A Little Hero

A boy who is “barely eleven,” and who, in the eyes of adult ladies—infuriating him to no end—is “still the same little, vague creature that they sometimes loved to stroke and with whom they could play as with a small doll.” Spending the summer at his relative’s estate near Moscow, where an entire society of holidaymakers gathered, he fell in love with one of the ladies—Mme M*—not with childish love. For her he performs a real feat (tames the wild mustang Tancred), becomes an unwilling witness to her family secret (she is unhappy with her husband and loves someone else), and selflessly, like the Dreamer from “White Nights” or Ivan Petrovich from the future “Humiliated and Insulted,” does everything so that his beloved can be happy in love (in this case, he finds and returns to her a letter from her “rival,” which she had lost). And as a reward he gets a kiss, a gas scarf, and scorching memories for the rest of his life…

A kind, dreamy, unusually clever Little Hero stands alongside other boys from Dostoevsky’s later novels: Kolyа Ivolgin (“The Idiot”) and Kolyа Krasotkin (“The Brothers Karamazov”).