Notes from a Dead House (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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.”

Man is a creature who gets used to everything, and that, I think, is the best definition of him.

I remember how a drunken robber (you could occasionally get drunk in prison) once began telling about how he killed a five-year-old boy, how he lured him first with a toy, took him to some empty shed, and there put a knife in him. The whole barrack, which until then had laughed at his jokes, cried out like one man, and the robber was forced to shut up; they did not cry out in indignation, but just so, because he shouldn’t have talked about that; because it was not acceptable to talk about that.

In general I must say that all these people, with the exception of a few inexhaustibly cheerful ones, who were held up to universal scorn because of it, were gloomy, envious, terribly vain, boastful, touchy, and formalists in the highest degree. The ability to be surprised at nothing was considered the greatest virtue. They were all mad about keeping up appearances. But not infrequently the most arrogant look changed with lightning speed to the most pusillanimous. There were several truly strong men; they were simple and unaffected. But, strangely enough, among these truly strong men there were a few who were vain to the utmost degree, almost to the point of sickness. In general, vanity and appearances took the foreground. The majority were depraved and terribly degenerate. There was ceaseless gossip and scandal-mongering: it was hell, pitch-darkness. Yet no one dared to rebel against the internal statutes and accepted customs of the prison; everyone submitted. There were outstanding characters who submitted with difficulty, with effort, but submitted all the same.

A prisoner is obedient and submissive up to a certain point; but there is a limit that should not be overstepped. Incidentally, nothing could be more curious than these strange fits of impatience and rebelliousness. Often a man endures for several years, resigns himself, suffers the harshest punishments, and suddenly explodes over some small thing, a trifle, almost nothing.

Of course, prisons and the system of forced labor do not correct the criminal; they only punish him and ensure society against the evildoer’s further attempts on its peace and quiet. In the criminal himself, prison and the most intense forced labor develop only hatred, a thirst for forbidden pleasures, and a terrible light-mindedness. But 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. Of course, a criminal who has risen against society hates it, and almost always considers himself right and society wrong. Besides, he has already suffered its punishment, and he almost considers he has come out clean, has evened the score. Finally, from such points of view, one might reckon that the criminal himself ought to be all but vindicated. But, despite all possible points of view, everyone will agree that there are crimes which always and everywhere, by all possible laws, from the beginning of the world, have been considered indisputable crimes and will be considered so as long as man remains man.

Without work, and without lawful, normal property, a man cannot live, he becomes depraved, he turns into a brute.

Money is minted freedom, and therefore, for a man completely deprived of freedom, it is ten times dearer. Just to have it jingling in his pocket half comforts him, even if he cannot spend it. But money can be spent always and everywhere, the more so as forbidden fruit is twice sweeter. And in prison you could even get hold of vodka. Pipes were strictly forbidden, but everybody smoked them. Money and tobacco saved them from scurvy and other diseases. Work saved them from crime: without work the prisoners would have devoured each other like spiders in a jar. In spite of which, both work and money were forbidden.

I remember the first time I was given alms in money. It was soon after my arrival in prison. I was coming back from the morning’s work alone, with a convoy soldier. I crossed paths with a mother and her daughter, a girl of about ten, pretty as a little angel. I had already seen them once. The mother was a soldier’s wife, a widow. Her husband, a young soldier, had been on trial and had died in the prisoners’ ward of the hospital while I, too, was lying sick there. His wife and daughter came to take leave of him; they both wept terribly. When she saw me, the girl blushed and whispered something to her mother; the mother stopped at once, rummaged in her purse for a quarter kopeck, and gave it to the girl. The girl rushed after me … “Here ‘unfortunate,’ take a little kopeck for Christ’s sake,” she cried, running ahead of me and putting the coin in my hand. I took her little kopeck, and the girl went back to her mother perfectly content. I held on to that little kopeck for a long time.

The labor itself, for instance, did not seem to me so very punishing, so hard, and only much later did I realize that the punishment and hardness of this labor lay not so much in its difficulty and ceaselessness as in its being forced, imposed, under the lash.

It occurred to me once that if they wanted to crush, to annihilate a man totally, to punish him with the most terrible punishment, so that the most dreadful murderer would shudder at this punishment and be frightened of it beforehand, they would only need to give the labor a character of complete, total uselessness and meaninglessness.

