Resurrection quotes

crows, sparrows, and pigeons, filled with the joy of spring, were getting their nests ready; the flies were buzzing along the walls, warmed by the sunshine.

All were glad, the plants, the birds, the insects, and the children. But men, grown-up men and women, did not leave off cheating and tormenting themselves and each other.

It was not this spring morning men thought sacred and worthy of consideration, not the beauty of God’s world, given for a joy to all creatures, this beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony, and to love, but only their own devices for …

Others whispered very low, and not fast enough, and then, as if frightened, hurried to catch up the priest. Some kept their fingers tightly together, as if fearing to drop the pinch of invisible something they held; others kept separating and folding theirs.

Everyone save the old priest felt awkward, but he was sure he was fulfilling a very useful and important duty.

After the swearing in, the president requested the jury to choose a foreman, and the jury, thronging to the door, passed out into the debating-room, where almost all of them at once began to smoke cigarettes.

“Your name?” asked the president, with a weary sigh at being obliged to repeat the same questions, without looking at the prisoner, but glancing over a paper that lay before him.

The president was so used to his task that, in order to get quicker through it all, he did two things at a time.

Bótchkova was forty-three years old, and came from the town of Kalomna. She, too, had been in service at the Hotel Mauritánia.

“Occupation. What was your occupation?”

“You know yourself,” she said, and smiled.

Then, casting a hurried look round the room, again turned her eyes on the president.

Then money was not needed, and he did not require even one-third of what his mother allowed him; but now this allowance of 1,500 roubles a month did not suffice, and he had already had some unpleasant talks about it with his mother.

Then he had looked on his spirit as the I; now it was his healthy strong animal I that he looked upon as himself.

And all this terrible change had come about because he had ceased to believe himself and had taken to believing others. This he had done because it was too difficult to live believing one’s self;

This he had done because it was too difficult to live believing one’s self; believing one’s self, one had to decide every question not in favour of one’s own animal life, which is always seeking for easy gratifications, but almost in every case against it.

Believing others there was nothing to decide; everything had been decided already, and decided always in favour of the animal I and against the spiritual.

Nor was this all. Believing in his own self he was always exposing himself to the censure of those around him; believing others he had their approval.

now he knew he was in love and was glad of it, and knew dimly what this love consisted of and what it might lead to, though he sought to conceal it even from himself.

In Nekhlúdoff, as in every man, there were two beings: one the spiritual, seeking only that kind of happiness for himself which should tend towards the happiness of all; the other, the animal man, seeking only his own happiness, and ready to sacrifice to it the happiness of the rest of the world.

At this period of his mania of self-love brought on by life in Petersburg and in the army, this animal man ruled supreme and completely crushed the spiritual man in him.

He knew she had that love in her because on that night and morning he was conscious of it in himself, and conscious that in this love he became one with her.

Ah! if it had all stopped there, at the point it had reached that night.

“Yes, all that horrible business had not yet happened on that Easter eve!” he thought, as he sat by the window of the jurymen’s room.

… it was a pity to go away before having fully gratified the cravings of his love for her, yet the absolute necessity of parting had its advantages because it put a sudden stop to relations it would have been very difficult for him to continue.

Then he thought that he ought to give her some money, not for her, not because she might need it, but because it was the thing to do.

So he gave her what seemed to him a liberal amount, considering his and her station. On the day of his departure, after dinner, he went out and waited for her at the side entrance.

He now felt the same loathing and pity and vexation as when, out shooting, he was obliged to kill a wounded bird.

The wounded bird struggles in the game bag. One is disgusted and yet feels pity, and one is in a hurry to kill the bird and forget it.

Such mixed feelings filled Nekhlúdoff’s breast as he sat listening to the examination of the witnesses.

… evidence was finished, the president announced that the investigation was now concluded and immediately called on the prosecutor to proceed, hoping that as the latter was also a man, he, too, might feel inclined to smoke or dine, and show some mercy on the rest.

But the public prosecutor showed mercy neither to himself nor to anyone else.

