By Trevin Wax, TGC. (photo: Brett Jordan/Unsplash)
Every time I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, I walk away with fresh insight into the human heart and new applications for contemporary challenges. This year, reading through Michael Katz’s new translation, I was struck by Kolya Krasotkin—a 13-year-old on the precipice of manhood whose past history and present insecurities result in outward bravado.
Kolya is a minor character in Dostoevsky’s towering work of Christian moral vision. It’s easy to focus only on the Karamazov brothers—Ivan’s intellectual rebellion, Dmitri’s ill-fated passions, and Alyosha’s saintliness. But this time around, I found in Kolya the 19th-century Russian equivalent of today’s drifting young men, flailing about due to a lack of direction, often overcompensating by trying to impress others with their intelligence or strength.
Pain Behind the Performance
Kolya is sharp. He knows how to impress his teachers. He dominates his classmates. At one point, he tries to prove his courage by lying down under a speeding train. He throws around references to Voltaire and socialism to seem more grown-up than he is. But beneath it all, Kolya is scared. Insecure. Afraid he’ll be exposed as ridiculous. In his own words,
Sometimes I imagine all sorts of things, that everyone’s laughing at me, the whole world, and then I’m simply ready to destroy the entire order of things.
I wonder at times if many young men today, who espouse semirevolutionary aspirations that would destroy the social order, are just trying to escape the sense that their lives are laughable. What if this deep insecurity is the root that causes young men to act out online, or hide behind anonymous personas, or disengage from real-life challenges, or express a false bravado by trampling cultural norms?