The Boy Who Needs to Prove Himself — The Brothers Karamazov

November frost grips the town. Near Plotnikov's shop Madame Krassotkin keeps a neat house for her fourteen-year-old Kolya, the son she has guarded since her husband died when the boy was an infant. Her love is constant terror: illness, chairs, schoolfights. She studies lessons with him, fawns on classmates to spare him teasing, and wins the nickname they mock him with: mother's darling. Kolya is strong, vain, clever, knows where to draw the line with teachers, yet lives for sensation and pranks.

On summer visit to a railway station he bets older boys he will lie between the rails at eleven o'clock and not move. They wait in bushes; he lies flat; the train darts past. He pretends insensibility but later admits he truly lost consciousness, comes home white, earns fame as a desperate character, and when the story reaches school only Dardanelov's intercession saves him. His mother nearly goes mad; Kolya swears on the holy image and his father's memory and weeps like a six-year-old, then wakes unfeeling again, quieter and sterner.

The railway scare changes him toward her and toward Dardanelov, the bachelor teacher in love with the widow, who gains a faint hope after helping hush the affair. Kolya despised his sentiment but learns tact, teases with Troy and Smaragdov, bullies his hidden dog Perezvon indoors, and the chapter ends by naming him the boy Ilusha stabbed defending his father when schoolmates shouted wisp of tow.