In prison they generally took a dark and unfavorable view of former noblemen. Even though they were already stripped of all their property rights and were completely equal to all the other prisoners—the prisoners would never recognize them as their comrades. This happened not even from conscious prejudice, but just so, quite sincerely, unconsciously. They sincerely considered us noblemen, even though they themselves liked to taunt us with our fall.

I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that you can know a man by his laughter, and if from the first encounter you like the laughter of some completely unknown person, you may boldly say that he is a good man.

I stopped at why money never stayed long in a prisoner’s pocket. But, apart from the difficulty of safeguarding it, there is so much anguish in prison, and a prisoner is by nature a being who yearns so much for freedom, and, finally, by his social position, is so light-minded and disorderly, that he is naturally inclined to suddenly “go all out,” to carouse away all his capital, with noise and music, so as to forget his anguish if only for a moment.

I remember being occupied most of all by one thought, which afterwards constantly pursued me during all my life in prison—a partly insoluble thought, insoluble for me even now: about the inequality of punishment for the same crime. True, crimes cannot be compared with each other, even approximately. For instance, two criminals each killed a man; the circumstances of both cases are weighed, and both wind up with the same punishment. Yet look at the difference between the crimes. One, for instance, put a knife into a man just like that, for nothing, for an onion: he came out on the high road, put a knife into a muzhik, and all the man had was an onion. “Look, man! You sent me out to rob: so I put a knife in a muzhik and all I found on him was an onion.” “Fool! An onion’s a kopeck! A hundred men—a hundred kopecks. There’s a rouble for you!” (A prison legend.) But another killed defending the honor of his bride, his sister, his daughter from the lust of a tyrant. One killed as a vagrant beset by a whole regiment of pursuers, defending his freedom, his life, often dying of hunger; another cuts little children’s throats for the pleasure of it, to feel their warm blood on his hands, to enjoy their fear, their last dove-like trembling under his knife. And what then? They both go to the same hard labor. True, there are variations in the length of the sentences. But these variations are relatively few; while the variations in one and the same crime are a numberless multitude. For ea...

simple folk, who never reproach a prisoner for his crime, however terrible it was, and forgive him everything on account of the punishment he endures and in general for his misfortune. Not for nothing do folk all over Russia call crime misfortune and criminals unfortunates. That is a profoundly significant definition. It is all the more important for being made unconsciously, instinctively.

Orlov was the complete opposite of him. This was manifestly a total victory over the flesh. You could see that the man had limitless control of himself, despised all tortures and punishments, and had no fear of anything in the world. You saw in him only an infinite energy, a thirst for activity, a thirst for revenge, a thirst for attaining a set goal. Among other things, I was struck by his strange haughtiness. He looked upon everything from some incredible height, though without any effort to stand on stilts, but just so, somehow naturally. I think there was no being in the world who could have had an effect on him by authority alone. He looked at everything with a sort of unexpected calm, as if there was nothing in the world that could surprise him. And though he fully realized that the other prisoners looked at him with respect, he did not pose before them in the least. Yet vanity and arrogance are characteristic of almost all prisoners without exception. He was not at all stupid and was somehow strangely frank, though by no means a babbler. To my questions he replied directly that he was waiting to recover, the sooner to get through the rest of the punishment, and that he had been afraid at first, before the punishment, that he would not survive it. “But now,” he added, winking at me, “the matter’s settled. I’ll get through the rest of the strokes and set off at once with a party to Nerchinsk, but I’ll escape on the way.

Indeed, among our people everywhere, in whatever surroundings, in whatever conditions, there are and always will be certain strange persons, placid and often not at all lazy, who are destined by fate to remain eternally destitute. They are always solitary, they are always slovenly, they always look somehow downtrodden and depressed by something, and they are eternally ordered about by somebody, run somebody’s errands, usually a carouser or a man suddenly become rich and eminent. Any undertaking, any initiative is a grief and a burden for them. It seems they were born on the condition that they never begin anything themselves and only serve others, that they not live by their own will, that they dance to another’s tune; their purpose is only to do for others. To crown it all, no circumstances, no upheavals can make them rich. They are always destitute. I have noticed that such persons exist not only among simple people, but in all companies, estates, parties, journals, and associations.

