Notes from a Dead House (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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.