He was very stupid by nature, but, besides this, he had had the misfortune of finishing school with a gold medal and of receiving a reward for his essay on “Servitude” when studying Roman Law at the University, and was therefore self-confident and self-satisfied in …

Still he would not give in to the feelings of repentance which began to arise within him. He tried to consider it all as a coincidence, which would pass without infringing his manner of life.

He felt himself in the position of a puppy, when its master, taking it by the scruff of its neck, rubs its nose in the mess it has made.

The puppy whines, draws back and wants to get away as far as possible from the effects of its misdeed, but the pitiless master does not let go.

“Nothing is worse than to confess to being in low spirits,” said Missy. “I never do it, and therefore am always in good spirits.”

Nekhlúdoff felt as a horse must feel when it is being caressed to make it submit to having the bit put in its mouth and be harnessed, and today he felt less than ever inclined to draw.

“Well, are you coming into my room? We will try to cheer you up.”

And my position with regard to money? To use riches considered by me unlawful on the plea that they are inherited from my mother? And the whole of my idle, detestable life? And my conduct towards Katúsha to crown all? Knave and scoundrel!

Let men judge me as they like, I can deceive them; but myself I cannot deceive.

”

And, suddenly, he understood that the aversion he had lately, and particularly today, felt for everybody—the Prince and Sophia Vasílievna and Cornéy and Missy—was an aversion for himself.

And, strange to say, in this acknowledgement of his baseness there was something painful yet joyful and quieting.

More than once in Nekhlúdoff’s life there had been what he called a “cleansing of the soul.”

… a state of mind in which, after a long period of sluggish inner life, a total cessation of its activity, he began to clear out all the rubbish that had accumulated in his soul, and was the cause of the cessation of the true life.

His soul needed cleansing as a watch does.

After such an awakening Nekhlúdoff always made some rules for himself which he meant to follow forever after, wrote his diary, and began afresh a life which he hoped never to change again. “Turning over a new leaf,” he called it to himself in English.

“Only think, to entice the lad’s wife and lock him himself up to feed vermin, and me, too, in my old days—” she began to retell her story for the hundredth time. “If it isn’t the beggar’s staff it’s the prison.

Yes, the beggar’s staff and the prison don’t wait for an invitation.

”

The red-haired woman was crying because she had been abused and had not got any of the vodka she wanted so badly; also because she remembered how all her life she had been abused, mocked at, offended, beaten.

Remembering this, she pitied herself, and, thinking no one heard her, began crying as children cry, sniffing with her nose and swallowing the salt tears.

“I’m sorry for her,” said Máslova.

on the contrary, we support the establishments where they are formed. These establishments are well known: factories, mills, workshops, public-houses, gin-shops, brothels. And we do not destroy these places, but, looking at them as necessary, we support and regulate them.

We educate in this way not one, but millions of people, and then catch one of them and imagine that we have done something, that we have guarded ourselves, and nothing more can be expected of us.

Have we not sent him from the Moscow to the Irkoútsk Government?”

“

Terrible! It is difficult to say whether the cruelty or the absurdity is greater, but the one and the other seem to reach their climax.

”

Wet, muddy, and quite exhausted, she returned, and from that day the change which brought her where she now was began to operate in her soul.

Beginning from that dreadful night, she ceased believing in God and in goodness.

She had herself believed in God, and believed that other people also believed in Him; but after that night she became convinced that no one believed, and that all that was said about God and His laws was deception and untruth.

If this faith did not exist it would have been more difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to use all their powers to torment people, as they were now doing, with a quiet conscience.

The inspector was such a kindhearted man that he could not have lived as he was now living unsupported by his faith.

Therefore, he stood motionless, bowed and crossed himself zealously, tried to feel touched when the song about the cherubims was being sung, and when the children received communion he lifted one of them, and held him up to the priest with his own hands.

He did not believe that the bread turned into flesh, that it was useful for the soul to repeat so many words, or that he had actually swallowed a bit of God.

