Writing
Chesterton's Fence, Borrowed
Kolya recites his ideas, he does not explain them. Dostoevsky uses a thirteen-year-old to mock a generation of intellectuals tearing down fences they cannot see.
Any analysis of Kolya Krasotkin has to begin with the fact that he is a boy who has just turned thirteen. I do not say that to dismiss him; he would hate any remark about his age. What Kolya wants is the approval of equally intelligent men. His ideas are borrowed from the magazines he has read and from his brief conversations with Rakitin, who is himself no better than Kolya at understanding the ideas they both so grandly embrace. The blind, leading the blind. Kolya is too eager to prove he is not like the other children, that he understands. And perhaps he does understand what he has read. Still, he is green. At thirteen, you have barely had enough experience to tally an abstract idea against the concrete reality of life. You do not yet know what the new idea is arguing against, and even if the idea is correct, you cannot feel the full force of it.
I like Kolya, though. Behind the angst, sometimes too quick to bravado, sometimes too quick to trumpet ideas he does not truly understand, he is a kind soul. He has the big-brother complex, but he does not use it to tyrannize. He wants the younger children to idolize him, yes, but he does not rule them with an iron fist. He is an orphan himself, forced to be the man of the house too early, and in that curtailed childhood he has had to act like an adult. Unfortunately, until he met Alyosha, the only adult he considered his intellectual equal was Rakitin. So he has taken Rakitin's half-baked ideas and made them his worldview.
Dostoevsky uses Kolya brilliantly to mock the ideas of the socialists and liberals of the day. I do not think he despises those ideas, exactly: that the classics are useless, that God is a hypothesis man must invent, that Christianity has been a tranquilizer for the slaves. These were fashionable ideas, and Dostoevsky's point, through Kolya, is that the people who repeat them rarely know the full consequences of what they are advocating. These ideas tear down Chesterton's fence without understanding what it was holding back. The impulse may be well-natured. The consequences will be devastating. And the ideas themselves are seldom truly understood, only copied from someone else's articulation. Kolya recites them. He does not explain them. There lies the problem. Like Kolya, the ideas are green.