The House of the Dead

while two hours after his arrival an ordinary prisoner is on the same footing as all the rest, is at home, has the same rights in the community as the rest, is understood by everyone, understands everyone, knows everyone, and is looked on by everyone as a comrade, it is very different with the gentleman, the man of a different class. However straightforward, good-natured and clever he is, he will for years be hated and despised by all; he will not be understood, and what is more he will not be trusted. He is not a friend, and not a comrade, and though he may at last in the course of years attain such a position among them that they will no longer insult him, yet he will never be one of them, and will forever be painfully conscious that he is solitary and remote from all. This remoteness sometimes comes to pass of itself unconsciously through no ill-natured feeling on the part of the convicts. He is not one of themselves, and that’s all. Nothing is more terrible than living out of one’s natural surroundings. A peasant transported from Taganrog to the port of Petropavlovsk at once finds the Russian peasants there exactly like himself, at once understands them, and gets on with them, and in a couple of hours they may settle down peaceably to live in the same hut or shanty. It is very different with gentlemen. They are divided from the peasants by an impassable gulf, and this only becomes fully apparent when the gentleman is by force of external circumstances completely deprived of his former privileges, and is transformed into a peasant. You may have to do with the peasants all your life, you may associate with them every day for forty years, officially for instance, in the regulation administrative forms, or even simply in a friendly way, as a benefactor or, in a certain sense, a father⁠—you will never know them really. It will all be an optical illusion and nothing more. I know that all who read what I say will think that I am exaggerating. But I am convinced of its truth. I have reached the conviction, not from books, not from abstract theory, but from experience, and I have had plenty of time to verify it. Perhaps in time everyone will realize the truth of this.

Events, as ill-luck would have it, confirmed my observations from the first and had a morbid and unhinging influence on me. That first summer I wandered about the prison in almost complete loneliness, without a friend. As I have mentioned already, I was in such a state of mind that I could not even distinguish and appreciate those of the prisoners who were later on able to grow fond of me, though they never treated me as an equal. I had comrades too of my own class, but their comradeship did not ease my heart of its oppression. I hated the sight of everything and I had no means of escape from it. And here, for instance, is one of the incidents which from the beginning made me understand how completely I was an outsider, and how peculiar my position was in the prison.

One day that summer, early in July, on a bright hot working day at one o’clock, when usually we rested before our afternoon work, the prisoners all got up like one man and began forming in the yard. I had heard nothing about it till that minute. At that time I used to be so absorbed in myself that I scarcely noticed what was going on about me. Yet the prisoners had for the last three days been in a state of suppressed excitement. Perhaps this excitement had begun much earlier, as I reflected afterwards when I recalled snatches of talk, and at the same time the increased quarrelsomeness of the convicts and the moroseness and peculiar irritability that had been conspicuous in them of late. I had put it down to the hard work, the long wearisome summer days, the unconscious dreams of the forest, and of freedom and the brief nights, in which it was difficult to get enough sleep. Perhaps all this was working together now into one outbreak, but the pretext for this outbreak was the prison food. For some days past there had been loud complaints and indignation in the prison, and especially when we were gathered together in the kitchen at dinner or supper; they were discontented with the cooks and even tried to get a new one, but quickly dismissed him and went back to the old. In fact all were in an unsettled state of mind.

“They work us hard and they feed us on tripe,” someone would growl in the kitchen.

“If you don’t like it, order a blancmange,” another would reply.

“I like soup made of tripe, lads,” a third would put in, “it’s nice.”

“But if you never get anything else but tripe, is it nice?”

“Now to be sure it’s time for meat,” said a fourth; “we toil and toil at the brickyard; when one’s work’s done, one wants something to eat. And what is tripe?”

“And if it is not tripe, it’s heart.”

“Yes, there’s that heart too. Tripe and heart, that’s all they give us. Fine fare that is! Is that justice or is it not?”

“Yes, the food’s bad.”

“He’s filling his pockets, I warrant.”

“It’s not your business.”

“Whose then? It’s my belly. If everybody would make a complaint we should get something done.”

“A complaint?”

“Yes.”

“It seems you didn’t get flogged enough for that complaint. You image!”

“That’s true,” another who had hitherto been silent said grumpily. “It’s easy talking. What are you going to say in your complaint; you’d better tell us that first, you blockhead?”

“All right, I’ll tell you. If all would come, I’d speak with all. It’s being poor, it is! Some of us eat their own food, and some never sit down but to prison fare.”

“Ah, the sharp-eyed, envious fellow! His eyes smart to see others