No one could believe this, but he believed that one ought to hold this faith.

What strengthened him most in this faith was the fact that, for fulfilling the demands of this faith, he had for the last fifteen years been able to draw an income, which enabled him to keep his family, send his son to a gymnasium and …

Nekhlúdoff remained in this room for about five minutes, feeling strangely depressed, conscious of how powerless he was, and at variance with all the world.

He was seized with a curious moral sensation like seasickness.

What astonished him most was that Katúsha was not ashamed of her position—not the position of a prisoner (she was ashamed of that), but her position as a prostitute. She seemed satisfied, even proud of it. And, yet, how could it be otherwise?

Everybody, in order to be able to act, has to consider his occupation important and good.

Therefore, in whatever position a person is, he is certain to form such a view of the life of men in general which will make his occupation seem important and good.

“Why should I be calm?” she began, quickly, flushing scarlet. “

I am a convict, and you are a gentleman and a prince. There’s no need for you to soil yourself by touching me.

You go to your princesses; my price is a ten-rouble note.”

“You go away. I am a convict and you a prince, and you’ve no business here,” she cried, pulling away her hand, her whole appearance transformed by her wrath. “

You’ve got pleasure out of me in this life, and want to save yourself through me in the life to come.

You are disgusting to me—your spectacles and the whole of your dirty fat mug. Go, go!” she screamed, starting to her feet.

she, too, would never have felt the whole horror of what had been done to her. He only now saw what he had done to the soul of this woman; only now she saw and understood what had been done to her.

Up to this time Nekhlúdoff had played with a sensation of self-admiration, had admired his own remorse; now he was simply filled with horror.

He knew he could not throw her up now, and yet he could not imagine what would come of their relations to one another.

In this room stood several jailers.

In the next room sat about twenty persons, men and women in groups and in pairs, talking in low voices.

There was a writing table by the window.

“It is high time. What do you mean by it? This sort of thing is quite impossible. I am now asking you for the last time,” he repeated wearily, now putting out his cigarette and then lighting another.

It was evident that, artful, old, and common as were the devices enabling men to do evil to others without feeling responsible for it, the inspector could not but feel conscious that he was one of those who were guilty of causing the sorrow which manifested itself in this room.

And it was apparent that this troubled him sorely. At length the prisoners and their visitors began to go—the first out of the inner, the latter out of the outer door.

The sufferings of the evidently innocent Menshóff seemed terrible, and not so much his physical suffering as the perplexity, the distrust in the good and in God which he must feel, seeing the cruelty of the people who tormented him without any reason.

Terrible were the disgrace and sufferings cast on these hundreds of guiltless people simply because something was not written on paper as it should have been.

Terrible were the brutalised jailers, whose occupation is to torment their brothers, and who were certain that they were fulfilling an important and useful duty;

“Whose fault is it? No one’s,” he said, decidedly. “

Ask the Procureur, he’ll say it is the Governor’s; ask the Governor, he’ll say it is the Procureur’s fault. No one is in fault.

”

“Now, come up; I am so glad,” said Máslennikoff, grasping Nekhlúdoff’s hand. In spite of his corpulency Máslennikoff hurried quickly up the stairs. He was in particularly good spirits, owing to the attention paid him by the important personage.

Every such attention gave him the same sense of delight as is felt by an affectionate dog when its master pats it, strokes it, or scratches its ears.

It wags its tail, cringes, jumps about, presses its ears down, and madly rushes about in a circle. Máslennikoff was ready to do the same.

but it would be false to say of one man that he is kind and wise, of another that he is wicked and foolish. And yet we always classify mankind in this way. And this is untrue.

Men are like rivers: the water is the same in each, and alike in all; but every river is narrow here, is more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now cold, now dull, now warm.

It is the same with men. Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality, and sometimes one manifests itself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

Men are like rivers: the water is the same in each, and alike in all; but every river is narrow here, is more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now cold, now dull, now warm. It is the same with men.

Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality, and sometimes one manifests itself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

In some people these changes are very rapid, and Nekhlúdoff was such a man. These changes in him were due to physical and to spiritual causes. At this time he experienced such a change.

“And what are you going to have for dinner?”

“Our food is very good. First course, bread and kvass; second course, kvass and bread,” said the old woman, showing her teeth, which were half worn away.

“No,” seriously; “let me see what you are going to eat.”

Henry George’s fundamental position recurred vividly to his mind and how he had once been carried away by it, and he was surprised that he could have forgotten it.

The earth cannot be anyone’s property; it cannot be bought or sold any more than water, air, or sunshine.

All have an equal right to the advantages it gives to men. And now he knew why he had felt ashamed to remember the transaction at Kousmínski. He had been deceiving himself.

Nekhlúdoff felt as one does when touching a sore place.

It feels as if the bruised part was always being hit; yet it is only because the place is sore that the touch is felt.

“Is it possible that the same thing is happening everywhere?” he thought, and began questioning the isvóstchik about the quantity of land in his village, how much land the man himself had, and why he had left the country.

“Never. The whole face is altered. Why, it must be ten years since then.”

“Not years, but a lifetime,” said Máslova.

And suddenly her animation went, her face grew gloomy, and a deep line appeared between her brows.

“All the more, since I was the cause of it.”

“Well, you are a simpleton,” said his aunt, repressing a smile, “a terrible simpleton; but it is just because you are such a terrible simpleton that I love you.”

She repeated the word, evidently liking it, as it seemed to correctly convey to her mind the idea of her nephew’s moral state. “Do you know—What a lucky chance. Aline has a wonderful home—the Magdalene Home. I went there once. They are terribly disgusting.

“What do you want, then? That I should work and not eat anything?”

“No, I do not wish you not to eat. I only wish that we should all work and all eat.”

He could not help smiling as he said it.

He felt that from the first, with his aunt, he involuntarily fell into a bantering tone while talking about serious matters.

Petersburg in general affected him with its usual physically invigorating and mentally dulling effect.

Everything so clean, so comfortably well-arranged and the people so lenient in moral matters, that life seemed very easy.

Petersburg in general affected him with its usual physically invigorating and mentally dulling effect.

Everything so clean, so comfortably well-arranged and the people so lenient in moral matters, that life seemed very easy.

A fine, clean, and polite isvóstchik drove him past fine, clean, polite policemen, along the fine, clean, watered streets, past fine, clean houses to the house in which Mariette lived.

Writing is also not forbidden,” he continued. “A slate is provided, and a slate pencil, so that they can write as a pastime. They can wipe the slate and write again. But they don’t write, either.

Oh, they very soon get quite tranquil. At first they seem restless, but later on they even grow fat and become very quiet.

” Thus spoke the General, never suspecting the terrible meaning of his words.

But under the stress of his daily life he, a truthful man, allowed a little falsehood to creep in. He said that in order to do justice to an unreasonable thing one had to study the unreasonable thing.

It was a little falsehood, but it sunk him into the big falsehood in which he was now caught.

Before putting to himself the question whether the orthodoxy in which he was born and bred, and which everyone expected him to accept, and without which he could not continue his useful occupation, contained the truth, he had already decided the answer.

But under the stress of his daily life he, a truthful man, allowed a little falsehood to creep in.

He said that in order to do justice to an unreasonable thing one had to study the unreasonable thing.

It was a little falsehood, but it sunk him into the big falsehood in which he was now caught.

“No; better begin with the French Theatre, and do penance afterwards.”

“Now, then, you are not to hold me up for ridicule. The preacher is the preacher and the theatre is the theatre. One need not weep in order to be saved. One must have faith, and then one is sure to be gay.”

“You, ma tante, preach better than any preacher.”

He had committed no evil action, but, what was far worse than an evil action, he had entertained evil thoughts whence all evil actions proceed.

An evil action may not be repeated, and can be repented of; but evil thoughts generate all evil actions.

