Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/242

230 bent figure of the grey-haired, silent Nowakowski. Longing often gnawed at my mind and heart, but soon everything was engulfed in a strange, dull indifference to all that was happening in my moral and physical spheres. It was just as though I had for some time been effaced from life, as though I had been in a lethargy and were at intervals coming back to consciousness, only to fall again into a sleep still more profound and heavy, unmarked by dreams or by any remembrance of a former existence. Such an experience is only normal in the life of a prisoner and explains why men who have been sentenced to long terms do not, for the most part, begin to work of their own will, for they instinctively realize that the end of the period of their exclusion from the life of the State and of society is still so far away that the one single thought is simply to wait for it to come and there is no reason to begin to prepare for it through work. This is the most demoralizing influence of the prison, since a man after this lethargy rarely knows how, when he is set free, to return to normal life. Moreover, he must inevitably go through a period of despondency, strongly set with doubt and with hate, not only the hatred for the authorities who condemned him but also that for society, which looks with silence and indifference upon the moral tortures of the inmates of its prisons.

I really do not know which suffers the more in a Russian prison, the simple man or the cultured one. While the first may develop a degenerating laziness and hate, in the second there may readily appear more dangerous symptoms, which tend to destroy his whole spiritual structure. I have specially in mind that despondency—impossible to formulate in words—as to the real value of life and work in a time when there is so much legal injustice in the depriving of man of liberty and of the