Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 0for 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, Karam-
azov, 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 libellous 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 amuse-
ment, 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 theatre 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 artis-