An evil action only smooths the path for other evil acts; evil thoughts uncontrollably drag one along that path.

He had committed no evil action, but, what was far worse than an evil action, he had entertained evil thoughts whence all evil actions proceed. An evil action may not be repeated, and can be repented of; but evil thoughts generate all evil actions.

An evil action only smooths the path for other evil acts; evil thoughts uncontrollably drag one along that path.

When Nekhlúdoff repeated in his mind the thoughts of the day before, he was surprised that he could for a moment have believed these thoughts.

Yet he feared lest the people might also come to such a state, and looked upon it as his sacred duty, as he called it, to save the people therefrom.

A certain cookery book declares that some crabs like to be boiled alive.

In the same way he thought and spoke as if the people liked being kept in superstition; only he meant this in a literal sense, whereas the cookery book did not mean its words literally.

His feelings towards the religion he was keeping up were the same as those of the poultry-keeper towards the carrion he fed his fowls on.

Carrion was very disgusting, but the fowls liked it; therefore it was right to feed the fowls on carrion.

Of course all this worship of the images of the Iberian, Kazán and Smolénsk Mothers of God was a gross superstition, but the people liked it and believed in it, and therefore the superstition must be kept up.

Besides, this one was driven to it by necessity, while the other amused herself by playing with that enchanting, disgusting, frightful passion.

This woman of the street was like stagnant, smelling water offered to those whose thirst was greater than their disgust; that other one in the theatre was like the poison which, unnoticed, poisons everything it gets into.

”

“

Yes, the only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the present time is a prison

,” he thought, and even felt that this applied to him personally, when he drove up to the prison and entered its walls.

Science answered thousands of different very subtle and ingenious questions touching criminal law, but not the one he was trying to solve. He asked a very simple question: “

Why, and with what right, do some people lock up, torment, exile, flog, and kill others, while they are themselves just like those whom they torment, flog, and kill?

” And in answer he got deliberations as to whether human beings had free will or not. Whether signs of criminality could be detected by measuring the skulls or not. What part heredity played in crime. Whether immorality could be inherited.

At that time she was in love with his friend, Nikólenka Irténieff, since dead.

They both loved Nikólenka, and loved in him and in themselves that which is good, and which unites all men.

Since then they had both been depraved, he by military service and a vicious life, she by marriage with a man whom she loved with a sensual love, who did not care for the things that had once been so dear and holy to her …

When she saw her brother she jumped up and hurried towards him, with her silk dress rustling. They kissed, and looked smilingly at each other.

There passed between them that mysterious exchange of looks, full of meaning, in which all was true, and which cannot be expressed in words. Then came words which were not true.

They had not met since their mother’s death.

“

The upholding of class interests! I think the law is only an instrument for upholding the existing order of things beneficial to our class.

”

… all of a sudden I called to mind how many times I have been, and even still am, though but in thought, guilty of the thing that I hated her for, and immediately I became disgusting to myself, and pitied her and felt happy again.

If only we could manage to see the beam in our own eye in time, how kind we should be.

” Then he wrote: “I have been to see Nathalie, and again self-satisfaction made me unkind and spiteful, and a heavy feeling remains. Well, what is to be done? Tomorrow a new life will begin. A final goodbye to the old!

… slight touch, and the black trotters, their shoes ringing against the paving stones, drew the carriage, softly swaying on its rubber tires, towards the country house where the husband, the wife, the girl, and the boy with the sharp collarbones were going to amuse themselves.

Neither the father nor the mother gave the girl and boy any explanation of what they had seen, so that the children had themselves to find out the meaning of this curious sight.

The girl, taking the expression of her father’s and mother’s faces into consideration, solved the problem by assuming that these people were quite another kind of men and women than her father and mother and their acquaintances, that they were bad people, and that they …

But the boy with the long, thin neck, who looked at the procession of prisoners without taking his eyes off them, solved the question differently.

