Only the entrepreneur got rich from it. The odd fellow loved art for art’s sake. He was tearful as an old woman, and so many times, after being punished, he would promise and swear to give up smuggling. He would control himself manfully, sometimes for a whole month, but in the end he still could not keep away from it … Thanks to such persons, there was no lack of vodka in prison.

Finally, there was another source of income, which, while it did not make the prisoners rich, was constant and beneficial. This was almsgiving. The upper class of our society has no idea how merchants, tradesmen, and all our people care for the “unfortunate.” The almsgiving is almost continuous, and almost always in the form of bread, rolls, and kalachi,3 far more seldom in money. Without these alms, in many places prisoners, especially those awaiting trial, who are kept much more strictly than those who have been sentenced, would have a hard time of it. The alms are religiously shared out among the prisoners. If there is not enough to go around, the rolls are cut into equal parts, sometimes even as many as six parts, so that each prisoner is sure to get his piece. I remember the first time I was given alms in money. It was soon after my arrival in prison. I was coming back from the morning’s work alone, with a convoy soldier. I crossed paths with a mother and her daughter, a girl of about ten, pretty as a little angel. I had already seen them once. The mother was a soldier’s wife, a widow. Her husband, a young soldier, had been on trial and had died in the prisoners’ ward of the hospital while I, too, was lying sick there. His wife and daughter came to take leave of him; they both wept terribly. When she saw me, the girl blushed and whispered something to her mother; the mother stopped at once, rummaged in her purse for a quarter kopeck, and gave it to the girl. The girl rushed after me … “Here ‘unfortunate,’ take a little kopeck for Christ’s sake,” she cried, running ahead of me and putting the coin in my hand. I took her little kopeck, and the girl went back to her mother perfectly content. I held on to that little kopeck for a long time.

II

First Impressions

The first month and generally the beginning of my life in prison are vividly present now in my imagination. My subsequent prison years flit through my memory much more dimly. Some seem completely effaced, merged together, leaving a single overall impression: heavy, monotonous, stifling.

But everything I experienced in the first days of my hard labor stands before me now as if it happened yesterday. And so it should be.

I clearly remember that, when I first stepped into that life, I was struck that I seemed to find nothing especially striking, unusual, or, better to say, unexpected in it. It all seemed to have flashed by me before in my imagination when, on my way to Siberia, I tried to figure out my destiny ahead of time. But soon a huge number of the strangest surprises, of the most monstrous facts, began to stop me at almost every step. And only later on, after living in prison for quite a long time, did I fully comprehend all the exclusiveness, all the unexpectedness of such an existence, and I marveled at it more and more. I confess that this astonishment accompanied me throughout my long term at hard labor; I could never be reconciled to it.

My first general impression on entering prison was extremely repulsive; but despite that—strangely!—it seemed to me that it was much easier to live in prison than I had imagined on the way there. Though the prisoners were in fetters, they walked freely about the whole prison, swore, sang songs, did their own work, smoked pipes, and even drank vodka (at least a few did), and at night some got down to playing cards. The labor itself, for instance, did not seem to me so very punishing, so hard, and only much later did I realize that the punishment and hardness of this labor lay not so much in its difficulty and ceaselessness as in its being forced, imposed, under the lash.