There are people so beautiful by nature, so richly endowed by God, that the mere thought that they might ever change for the worse seems impossible to you.

A simple man, going to hard labor, lands in his own society, or perhaps one even more developed. He has lost a great deal, of course—his birthplace, his family, everything—but his milieu remains the same. An educated man, who is subject by law to the same punishment as the simple man, often loses incomparably more. He has to stifle in himself all his needs, all his habits, to move into a milieu that is insufficient for him, to get used to breathing a different air … He is a fish out of water … And the same punishment imposed by law on everyone turns out to be ten times more tormenting for him. This is true … even if it is only a matter of sacrificing material habits.

All those first three days I had spent in the most painful feelings: “This is the end of my wanderings: I am in prison!” I repeated to myself every moment. “This is my refuge for many long years, my corner, which I enter with such a mistrustful, such a morbid feeling … But who knows? Maybe many years from now I’ll be sorry when I have to leave it!…,” I would add, not without an admixture of that gleeful feeling which sometimes reaches the point of a need to deliberately chafe your own wound, as if you wish to admire your own pain, as if the consciousness of the extent of your misfortune indeed affords pleasure. The thought of being sorry to leave this corner in time struck me with horror: even then I already had a presentiment of the monstrous degree to which a man grows accustomed to things.

Among the sullen and hate-filled faces of the other prisoners, I could not help noticing several that were kind and cheerful. “There are bad people everywhere, and among the bad some good ones,” I hastened to think, consoling myself. “Who knows? Maybe these people are not so much worse than the remainder, who remained there, outside the prison.” I was thinking that, and shook my head at the thought myself, and yet—my God!—if I had only known then how true that thought was!

Yes, it can be very hard to make a man out, even after long years of acquaintance!

I lived for several years among murderers, profligates, and inveterate villains, but I can say positively, never in my life have I met such total moral degradation, such decisive depravity, and such insolent baseness as in A—v. With us there was a parricide from the nobility; I have already mentioned him; but I was convinced by many details and facts that even he was incomparably more honorable and humane than A—v. 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. I am not exaggerating; I got to know A—v well. He was an example of what the carnal side of man can come to, unrestrained by any inner norm, any lawfulness. And how revolting it was for me to look at his eternally mocking smile! He was a monster, a moral Quasimodo.1 Add to that the fact that he was cunning and intelligent, good-looking, even somewhat educated, and not without abilities. No, better fire, better plague and famine, than such a man in society!

A prisoner is greedy for money to the point of convulsions, to a darkening of the mind, and if he does indeed throw it away like wood chips when he carouses, he does it for something he considers on a higher level than money. What is higher than money for a prisoner? Freedom, or at least the dream of freedom. And prisoners are great dreamers. I will say something about that later, but while I’m at it, believe me, I have seen men exiled for twenty years who would quite calmly say to me such phrases as “Just wait, God grant I’ll finish my term, and then …” The whole meaning of the word “prisoner” is a man with no will; but in wasting money, he is acting by his own will. In spite of any brands, fetters, and the hateful palings of the prison that screen him off from God’s world and close him in like a beast in a cage—he can get hold of some vodka, which is a fearfully forbidden pleasure, treat himself to a bit of philandering, sometimes (though not always) bribe his immediate overseers, the invalid soldier and even the sergeant, to look the other way while he violates law and discipline; to top it all off, he can even display his bravado before them, and a prisoner loves terribly to display his bravado, that is, to show off before his comrades, and even persuade himself, at least for a time, that he has much more freedom and power than it may seem—in short, he can carouse, brawl, reduce somebody to dust, and prove to him that he can do all this, that it is all “in our own hand...

