Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/104

 impressed me from the beginning. The hopes of a prisoner deprived of freedom are utterly different from those of a man living a natural life. A free man hopes, of course (for a change of luck, for instance, or the success of an undertaking), but he lives, he acts, he is caught up in the world of life. It is very different with the prisoner. There is life for him too, granted—prison life—but whatever the convict may be and whatever may be the term of his sentence, he is instinctively unable to accept his lot as something positive, final, as part of real life. Every convict feels that he is, so to speak, not at home, but on a visit. He looks at twenty years as though they were two, and is fully convinced that when he leaves prison at fifty-five he will be as full of life and energy as he is now at thirty-five. “I’ve still life before me,” he thinks and resolutely drives away all doubts and other vexatious ideas. Even those in the “special division” who had been sentenced for life, sometimes reckoned on orders suddenly coming from Petersburg: “to send them to the mines at Nerchinsk and to limit their sentence.” Then it would be all right: to begin with, it is almost six months’ journey to Nerchinsk, and how much pleasanter the journey would be than being in prison! And afterwards the term in Nerchinsk would be over and then And sometimes even grey-headed men reckoned like this.

At Tobolsk I have seen convicts chained to the wall. The man is kept on a chain seven feet long; he has a bedstead by him. He is chained like this for some exceptionally terrible crime committed in Siberia. They are kept like that for five years, for ten years. They are generally brigands. I only saw one among them who looked as if he had belonged to the upper classes; he had been in the government service somewhere. He spoke submissively with a lisp; his smile was mawkishly sweet. He showed us his chain, showed how he could most comfortably lie on the bed. He must have been a choice specimen! As a rule they all behave quietly and seem contented, yet every one of them is intensely anxious for the end of his sentence. Why, one wonders? I will tell you why: he will get out of the stifling dank room with its low vaulted roof of brick, and will walk in the prison yard and that is all. He will never be allowed out of the prison. He knows those who have been in chains are always kept in prison and fettered to the day of their death. He knows that and yet he is desperately eager for the end of his time on the chain. But