Pamela Shropshire’s Reviews > Notes from a Dead House > Status Update

…It seems to me that if he had badly wanted a drink of vodka, and could not have obtained it otherwise than by cutting someone’s throat, he would certainly have cut it, provided it could have been done on the quiet, so that nobody knew. He learned calculation in prison.

[about A__v, who toadyed to the major]
I had occasion to learn something of his soul: his cynicism reached the point of outrageous insolence, of the coldest mockery, and aroused an insurmountable loathing…

…and sometimes even blessed my fate for having sent me this solitude…

…rejoiced that it was no longer a thousand, but nine hundred and ninety-nine. I remember that in all that time, despite having hundreds of fellow prisoners, I was in terrible solitude, and I finally came to love that solitude. Spiritually alone, I revisited all my past life, went through everything down to the smallest detail, pondered my past, judged myself alone strictly and implacably…

I remember that those long, boring days were as monotonous as rainwater dripping from the roof drop by drop. I remember that only the passionate desire for resurrection, renewal, a new life, gave me strength to wait and hope…I counted off each day, and, though there were a thousand left, I counted each one off with delight, bade farewell to it, buried it, and, with the coming of the new day…

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.

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…