Status Updates From Aufzeichnungen aus einem to...

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…

Une vision hyper originale du bagne en Sibérie: surprenant et réel (en tout cas, plus objectif que d’autre puisqu’il y a vécu)