Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/257

Rh types of songs are current, some gay, some sad, and they are rendered both as simple airs or with frequently well-combined and impressive part singing. The prisoners put into these songs their whole soul and they value highly any among them who has unusual talent. I found that the most popular among these prison songs was the one which began: Though the sun ever mounts and descends the blue sky, The dank cell of my prison stays dark &hellip; The songs of the prisons really merit a special, closely analytical study, for in them one can find echoes of all the historical periods of Russia, the motifs from the folksongs of the many peoples which have combined to make up the Russian Empire, the influences of the legends of various Mongolian tribes and, especially, distinct traces of the vivacious, sentimental gipsy music. It is a crushingly significant fact that the prisoners never sing religious or pious songs.

"We are cursed," they say: "God will not heed our prayers."

These words are terribly tragic, the more so since every prisoner individually and secretly lifts his eyes to Heaven, fervently though almost hopelessly, with longing and despair feeling that from there only can come relief and aid.

With my work and in these first studies of the prison life my days passed rather quickly. I felt distinctly that beyond the walls of my individual cell there simmered and boiled quite a different life, this "hell" of which Mironoff had spoken; yet I could not at the outset penetrate into all its details and its hidden recesses. Time and propitious conditions were necessary for this. However, the clamour which always reigned in the main