Notes from a Dead House (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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.