![]() The criminals were now quiet, and most of them were asleep.Though the people were lying on and under the bed shelves and inthe space between, they could not all be placed inside the rooms,and some of them lay in the passage with their sacks under theirheads and covered with their cloaks. In theprisons of Tamen, Ekaterinburg, Tomsk and at the halting stationsNekhludoff saw how successfully the object society seemed to haveset itself was attained. Every year hundreds ofthousands were brought to the highest pitch of depravity, andwhen completely depraved they were set free to carry thedepravity they had caught in prison among the people. Just as if a problem had been set to find the best, the surestmeans of depraving the greatest number of persons," thoughtNekhludoff, while investigating the deeds that were being done inthe prisons and halting stations. When the ice and cold water had eased Kryltzoff a little,and he had been put to bed, Nekhludoff, having said goodnight toeverybody, went out with the sergeant, who had been waiting forhim some time. ![]() Mary Pavlovna brought valerian drops andoffered them to him, but he, breathing quickly and heavily,pushed her away with his thin, white hand, and kept his eyesclosed. All theseinstitutions seemed purposely invented for the production ofdepravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no otherconditions could produce it, and for the spreading of thiscondensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population To those whowere deprived of their freedom, who were in want and misery, actsof violence were evidently still more permissible. And the most terrible part was that this was not asolitary, but a recurring case.Īnd, fifthly, the fact that all sorts of violence, cruelty,inhumanity, are not only tolerated, but even permitted by thegovernment, when it suits its purposes, was impressed on themmost forcibly by the inhuman treatment they were subjected to bythe sufferings inflicted on children, women and old men byfloggings with rods and whips by rewards offered for bringing afugitive back, dead or alive by the separation of husbands andwives, and the uniting them with the wives and husbands of othersfor sexual intercourse by shooting or hanging them. Hesaw a living man who was accused of this and acknowledged thefact. ![]() Nekhludoff found out during hisjourney how tramps, escaping into the marshes, persuade a comradeto escape with them, and then kill him and feed on his flesh. ![]() Ordinary, simple men with a conception of the demands of thesocial and Christian Russian peasant morality lost thisconception, and found a new one, founded chiefly on the idea thatany outrage or violence was justifiable if it seemed profitable.After living in a prison those people became conscious with thewhole of their being that, judging by what was happening tothemselves, all the moral laws, the respect and the sympathy forothers which church and the moral teachers preach, was really setaside, and that, therefore, they, too, need not keep the laws.Nekhludoff noticed the effects of prison life on all the convictshe knewon Fedoroff, on Makar, and even on Taras, who, after twomonths among the convicts, struck Nekhludoff by the want ofmorality in his arguments. ![]()
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