The authorities are sometimes surprised that some prisoner who for several years has been so quiet, so well-behaved, has even been made an overseer on account of his praiseworthy behavior, suddenly, out of the blue—as if some devil has gotten into him—turns mischievous, carouses, makes a row, and sometimes even risks some criminal offense: shows disrespect for his superiors, kills or rapes someone, and so on. They look at him in amazement. 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. So, perhaps, a man buried alive wakes up in his coffin, bangs on the lid and tries to throw it off, though of course reason could convince him that all his efforts will be in vain. But the point is that he is no longer reasoning: it’s convulsions. Let us also take into account that almost any self-willed display of personality in a prisoner is considered a crime; and in that case it is naturally all the same to him whether it is a big or a small display. If it’s carousing, let it be carousing; if it’s a risk, let it be an all-out risk—even murder. It’s enough just to begin: once a man is drunk, there’s no holding him back! And therefore it would be better in every way not to drive him that...

And I remember it was even pleasant for me to think, as if flaunting my own hurt to myself, that now I had one being left in the whole world who loved me and was attached to me, my friend, my only friend—my faithful dog Sharik.

The hope of an inmate, deprived of freedom, is of a completely different sort from that of a man living a real life. A free man has hopes, of course (for instance, for a change in his lot, for success in some undertaking), but he lives, he acts; the whirl of real life carries him away entirely. Not so the inmate. Here, let’s say, there is also life—the life of prison, of hard labor; but whoever the convict may be and whatever his term of punishment, he is decisively, instinctively, unable to take his lot as something absolute, definitive, as part of real life. Every convict feels that he is not at home, but as if on a visit. He looks at twenty years as if they were two, and is completely convinced that when he leaves prison at fifty-five he will be as fine a fellow as he is now at thirty-five. “We’ve still got a life to live!” he thinks and stubbornly drives away all doubts and other vexing thoughts.

He will never be let out of prison. He knows himself that those who have been chained up are kept in prison forever, till they die, and in fetters. He knows it, and still he wants terribly to finish his term on the chain. For without that wish, how could he sit for five or six years on a chain and not die or go out of his mind? Would anyone sit it out?

Again I don’t know why, but it always seemed to me as if he did not live in the same prison with me, but somewhere far off in another house, in town, and only came to the prison in passing, to find out the news, to visit me, to see how we all lived. He was always hurrying somewhere, as if he had left someone waiting for him somewhere, as if he had not finished doing something. And yet he never seemed very flustered. His gaze, too, was somehow strange: intent, with a shade of boldness and a certain mockery, but he gazed somehow into the distance, through the object; as if he were trying to make out, beyond the object in front of his nose, some other more distant one. This gave him an absentminded look. I watched on purpose sometimes to see where Petrov would go after me. Where was it that he was so expected? But he would hurry off somewhere to the barracks or the kitchen, sit down there by one of the talkers, listen attentively, occasionally enter into the conversation himself, even very vehemently, and then would suddenly break off and fall silent. But whether he talked or sat silently, still you could see that he was there just so, in passing, that he had something to do elsewhere and was expected. The strangest thing was that he never had anything to do; he lived in complete idleness (apart from prison work, of course). He knew no handicrafts, and almost never had any money. But he was not much worried about money either.

He seemed to be interested in everything, but it somehow happened that he mostly remained indifferent to it all and just loitered about the prison doing nothing, as if tossed now here, now there.

It sometimes happens in the lives of such people that they suddenly reveal and distinguish themselves sharply and prominently in a moment of abrupt mass action or upheaval, and thus hit at once upon their full activity. They are not men of words, and cannot be the instigators or main leaders of the affair; but they are its main executors and the first to begin. They begin simply, without special pronouncements, but they are the first to leap over the main obstacle, without reflection, fearlessly making straight for all the knives—and everybody rushes after them and goes on blindly, goes on till the last wall, where they usually lay down their lives. I don’t believe Petrov has ended well; in some one moment it will be all over for him at once, and if he has not perished so far, it means his time has not come yet. Who knows, though? Maybe he will live to have gray hair and die most peacefully of old age, drifting about aimlessly here and there. But I think M. was right when he said that he was the most resolute man in the whole prison.

