“Don’t trouble; it is cold, but I don’t often catch cold. Let us go in, though, and, by the way, what is your name? I know you are called Kolya, but what else?”
“Nikolay—Nikolay Ivanovitch Krassotkin, or, as they say in official documents, ‘Krassotkin son.’ ” Kolya laughed for some reason, but added suddenly, “Of course I hate my name Nikolay.”
“Why so?”
“It’s so trivial, so ordinary.”
“You are thirteen?” asked Alyosha.
“No, fourteen—that is, I shall be fourteen very soon, in a fortnight. I’ll confess one weakness of mine, Karamazov, just to you, since it’s our first meeting, so that you may understand my character at once. I hate being asked my age, more than that ... and in fact ... there’s a libelous story going about me, that last week I played robbers with the preparatory boys. It’s a fact that I did play with them, but it’s a perfect libel to say I did it for my own amusement. I have reasons for believing that you’ve heard the story; but I wasn’t playing for my own amusement, it was for the sake of the children, because they couldn’t think of anything to do by themselves. But they’ve always got some silly tale. This is an awful town for gossip, I can tell you.”
“But what if you had been playing for your own amusement, what’s the harm?”
“Come, I say, for my own amusement! You don’t play horses, do you?”
“But you must look at it like this,” said Alyosha, smiling. “Grown‐up people go to the theater and there the adventures of all sorts of heroes are represented—sometimes there are robbers and battles, too—and isn’t that just the same thing, in a different form, of course? And young people’s games of soldiers or robbers in their playtime are also art in its first stage. You know, they spring from the growing artistic instincts of the young. And sometimes these games are much better than performances in the theater, the only difference is that people go there to look at the actors, while in these games the young people are the actors themselves. But that’s only natural.”
“You think so? Is that your idea?” Kolya looked at him intently. “Oh, you know, that’s rather an interesting view. When I go home, I’ll think it over. I’ll admit I thought I might learn something from you. I’ve come to learn of you, Karamazov,” Kolya concluded, in a voice full of spontaneous feeling.