Notes from a Dead House (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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.