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“The prison is immobile,” as Mochulsky observes, “it is a ‘dead house’ frozen in perpetuity, but the author moves.”*8
What he saw in these “simple people” was a complexity of character, a capacity for extremes of both evil and good, that destroyed the basic assumptions of the utopian socialism he had embraced as a young man.
“The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner, an outcast …,” he writes, “but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being.”
Here you were in a special world, unlike anything else; it had its own special laws, its own clothing, its own morals and customs, an alive dead house, a life like nowhere else, and special people.
Man is a creature who gets used to everything, and that, I think, is the best definition of him.
I am firmly convinced that the famous system of solitary confinement also achieves only a false, deceptive, external purpose. It sucks the living juice from a man, enervates his soul, weakens it, frightens it, and then presents this morally dried-up, half-crazed mummy as an example of correction and repentance.
“We’re beaten folk,” they used to say, “we’re all beaten up inside; that’s why we shout in our sleep.”
Without his own special, personal occupation, to which he was committed with all his mind, with all his reckoning, a man could not live in prison.
Without work, and without lawful, normal property, a man cannot live, he becomes depraved, he turns into a brute.
The characteristic of these people is the annihilation of their own person always, everywhere, and before almost everyone, and in group activities to take not even a secondary but a tertiary role. All this is simply in their nature.
Before my eyes, during my life in prison, A—v turned into and remained a piece of meat with teeth and a stomach, and with an unquenchable thirst for the coarsest, most brutish carnal pleasures, and to satisfy the least and most whimsical of these pleasures, he was capable of cold-blooded murder, cutting throats, anything so long as it left no traces.
The whole meaning of the word “prisoner” is a man with no will; but in wasting money, he is acting by his own will.
And yet maybe the whole reason for this sudden outburst in a man from whom it could be least expected is the anguished, convulsive display of his personality, an instinctive longing for his own self, a desire to declare himself, his humiliated self, which appears suddenly and reaches the point of anger, rage, a darkening of the mind, fits, convulsions.
Reason holds sway over people like Petrov only until they want something. Then nothing on earth can hinder their desire.
Every man, whoever he may be and however humiliated, still requires, even if instinctively, even if unconsciously, respect for his human dignity. The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner, an outcast, and he knows his place before his superior; but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being.
Humane treatment may make a human being even of someone in whom the image of God has faded long ago.2
These giftless enforcers of the law decidedly do not understand, and are incapable of understanding, that its literal enforcement alone, without thought, without an understanding of its spirit, leads straight to disorder and has never led to anything else.
In short, they were children, perfect children, though some of these children were forty years old.
The highest and most sharply characteristic feature of our people is this sense of justice and the thirst for it.
Imagine prison, fetters, unfreedom, long sad years ahead, a life as monotonous as drizzling rain on a dreary autumn day—and suddenly all these downtrodden and confined men are allowed for one little hour to let go, to have fun, to forget the oppressive dream, to set up a whole theater, and what a theater: to the pride and astonishment of the whole town, as if to say, see what kind of prisoners we are!
The beds were wooden, painted green, all too familiar to each of us in Russia—those same beds which, by a sort of predestination, simply cannot be without bedbugs.
The prisoners delighted in executing them, so that when an executed beast popped under a prisoner’s thick, clumsy nail, you could even judge the extent of the satisfaction it gave him by the look on the hunter’s face.
Fetters are simply a dishonor, a shame and a burden, physical and moral. At least they’re supposed to be.
At the same time the criminal knows and has no doubt that he is vindicated by the court of his own milieu, his own simple folk, who will never (this, too, he knows) condemn him definitively, and for the most part will vindicate him outright, as long as his offense is not against his own, his brothers, his fellow simple folk.
What soldier personally hates a Turk when he makes war on him? And yet the Turk cuts him down, stabs him, shoots at him.
You could see by his face that this was the most unreflective man in the world.
He loved, he passionately loved performing his art, and loved it solely for the art’s sake. He took pleasure in it, and, like a jaded Roman patrician, glutted with pleasures, he invented for himself various subtleties, various perversions, in order to arouse and pleasantly tickle his fat-bloated soul at least somewhat.
Strangely enough, there are even some among them who are not kind people at all, and yet they sometimes acquire great popularity. They are not squeamish, they are not disgusted by the people under them—there, it seems to me, is where the reason lies! You see nothing of the clean-handed little squire in them, you catch no whiff of the fine lord, but they have a sort of special, inborn, common-folk smell, and, my God, how sensitive the people are to that smell!
Tyranny is a habit; it is endowed with development, and develops finally into an illness.
I stand upon this, that the best of men can, from habit, become coarse and stupefied to the point of brutality. Blood and power intoxicate: coarseness and depravity develop; the most abnormal phenomena become accessible and, finally, sweet to the mind and feelings. Man and citizen perish forever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration, becomes almost impossible for him.
A society that looks indifferently upon such a phenomenon is itself infected at its foundation.
a generation does not tear itself away so quickly from the inheritance sitting in it; a man does not renounce so quickly what has entered his blood, what was passed on to him, so to speak, with his mother’s milk.
To acknowledge one’s guilt and ancestral sin is little, very little; it is necessary to break with them completely.
Life in the forest, a life poor and terrible, but free and full of adventures, has something tempting about it, a sort of mysterious enchantment for those who have once experienced it, and—lo and behold—the man runs away, even a modest, conscientious man, who has promised to become a good, sedentary man and a sensible householder.
In uniform he was a terror, a god. In a frock coat he suddenly became a complete nothing and smacked of the lackey. It’s astonishing how much a uniform does for these people.
in all that time, despite having hundreds of fellow prisoners, I was in terrible solitude, and I finally came to love that solitude.
They are perhaps the most gifted, the strongest of all our people. But their mighty strength perishes for nothing, perishes abnormally, unlawfully, irretrievably.