The man lives quietly and meekly; he has a hard lot, but he bears it. Suppose he’s a muzhik, or a house serf, a tradesman, a soldier. Suddenly something in him comes unhinged; he can’t control himself and sticks a knife into his enemy and oppressor. It’s here that the strangeness begins: for a while the man suddenly leaps beyond all limits. The first man he killed was an oppressor, an enemy; that is a crime, but understandable; he had a reason; but then he kills not an enemy but the first man he meets, kills him for fun, for a rude word, for a glance, for a trifle, or simply “Out of my way, don’t cross me, I’m coming.” It’s as if the man is drunk, as if he’s in a feverish delirium. As if, having leaped over a line that was sacred to him, he begins to admire the fact that nothing is holy for him anymore; as if he feels an urge to leap over all legality and authority at once, and to revel in the most boundless and unbridled freedom, to revel in this thrill of horror, which it is impossible for him not to feel. He also knows that a terrible punishment awaits him. All this may resemble the sensation when a man on a high tower feels drawn to the depths below him, so that he is finally glad to throw himself down headlong: do it quickly and there’s an end to it! And all this happens even with the most meek and hitherto inconspicuous people. Some of them, when so bedazed, even start prancing. The more downtrodden he was before, the stronger now is his urge to show off, to strike t...

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. And since he is in fact a human being, it follows that he must be treated as a human being. My God! Humane treatment may make a human being even of someone in whom the image of God has faded long ago.2 These “unfortunates” need to be treated all the more humanely. That is their salvation and their joy. I have met such kind, noble commanders. I have seen the effect they have had on these humiliated people. A few gentle words—and the prisoners all but resurrected morally. They rejoiced like children, and, like children, they began to love. I will note one more strange thing: the prisoners themselves do not like to be treated too familiarly and too kindly by their superiors. They want to respect their superior, and here they somehow cease to respect him. The prisoner likes it, for instance, that his superior has decorations, that he looks distinguished, that he is in favor with some still higher superior, that he is strict, and important, and just, and maintains his dignity. Prisoners like such an officer more: it means that he preserves his own dignity, and does not offend them, therefore everything is good and beautiful.

Luchka had killed six people, but nobody in the prison was afraid of him, though it may have been his heart’s desire to be known as a horrible man …

Besides innate reverence for the great day, the prisoner unconsciously felt that by observing the holiday he was as if in contact with the whole world, that he was therefore not entirely an outcast, a lost man, a cut-off slice, that things in prison were the same as among other people.

Akim Akimych was also preparing very much for the feast day. He had no family memories, because he had grown up as an orphan in a strange house and had been doing hard work almost from the age of fifteen; nor had he had any special joys in his life, because his whole life had been regular, monotonous, for fear of stepping even a hair’s breadth outside his prescribed duties. Nor was he especially religious, because propriety seemed to have swallowed up in him all his other human gifts and particularities, all passions and desires, bad and good. As a result of all that, he was preparing to meet the solemn day not fussing, not worrying, not confused by melancholy and totally useless memories, but with a quiet, methodical propriety, exactly enough to fulfill the duties of the ritual established once and for all. In general he did not like to think much. The meaning of a fact seemed never to enter his head, but the rules once pointed out to him he fulfilled with sacred precision. If he had been ordered the next day to do exactly the opposite, he would have done it with the same obedience and thoroughness as he had done the opposite the day before. Once, once only in his life, had he attempted to follow his own mind—and he had landed in prison. The lesson had not been wasted on him. And though he was destined never to understand exactly what he was guilty of, he had deduced a salutary rule from his adventure—never to reason in any circumstances, because “he had no head for it,” ...

I will note in passing that there was almost no friendship to be observed among the prisoners, I don’t mean in general—that goes without saying—but in particular, when some one prisoner became friends with another. There was almost none of that among us, and it is a remarkable feature: it is not that way in freedom. Among us, with very rare exceptions, we generally treated each other callously, drily, and this sort of formal tone was established and accepted once and for all.

All these poor people had wanted to have fun, to spend the great feast joyfully—and Lord! how oppressive and sad this day was for nearly every one of them. Each of them saw it out as if he had been cheated of some hope. Petrov stopped to see me a couple of more times. He had drunk very little that whole day and was almost completely sober. But up to the very last hour he kept expecting that something simply had to happen, something extraordinary, festive, joyful. Though he didn’t say it, you could see it in his eyes. He shuttled tirelessly from one barrack to another. But nothing special happened, and he met with nothing but drunkenness, senseless, drunken cursing, and heads stupefied by vodka. Sirotkin also wandered about all the barracks in his new red shirt, pretty, well scrubbed, and also as if quietly and naïvely expecting something. It was gradually becoming unbearable and disgusting in the barracks. Of course, there was also much that was funny, but I felt somehow sad and sorry for them all, I felt oppressed and stifled among them.

