for worldwide order and so on... and if He didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent Him,” Kolya added, beginning to blush.
He suddenly imagined that Alyosha would now think that he was trying to show off his erudition and prove how 'grown-up' he was.…
“Oh yes, everything... that is... why on earth do you think I wouldn't understand it? Of course, it has a lot of dirty bits... Of course, I understand that it's a philosophical novel and that it was written to promote an idea...” Kolya totally lost his train of thought. “I'm an incorrigible socialist, Karamazov,” he broke off suddenly, for no apparent reason.
…[Alyosha] “And have you read Belinsky?”
“Look... no, not exactly, but I read the bit about Tatiana - why she didn't go with Onegin.”
“Why she didn't go with Onegin? Surely you don't... understand that?”
…
[Alyosha] “Well now, tell me, have your read Pushkin, Evgeny Onegin say?... You know, you were talking about Tatiana just now.”“No, I haven't read it yet, but I want to.”
One of the reasons that talking about books is hard is that it’s not at all clear what good looks like. If you want to have a take on a book, should you have memorised the entire text? Should you have read secondary literature? Should you know biographical details about the author, or historical context about the time period? Should you have read other books by the author? Should you have read other books in the genre? Should you have finished the book?
And what about the take itself? Do you need to prove someone else wrong? Do you need make an original discovery? Should it have footnotes? Should it be funny?
Do I get to write an essay about Dostoevsky? Freud wrote an essay about Dostoevsky - has he not set the bar a bit high?
These are questions about norms; the answers are socially determined. One confronts them when writing a undergraduate dissertation, and formal academic training is supposed to supply (context-dependent) answers. If you’re writing on the internet, you can answer them however you want, except that those answers determine your audience and your audience’s reaction.
Kolya is encountering all these questions for the first time, and so he’s worried about looking ridiculous. Eventually, he’ll figure out how to form and present his ideas, but he’s not there yet.
Discussing books you haven’t read
Constrained by the contents of his father’s bookshelf and, uh, being thirteen years old, Alyosha hasn’t yet read very much. Nonetheless, he tries to project the impression of being well-read and knowledgeable.
The contrarian in me (a loud voice at the best of times) says that this is a useful and difficult skill which requires a certain degree of creativity. Talking about books you have read is easy; talking about books you haven’t is more difficult, and if we learned one thing at Oxford, it was that. As ever, it comes back to the bar scene in Good Will Hunting:
“Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or do you...is that your thing? You come into a bar. You read some obscure passage and then pretend...you pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some girls and embarrass my friend?”
If you’re resource-constrained, you have two options. You can diligently study Voltaire and Belinsky, and regurgitate their ideas. Or you can not do that, and hence be forced to come up with some thoughts of your own on the matter. If you’re not resource constrained, you’d do the reading and then come up with original ideas - but if you had to choose one, which would you go for?
If I say to you, “Walter Benjamin may have written The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but you’ve not read it - have you got any thoughts of your own on the matter?”, a creative thinker might manage to come up with something interesting to say just based on the title - whether or not they’ve read Benjamin. Not doing the work forces you to think originally, and sometimes that can be even better than doing the work.
I think this is what Borges was getting at with Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (a word that I do not quite have the Spanish to be comfortable saying). This is partially a story about Death of the Author (it’s a seven-page essay, very worth your time!), which I mentioned here. But isn’t Menard’s project a little like trying to sit in an Oxford tutorial, inventing your own take on Benjamin? And isn’t that a valuable project? In that sense, Kolya’s academic constraints are rather productive.
What counts as ‘torment’?
Let’s be fair to Kolya here. Even though he admits to ‘tormenting’ those around him, his tormenting really isn’t that bad. I mean come on - we’re reading Dostoevsky here, not Enid Blyton. If you want to know what real torment looks like, you can look within the same book of the Brothers Karamazov: Kolya tells us what happened to the stray dog Zhuchka:
“A stupid trick, that is a mean and beastly trick--to take a piece of bread, not the crust, stick a pin into it and throw it to some stray, one of those that's so hungry it'll swallow anything without chewing it, and then watch what happens. So they got a piece of bread and threw it to that shaggy Zhuchka, and now there's all this fuss about a stray which ran loose in the yard, which they didn't even feed, and which spent all day barking at the wind. (Do you like that stupid barking, Karamazov? I can't stand it.)
