Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/9

 COLLABORATOR'S NOTE

GAIN it has been my pleasure to assist Dr. Ossendowski in the textual preparation of a manuscript which contains material of unique appeal.

In this volume he gives an account of his personal experiences during the Russo-Japanese War and in the Revolution of 1905, as it affected the Far East, and offers what is probably the most intimate picture of the life of the Russian prisons in Siberia and Manchuria that has ever been drawn for the western world by one who has himself lived through the regime of these institutions.

By the medium of these experiences he presents a strong arraignment of the Tsar and his officials for the errors they committed in the handling of their own and their subject peoples, and admits us also to a most esoteric revelation of the psychology of prison life.

In his story we have likewise a fair epitome of the whole tragic history of that great body of Poles which has been forced to find its life under the dominating overlordship of the Tsars and which has constantly struggled toward the hope of a renewed existence of freedom. Though of no direct benefit to the movement in which he participated, his imprisonment produced unexpected results in another feature of Russian life. This was in the prisons themselves. For, as he indicates in the closing chapter of his text, he wrote a romance based upon his prison experiences, which contained such