Notes from a Dead House (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Here everyone was a dreamer, and that jumped into your eyes. You felt it painfully, precisely because this dreaminess lent the majority of the prisoners a gloomy and dismal, somehow unhealthy look. The great majority were silent and spiteful to the point of hatred, and did not like to openly display their hopes. Simple-heartedness and candor were held in contempt. The more unrealizable the hopes were, and the more the dreamer himself felt that unrealizability, the more stubbornly and chastely he concealed them within himself, but renounce them he could not. Who knows, maybe some were secretly ashamed of them. In the Russian character there is so much of the positive and sober-minded, so much inner mockery of oneself first of all … Maybe it was because of this constant secret dissatisfaction with themselves that there was so much impatience in these people in everyday relations with each other, so much resentment and mockery of each other. And if, for instance, someone of a more naïve and impatient sort should suddenly pop up among them and express aloud what was in all of their minds, should start dreaming and hoping, he would immediately be rudely checked, cut short, derided; but I suspect that the most zealous of the persecutors would be precisely those who themselves perhaps went still further in their dreams and hopes.