The Brothers Karamazovsuch as yours should be perverted by all this crude non-
sense before you have begun life.’
‘Don’t be anxious about my nature,’ Kolya interrupted,
not without complacency. ‘But it’s true that I am stupidly
sensitive, crudely sensitive. You smiled just now, and I fan-
cied you seemed to-.’
‘Oh, my smile meant something quite different. I’ll tell
you why I smiled. Not long ago I read the criticism made
by a German who had lived in Russia, on our students and
schoolboys of to-day. ‘Show a Russian schoolboy,’ he writes,
‘a map of the stars, which he knows nothing about, and he
will give you back the map next day with corrections on it.’
No knowledge and unbounded conceit — that’s what the
German meant to say about the Russian schoolboy.’
‘Yes, that’s perfectly right,’ Kolya laughed suddenly, ‘ex-
actly so! Bravo the German! But he did not see the good
side, what do you think? Conceit may be, that comes from
youth, that will be corrected if need be, but, on the other
hand, there is an independent spirit almost from childhood,
boldness of thought and conviction, and not the spirit of
these sausage makers, grovelling before authority.... But
the German was right all the same. Bravo the German! But
Germans want strangling all the same. Though they are so
good at science and learning they must be strangled.’
‘Strangled, what for?’ smiled Alyosha.
‘Well, perhaps I am talking nonsense, I agree. I am aw-
fully childish sometimes, and when I am pleased about
anything I can’t restrain myself and am ready to talk any
stuff. But, I say, we are chattering away here about nothing,