What does it mean?”

“It’s not about the tea,” the Pole replied. “They’re angry with you because you’re a nobleman and not like them. Many of them would like to pick on you. They’d like very much to insult you and humiliate you. You’re going to see a lot more unpleasantness here. It’s terribly hard here for all of us. For us it’s harder in all respects. It takes a lot of indifference to get used to it. You’ll meet with unpleasantness and abuse more than once over tea and your own food, though quite often quite a lot of them here have their own food, and some drink tea all the time. They can, but you can’t.”

Having said that, he got up and left the table. A few minutes later, his words came true …

* “Clean prison bread” means bread made from pure flour, with no admixtures. Author.

III

First Impressions

M—cki (the Pole who talked to me)1 had only just left when Gazin, completely drunk, barged into the kitchen.

A drunken prisoner, in broad daylight, on a weekday, when everybody was obliged to go out to work, with a strict superior who might turn up in the prison at any moment, with a sergeant who was in charge of the prisoners and never left the prison, with the guards, the invalids—in short, with all this strictness—completely confused the notions of the prisoners’ everyday life that had been taking shape in me. I had to spend a long time in prison before I could explain to myself all these facts that puzzled me so much in the first days of my term.

I have already said that the prisoners always had their own work and that this work was a natural need in the life at hard labor; that, apart from this need, a prisoner passionately loves money and values it above everything, almost on a par with freedom, and that it is enough to have it jingling in his pocket for him to be comforted. On the other hand, he is gloomy, sad, restless, and dispirited if he has none, and then he is ready to steal or do anything at all only so as to get it. But, though money was so precious in prison, it never stayed long with the lucky fellow who had it. First of all, it was hard to keep it from being stolen or confiscated. If the major laid hands on it during surprise searches, he immediately confiscated it. He may have used it to improve the prisoners’ food; in any case it was turned over to him. But most often it was stolen: you could not rely on anyone. Later on we discovered a way of keeping money in total security. We gave it for safekeeping to an old man, an Old Believer, who came to us from the Starodubsky settlements, and before that from Vietka …2 I cannot help saying a few words about him, though it takes me away from my subject.

He was a little old man of about sixty, small, gray-haired. He made a distinct impression on me from the first glance. He was so unlike the other prisoners: there was something so serene and gentle in his gaze that I remember looking with special pleasure at his clear, bright eyes, surrounded by small, radiating wrinkles. I often talked with him, and rarely in my life have I met such a kind, good-natured being. He was sent up for an extremely serious crime. Among the Starodubsky Old Believers some converts to Orthodoxy began to appear. The government strongly encouraged them and began making every effort to further the conversions of other dissenters. The old man together with other fanatics resolved to “stand for the faith,” as he put it. The building of a church for the reconciled was begun, and they burned it down. The old man was sent to hard labor as one of the instigators.