He still knew, firmly and without any doubt, for he had it from God, that these people were just the same kind of people as he was, and like all other people, and therefore someone had done these people some wrong, something that ought not to have been done, and he was sorry for them, and felt no horror either of those who were shaved and chained or of those who had shaved and chained them.

And so the boy’s lips pouted more and more, and he made greater and greater efforts not to cry, thinking it a shame to cry in such a case.

There was a smile on the lips that were already growing blue, a small beard outlined the lower part of the face, and on the shaved side of the head a firm, well-shaped ear was visible.

One could see what possibilities of a higher life had been destroyed in this man.

The fine bones of his hands and shackled feet, the strong muscles of all his well-proportioned limbs, showed what a beautiful, strong, agile human animal this had been.

As an animal merely he had been a far more perfect one of his kind than the bay stallion, about the laming of which the fireman was so angry.

Yet he had been done to death, and no one was sorry for him as a man, nor was anyone sorry that so fine a working animal had perished.

The only feeling evinced was that of annoyance because of the bother caused by the necessity of getting this body, threatening putrefaction, out of the way. The doctor and his assistant entered the hospital, accompanied by the inspector of the police station.

On the way from the prison to the station, besides the two Nekhlúdoff had seen, three other prisoners had fallen and died of sunstroke. One was taken to the nearest police station like the first two, and the other two died at the railway station.

The convoy men were not troubled because five men who might have been alive died while in their charge. This did not trouble them, but they were concerned lest anything that the law required in such cases should be omitted.

To convey the bodies to the places appointed, to deliver up their papers, to take them off the lists of those to be conveyed to Níjni—all this was very troublesome, especially on so hot a day.

Nathalie stood opposite the carriage, with her fashionable bonnet and cape, by the side of Agraphéna Petróvna, and was evidently trying to find something to say.

She could not even say écrivez, because they had long ago laughed at this word, habitually spoken by those about to part.

The short conversation about money matters had in a moment destroyed the tender brotherly and sisterly feelings that had taken hold of them. They felt estranged, so that Nathalie was glad when the train moved;

He conducted them in the usual manner, and could not foresee that two such strong men as those Nekhlúdoff saw would not be able to stand it and would die.

No one is guilty, and yet the men have been murdered by these people who are not guilty of their murder.

“All this comes,” Nekhlúdoff thought, “from the fact that all these people, governors, inspectors, police officers, and men, consider that there are circumstances in which human relations are not necessary between human beings.

That’s what it is,” Nekhlúdoff went on in his thoughts. “

If one acknowledges but for a single hour that anything can be more important than love for one’s fellow-men, even in some one exceptional case, any crime can be committed without a feeling of guilt.

”

That is why I feel so depressed when I am with these people. I am simply afraid of them, and really they are terrible, more terrible than robbers.

A robber might, after all, feel pity, but they can feel no pity, they are inured against pity as these stones are against vegetation.

That is what makes them terrible. It is said that the Pougatchéffs, the Razíns are terrible. These are a thousand times more terrible,” he continued, in his thoughts.

Without these conditions, the terrible acts I witnessed today would be impossible in our times. It all lies in the fact that men think there are circumstances in which one may deal with human beings without love; and there are no such circumstances.

One may deal with things without love. One may cut down trees, make bricks, hammer iron without love; but you cannot deal with men without it, just as one cannot deal with bees without being careful.

If you deal carelessly with bees you will injure them, and will yourself be injured. And so with men. It cannot be otherwise, because natural love is the fundamental law of human life.

All these people were evidently invulnerable and impregnable to the simplest feelings of compassion only because they held offices. “

As officials they were impermeable to the feelings of humanity, as this paved ground is impermeable to the rain.

” Thus thought Nekhlúdoff as he looked at the railway embankment paved with stones of different colours, down which the water was running in streams instead of soaking into the earth.

“What is it, sir? That we are drinking?

Ah, no one sees how we work, but everyone sees how we drink.

I have earned it, and I am drinking and treating my wife, and no one else.”