A man like the major always has a need to crush someone, to take something away, to deprive someone of his rights—in short, to restore order somewhere. In that respect he was known to the whole town. What did he care that precisely these constraints might lead to mischief in prison? There are punishments for mischief (so people like our major reason), and for these scoundrelly prisoners there is severity and an unrelenting, literal enforcement of the law—that’s all it takes! 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. “The law says so; what more do you want?” they say, and are sincerely surprised that, in addition to the law, sound reasoning and a sober mind are also required of them. This last in particular seems to many of them a superfluous and outrageous luxury, an insufferable constraint.

There is no cocky habit in the people of being in the forefront everywhere and at all costs, whether a man is worthy of it or not. You need only peel off the external, superficial husk and look at the kernel more closely, attentively, without prejudice, and you will see such things in the people as you never anticipated. There is not much our wise men can teach the people. I will even say positively—on the contrary, they themselves ought to learn from them.

I repeat: the prisoners could not praise their doctors highly enough, looked upon them as fathers, respected them. Everyone saw kindness from them, heard gentle words; and a prisoner, having been rejected by the whole world, valued that, because he could see how unfeigned and sincere those gentle words and that kindness were. They might not have been; no one would have asked questions if the doctors had treated them differently, that is, more rudely and inhumanly: consequently, they were kind out of genuine humanity. And, naturally, they understood that a sick man, whether or not he was a prisoner, needs such a thing, for instance, as fresh air, like any other sick man, even of the highest rank.

Humanity, kindness, brotherly compassion for a sick man are sometimes more necessary to him than any medicine.

It is time we stopped complaining apathetically that we are prey to the environment. Granted, it does prey on us in many ways, but not in all ways, and often some clever swindler who knows his business skillfully conceals and justifies not only his weakness, but often simply his baseness, by the influence of the environment, especially if he has a gift for fine talk or writing.

But, besides the difference of temperaments, a great role in the resoluteness and fearlessness of some men is played by an ingrained habit of receiving blows and punishments. Manifold beatings somehow strengthen a man’s spirit and back, and he comes to look upon punishment skeptically, almost as a minor inconvenience, and no longer fears it.

I was always astonished at the extraordinary good-naturedness, the complacency, with which all these beaten men told about how they were beaten and about those who beat them. Often not even the slightest shade of spite or hatred could be heard in such stories, which sometimes shook my heart and made it beat hard and fast. They would tell about it and laugh like children.

though a prisoner is always inclined to feel himself justified in his crimes against the authorities, so that the very question of it is unthinkable for him, all the same in practical terms he was aware that the authorities viewed his crimes quite differently, which meant that he had to take his punishment and be quits. Here the struggle was mutual. 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. His conscience is at peace, which makes him strong and morally untroubled, and that is the main thing. It’s as if he feels that he has something to support him, and therefore he does not hate, but takes what has happened to him as an inescapable fact, which did not begin with him, will not end with him, and will continue for a long, long time amidst the ongoing, passive, but persistent struggle.

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! What won’t they give for it! They are even ready to exchange the most merciful man for the most severe, so long as he gives off their own homespun smell. And what if the man with their smell is also really kindhearted, though in his own way? Then he’s priceless!

There are people, like tigers, who have a thirst for licking blood. A man who has once experienced this power, this unlimited lordship over the body, blood, and spirit of a man just like himself, created in the same way, his brother by the law of Christ; a man who has experienced this power and the full possibility of inflicting the ultimate humiliation upon another being bearing the image of God, somehow involuntarily loses control of his sensations. 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. What’s more, the example, the possibility, of such self-will has a contagious effect on the whole of society: power is seductive. A society that looks indifferently upon such a phenomenon is itself infected at its foundation. In short, the right of corporal punishment, granted to one man over another, is one of the plagues of society, one of the most powerful means of annihilating in it any germ, any attempt at civility, and full grounds for its inevitable and ineluctable corruption.