Status Updates From The House of the Dead

But towards the end, with the years it all somehow started to concentrate inside him, in his heart. The coals were covering over with ashes.

J’adore sa description des bains, du théâtre et de l’hôpital, c’est vraiment passionnant d’observer toute la réalité dans toute sa complexité de la vie de bagne

The most clean-handed lordling, the softest softy, after working the whole day by the sweat of his brow, as he never worked in freedom, will eat coarse bread and soup with cockroaches. You can get used to that, too, as is mentioned in a comic prisoner’s song about a former lordling who lands in hard labor:

They dole me out some soggy cabbage,
And I just wolf it down.

The reverse also happens: education sometimes goes along with such barbarity, such cynicism, that you loathe it, and however kind or well-disposed you may be, you can find neither excuses nor justification for it in your heart.

In prison it sometimes happened that you would know a man for several years and think he was a beast, not a man, and despise him. And suddenly a chance moment would come when his soul, on an involuntary impulse, would open up and you would see in it such riches, feeling, heart, such a clear understanding of his own and other’s sufferings, as if your own eyes had been opened…