Yet, on the whole, the life of a tramp in the forest is paradise compared with prison. That is easy to understand and indeed there can be no comparison. Though it’s a hard life, it is freedom. That is why every convict in Russia, whatever prison he may be in, grows restless in the spring with the first kindly rays of sunshine. Though by no means everyone intends to run away; one may say with certainty, indeed, that owing to the difficulty of escape and the penalties attaching to it, not more than one in a hundred ventures upon it; yet the other ninety-nine dream at least of how they might escape and where they would escape to and comfort their hearts with the very desire, with the very imagination of its being possible. Some recall how they have run away in the past. … I am speaking now only of those who are serving their sentence. But of course those who are awaiting sentence take the risks of flight far more frequently than other prisoners. Convicts condemned for a term only run away at the beginning of their imprisonment, if at all. When a convict has been two or three years in prison, those years begin to have a value in his mind and by degrees he makes up his mind that he would rather finish his term in the legal way and become a settler than run such risks, and take the chances of ruin if he fails. And failure is so possible. Scarcely one in ten succeeds in “changing his luck.” Another class of convicts, who more frequently take the hazards of flight, consists of those who are condemned to very long terms. Fifteen or twenty years seem an eternity, and a man condemned for such lengthy periods is always ready to dream of changing his luck, even if he has passed ten years in prison.
The branding does something to prevent prisoners attempting flight.
“To change one’s luck” is a technical expression, so much so that even in cross examination a prisoner caught trying to escape will answer that he wanted to change his luck. This rather bookish expression is exactly what is meant. Every fugitive looks forward, not exactly to complete freedom—he knows that is almost impossible—but either to getting into another institution or being sent as a settler, or being tried again for a fresh offence committed when he was tramping; in fact he does not care what becomes of him, so long as he is not sent back to the old place he is sick of, his former prison. If these fugitives do not, in the course of the summer, succeed in finding some exceptional place in which to spend the winter, if for instance they do not chance upon someone willing for interested motives to shelter a fugitive, if they do not, sometimes by means of murder, obtain a passport of some sort with which they can live anywhere they like, they are all either caught by the police or go in autumn of their own accord in crowds into the towns and the prisons and remain there for the winter, not, of course, without hopes of escaping again in the summer.
Spring had an influence on me too. I remember how eagerly I sometimes peeped through the chinks in the fence and how long I used to stand with my head against the fence looking obstinately and insatiably at the greenness of the grass on our prison rampart, and the deeper and deeper blue of the sky in the distance. My restlessness and depression grew stronger every day, and the prison became more and more hateful to me. The dislike with which as a “gentleman” I was continually regarded by the convicts during my first few years, became intolerable, poisoning my whole life. During those first few years I often used to go into the hospital, though I had no illness, simply to avoid being in prison, simply to escape from this obstinate, irreconcilable hatred. “You have beaks of iron, you’ve pecked us to death,” the convicts used to say to us, and how I used to envy the peasants who were brought to the prison! They were looked upon as comrades by everyone at once. And so the spring, the phantom of freedom, the general rejoicing of nature affected me with melancholy and nervous restlessness. At the end of Lent, I think in the sixth week, I took the sacrament. All the prisoners had been at the beginning of Lent divided by the senior sergeant into seven relays, one to take the sacrament during each week of the fast. Each of the relays consisted of about thirty men. I very much liked the week of the preparation for the sacrament. We were relieved of work. We went to the church, which was not far from the prison, twice or three times a day. It was long since I had been to church. The Lenten service so familiar to me from faraway days of childhood in my father’s house, the solemn prayers, the prostrations—all this stirred in my heart the far, faraway past, bringing back the days of my childhood, and I remember how pleasant it was walking over the frozen ground in the early morning to the house of God, escorted by guards with loaded guns. The guards did not, however, go into the church. We stood all together in a group close to the church door, so far back that we could only hear the loud-voiced deacon and from time to time catch a glimpse of the black cope and the bald head of the priest through the crowd. I remembered how sometimes standing in church as a child I looked at the peasants crowding near the entrance and slavishly parting to make way for a thickly epauletted officer, a stout gentleman, or an overdressed but pious lady, who invariably made