… least some semblance of justice shown them before and after they were sentenced, but in the case of the political prisoners there was not even that semblance, as Nekhlúdoff saw in the case of Shoústova and that of many and many of his new acquaintances.

These people were dealt with like fish caught with a net; everything that gets into the nets is pulled ashore, and then the big fish which are required are sorted out and the little ones are left to perish unheeded on the shore.

Having captured hundreds that were evidently guiltless, and that could not be dangerous to the government, they left them imprisoned for years, where they became consumptive, went out of their minds or committed suicide, and kept them only because they had no inducement to set …

One of them, the largest, with grated windows, was for the prisoners, another for the convoy soldiers, and the third, in which the office was, for the officers.

There were lights in the windows of all the three houses, and, like all such lights, they promised, here in a specially deceptive manner, something cosy inside the walls.

Lamps were burning before the porches of the houses and about five lamps more along the walls lit up the yard.

Símonson was silent; then, after thinking a little, he said: “Very well, then, I’ll tell her. You must not think I am in love with her,” he continued;

“I love her as a splendid, unique, human being who has suffered much. I want nothing from her. I have only an awful longing to help her, to lighten her posi⁠—”

Nekhlúdoff was surprised to hear the trembling in Símonson’s voice.

… and lying in the liquid oozing out of the stinking tub, especially that of the boy, with his innocent face asleep on the leg of a criminal, came all the more vividly to his mind, and he could not get it out of his head.

To know that somewhere far away there are men who torture other men by inflicting all sorts of humiliations and inhuman degradation and sufferings on them, or for three months incessantly to look on while men were inflicting these humiliations and sufferings on other men is a very different thing.

And Nekhlúdoff felt it. More than once during these three months he asked himself, “Am I mad because I see what others do not, or are they mad that do these things that I see?”

All these institutions seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population.

“Just as if a problem had been set to find the best, the surest means of depraving the greatest number of persons,” thought Nekhlúdoff, while investigating the deeds that were being done in the prisons and halting stations.

Every year hundreds of thousands were brought to the highest pitch of depravity, and when completely depraved they were set free to carry the depravity they had caught in prison among the people.

… terrible crimes, even cannibalism—were not casual, or due to degeneration or to the existence of monstrosities of the criminal type, as science, going hand in hand with the government, explained it, but an unavoidable consequence of the incomprehensible delusion that men may punish one another.

Nekhlúdoff saw that cannibalism did not commence in the marshes, but in the ministry.

He saw that his brother-in-law, for example, and, in fact, all the lawyers and officials, from the usher to the minister, do not care in the least for justice or the good of the people about whom they spoke, but only for the roubles they …

“What is your faith, dad?” asked a middle-aged man, who stood by his cart on the same side of the raft.

“I have no kind of faith, because I believe no one⁠—no one but myself,” said the old man as quickly and decidedly as before.

“How can you believe yourself?” Nekhlúdoff asked, entering into a conversation with him. “You might make a mistake.”

Nekhlúdoff got out his purse and offered some money to the old man, but he refused, saying, “I do not accept this sort of thing—bread I do accept.”

“There is nothing to excuse, you have not offended me. And it is not possible to offend me.”

And the old man put the wallet he had taken off again on his back. Meanwhile, the post-cart had been landed and the horses harnessed.

Only in the morning, just at the time Nekhlúdoff came to see him, he was like a reasonable being, could understand what was said to him, and fulfil more or less aptly a proverb he was fond of repeating:

“He’s tipsy, but he’s wise, so he’s pleasant in two ways.”

The higher authorities knew he was a drunkard, but he was more educated than the rest, though his education had stopped at the spot where drunkenness had got hold of him. He was bold, adroit, of imposing appearance, and showed tact even when tipsy;

Of course I do not suspect you, but you take an interest in him and in the others, and you have money, and here with us anything can be done with money.

I have been told to put down bribery. But how can I put down bribery when everybody takes bribes?

And the lower their rank the more ready they are to be bribed. How can one find it out across more than 3,000 miles? There any official is a little Tsar, just as I am here,” and he laughed.