Finally, they noticed that Gazin was starting to cave in. He complained of various pains, grew noticeably more sickly, went to the hospital more and more often … “He’s caving in!” the prisoners said among themselves.

He came into the kitchen in the company of that vile little Pole with the violin that carousers usually hired to fill out their revelry, and stopped in the middle of it, looking silently and attentively at everyone there. They all fell silent. Finally, seeing me and my comrade, he looked at us spitefully and mockingly, smiled smugly, seemed to have figured something out for himself, and, reeling badly, came over to our table.

“Allow me to ask,” he began (he spoke Russian), “on what sort of income are you pleased to be drinking tea here?”

I silently exchanged glances with my comrade, realizing that it would be best to keep silent and not answer him. The first contradiction would send him into a rage.

“So you’ve got money?” he went on asking. “So you’ve got heaps of money, eh? Came to hard labor just to sit and sip tea? Came to sit and sip tea, did you? Speak up, or else!…”

But seeing that we were resolved to keep silent and not notice him, he turned purple and trembled with fury. Beside him, in the corner, stood a big tray, where all the bread cut for the prisoners’ dinner or supper was placed. It was so big that it could hold bread enough for half the prison, but now it was empty. He seized it with both hands and brandished it over us. A little more and he would have smashed our heads. Despite the fact that murder or intended murder threatened the whole prison with extreme unpleasantness: there would be investigations, interrogations, reinforced strictness, and therefore the inmates generally did everything they could not to reach the point of such extremes—despite that, they all now sat hushed and expectant. Not a word in our defense! Not a cry against Gazin!—so strong was their hatred of us! Our dangerous situation obviously pleased them … But the affair ended well: he was just about to bring the tray down, when someone shouted from the front hall:

“Gazin! The vodka’s been stolen!…”

He slammed the tray on the floor and rushed out of the kitchen like a madman.

“Well, God saved them!” the prisoners said among themselves. And they went on talking about it long afterwards.

I was unable to find out afterwards whether this news of the stolen vodka was true or had been invented on the spot to save us.

That evening, already in the dark, before they locked the barracks, I wandered near the fence, and a heavy sadness fell on my soul, and never again did I experience such sadness in all my prison life. It was hard to endure the first day of imprisonment, wherever it might be: in a prison, in a fortress, at hard labor. But I remember being occupied most of all by one thought, which afterwards constantly pursued me during all my life in prison—a partly insoluble thought, insoluble for me even now: about the inequality of punishment for the same crime. True, crimes cannot be compared with each other, even approximately. For instance, two criminals each killed a man; the circumstances of both cases are weighed, and both wind up with the same punishment. Yet look at the difference between the crimes. One, for instance, put a knife into a man just like that, for nothing, for an onion: he came out on the high road, put a knife into a muzhik, and all the man had was an onion. “Look, man! You sent me out to rob: so I put a knife in a muzhik and all I found on him was an onion.” “Fool! An onion’s a kopeck! A hundred men—a hundred kopecks. There’s a rouble for you!” (A prison legend.) But another killed defending the honor of his bride, his sister, his daughter from the lust of a tyrant. One killed as a vagrant beset by a whole regiment of pursuers, defending his freedom, his life, often dying of hunger; another cuts little children’s throats for the pleasure of it, to feel their warm blood on his hands, to enjoy their fear, their last dove-like trembling under his knife. And what then? They both go to the same hard labor. True, there are variations in the length of the sentences. But these variations are relatively few; while the variations in one and the same crime are a numberless multitude. For each character there is a variation. But suppose it’s impossible to reconcile, to smooth over this difference, that it’s an insoluble problem—sort of like squaring the circle—let’s suppose so! But even if this inequality did not exist—look at another difference, the difference in the consequences of the punishment … Here is a man who languishes at hard labor, who melts down like a candle; here is another who, before he got to hard labor, did not even know there was such a rollicking life, such a pleasant club of jolly fellows. Yes, there are such men in prison. Here, for instance, is an educated man, with a highly developed conscience, with awareness, with heart. The aching of his own heart will kill him with its torment before any punishments.