Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/268

 this unfortunate point of view by the force of circumstance, by fate. There is no doubt that they were very miserable in prison. To the Circassians, to the Tatars and to Isay Fomitch they were cordial and friendly, but shunned the other convicts with abhorrence. Only the Starodubovsky Old Believer won their entire respect. It is remarkable, however, that all the while I was in prison none of the convicts ever taunted them with their nationality and their religion, or their ideas, as Russian peasants sometimes, though very rarely, do with foreigners, especially Germans. Though perhaps they do no more than laugh at the Germans; German is always an extremely comic figure in the eyes of the Russian peasant. The convicts treated our foreign prisoners respectfully in prison, far more so than the Russian “gentlemen” prisoners indeed, and they never touched them. But the latter seemed unwilling to notice and consider this fact. I have spoken of T. It was he who, when they were walking from their first place of exile to our prison, carried B. in his arms almost the whole journey, when the latter, weak in health and constitution, broke down before half the day’s march was over. They had at first been exiled to U. There, so they said, they were well off, that is, much better off than in our prison. But they got up a correspondence, of a perfectly harmless character however, with some other exiles in another town, and for this reason it was considered necessary to exile these three to our fortress, where they would be under the eye of a higher official. Their third comrade was Z. Till they came, M. was the only Pole in the prison. How miserable he must have been in his first year there!

This Z. was the old man who was always saying his prayers, as I have mentioned before. All our political prisoners were young, some mere boys; only Z. was a man of over fifty. He was a man of unquestionable honesty, but rather strange. His comrades B. and T. disliked him very much; they did not even speak to him; they used to say of him that he was quarrelsome, obstinate and fussy. I don’t know how far they were right. In prison, as in all places where people are kept together in a crowd against their will, I think people quarrel and even hate one another more easily than in freedom. Many circumstances combine to bring this about. But Z. certainly was a rather stupid and perhaps disagreeable man. None of his other comrades were on good terms with him. Though I never quarrelled with him, I did not get on with him particularly well. I believe he knew his own subject, mathematics. I remember that he