The House of the Dead

serene. There were far more of the ill-natured and the sullen, and those of them who were naturally talkative were infallibly uneasy backbiters and slanderers. They meddled in everyone’s affairs, though of their own hearts, their own private affairs, they showed no one a glimpse. That was not the thing, not correct. The good-natured⁠—a very small group⁠—were quiet, hid their imaginings in their hearts, and were of course more prone than the ill-natured to put faith and hope in them. Yet I fancy that there was another group of prisoners who had lost all hope. Such was the old dissenter from the Starodubovsky settlements; there were very few of these. The old man was externally calm (I have described him already), but from certain symptoms I judge that his inner misery was terrible. But he had his means of escape, his salvation⁠—prayer, and the idea of martyrdom. The convict whom I have described already, who used to read the Bible, and who went out of his mind, and threw a brick at the major, was probably one of the desperate class too, one of those who have lost their last hope, and as life is impossible without hope he found a means of escape in a voluntary and almost artificial martyrdom. He declared that he attacked the major without malice, simply to “accept suffering.” And who knows what psychological process was taking place in his heart then! Without some goal and some effort to reach it no man can live. When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man often becomes a monster in his misery. The one object of the prisoners was freedom and to get out of prison.

But here I have been trying to classify all the prisoners, and that is hardly possible. Real life is infinite in its variety in comparison with even the cleverest abstract generalization, and it does not admit of sharp and sweeping distinctions. The tendency of real life is always towards greater and greater differentiation. We, too, had a life of our own of a sort, and it was not a mere official existence but a real inner life of our own.

But as I have mentioned already I did not, and indeed could not, penetrate to the inner depths of this life at the beginning of my time in prison, and so all its external incidents were a source of an unutterable misery to me then. I sometimes was simply beginning to hate those men who were sufferers like myself. I even envied them for being, anyway, among their equals, their comrades, understanding one another; though in reality they were all as sick and weary as I was of this companionship enforced by stick and lash, of this compulsory association, and everyone was secretly looking towards something far away from all the rest. I repeat again, there were legitimate grounds for the envy which came upon me in moments of ill-humour. Those who declare that it is no harder for a gentleman, an educated man and all the rest of it, in our prisons and in Siberia, than it is for any peasant, are really quite wrong. I know I have heard of theories on the subject of late, I have read of them. There is something true and humane at the back of this idea⁠—all are men, all are human beings. But the idea is too abstract. It overlooks too many practical aspects of the question, which cannot be grasped except by experience. I don’t say this on the grounds that the gentleman, the man of education may be supposed to be more refined and delicate in his feelings, that he is more developed. There is no standard by which to measure the soul and its development. Even education itself is no test. I am ready to be the first to testify that, in the midst of these utterly uneducated and downtrodden sufferers, I came across instances of the greatest spiritual refinement. Sometimes one would know a man for years in prison and despise him and think that he was not a human being but a brute. And suddenly a moment will come by chance when his soul will suddenly reveal itself in an involuntary outburst, and you see in it such wealth, such feeling, such heart, such a vivid understanding of its own suffering, and of the suffering of others that your eyes are open and for the first moment you can’t believe what you have seen and heard yourself. The contrary happens too; education is sometimes found side by side with such barbarity, such cynicism, that it revolts you, and in spite of the utmost good-nature and all previous theories on the subject, you can find no justification or apology.

I am not speaking of the change of habits, of manner of life, of diet, etc., though that is harder of course for a man of the wealthier class than for a peasant, who has often been hungry when free, and in prison at least has enough to eat. I am not going to argue about that. Let us assume that for a man of any strength of will all this is of little consequence compared with other discomforts, though in reality a change of habits is not a trifling matter nor of little consequence. But there are discomforts beside which all this is so trivial that one ceases to notice the filth of one’s surroundings, the fetters, the close confinement, the insufficient and unclean food. The sleekest fine gentleman, the softest weakling will be able to eat black bread and soup with beetles in it, after working in the sweat of his brow, as he has never worked in freedom. To this one can get accustomed, as described in the humorous prison song which tells of a fine gentleman in prison:

Cabbage and water they give me to eat,
And I gobble it up as though it were sweet.

No; what is much more important than all this is that