Notes from a Dead House (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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.