So the dog rushed up, swallowed the bread, and started to yelp, then it went sort of crazy and ran off, it ran and ran and disappeared -that's how Ilyusha himself described it to me. He confessed to me, cried non-stop and clung to me, trembling. 'He ran and ran, he went crazy’ - he just kept repeating it, it haunted him.”
Dostoevsky doesn’t shy away from vicious depictions of abuse, both human and animal. Zhuchka’s demise is throat-tinglingly awful, but there are other examples just as bad: if you want something really messed up, check out Book I Chapter 5 of Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikov dreams of a horse being beaten to death.
Hegel found the difference between man and mere animal in our desire for recognition by other men; Dostoevsky found it in man’s capacity for violence. According to Ivan Karamazov, cruelty is something uniquely human:
“Of course, in every person there lurks a beast, a demon of fury, whose passions are inflamed by the cries of the victim, an unrestrained wild beast loosed from his chains, a beast riddled with disease contracted through debauchery - gout, liver disorder, and so on."
You may not agree with Ivan on this point; you may have more faith in human nature, you may not believe in the Fall; but if a demon of fury lurks inside us all, then Kolya’s tormenting is comparably innocuous.
Teenagers are horrible
This is a bit of a segue, but I think it’s really difficult to apply conventional moral norms to teenage boys, because teenage boys are horrible (teenage girls may well be different!). The solution for any individual teenager is to grow up, but there are always new teenagers to replace them, and those teenagers will be just as horrible, by virtue of being teenagers who haven’t yet made their mistakes and learned their lessons. So if your solution to the problem of “kids these days” is, at any point, “teenagers as a group stop will being horrible”, you do not actually have a solution.
It reminds me of a reductio ad absurdum solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict:
Step 1: ceasefire
Step 2: return hostages
Step 3: the Arabs and Israelis both go away, and discard their current set of preferences, and come back with a new, much more reasonable, set of preferences, very different to the ones they currently hold.
Step 4: peace
In the general case, I think your theory of teenage behavioural improvement needs to go something like: “these are horrible, restless, competitive little buggers with a capacity for cruelty, a need to show off, and a deep insecurity, and we need to figure out how to channel that energy into something positive, like guarding the kraal, winning debating competitions, or playing rugby - else bad things will happen.” When Kolya channels his talents into being mean to people, that’s not a perversion; that’s the base case for teenage boys, and the job of an educator is to find a better channel.
Transitions are hard
A wise man once said that “if you're going through hell, keep going." That sentiment applies to Kolya, to teenagers, and to anyone going through a transition; the rest of us should cut them some slack. The solution to Kolya’s rudeness and intellectual posturing isn’t for him to be less rude or presumptuous; it’s for him keep going until he finds a stronger identity and matures a little bit. This problem - the problem of transition - reminds me of Herman Hesse’s novel Demian, the novel of a disaffected postwar generation, struggling with their own transition. For instance, take this quote from the protagonist Sinclair:
At that time, I was an unusual young man of eighteen, precocious and immature and helpless. When I compared myself with other boys my age I often felt proud and conceited but just as often humiliated and depressed. Frequently, I considered myself a genius, and just as frequently, crazy. I did not succeed in participating in the life of boys my age, was often consumed by self-reproach and worries; I was helplessly separated from them. I was debarred for life."
Kolya, at his most self-reflective, might relate. His highs are very high, his lows are very low, and they follow one another in quick succession.
Demian is a book about self-discovery, heavily influenced by Nietzsche, and I suppose it must have been something of a self-help book for the young of 1920s Europe. Hesse espouses a variant of Nietzsche’s “become who you are”:
Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself. He might end up as poet or madman, as prophet or criminal - that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself.
One of my favourite lines in Demian comes from Eva, the mother of Max Demian, Sinclair’s mentor (or Messiah) Offering advice to Sinclair, she says:
“It is always difficult to be born. You know the chick does not find it easy to break his way out of the shell. Think back and ask yourself: Was the way all that difficult? Was it only difficult? Wasn't it beautiful too? Can you think of a more beautiful and easier way?”
Kolya is difficult because he struggles to be born.