But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: "No, don't! Don't dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye."

But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes."

Vyshinsky pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only. Therefore, when we sign a sentence ordering someone to be shot we can never be absolutely certain that we are punishing a guilty person. Thence arose the most practical conclusion: that is was useless to seek absolute evidence or unchallengeable witnesses. The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interrogator could find them without leaving his office, "basing his conclusions on his moral forces" (i.e., the superiority of someone who has slept well, been well fed, and has not been beaten up) "and on his character" (i.e., his willingness to apply cruelty!

What do you need to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap?

From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: "My like is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom... From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me."

Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogator will tremble.

So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

There was nowhere to appeal to. There was no appeals jurisdiction above it, and no jurisdiction beneath it. It was subordinate only to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, to Stalin, and to Satan.

Thus many were shot—thousands at first, then hundreds of thousands. We divide, we multiply, we sigh, we curse. But still and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the mind and then are easily forgotten.

Now just where could he get them in his solitary-confinrement cell with its overnight kerosene lamp, a cell into which not even a little bird could enter? And the scientist prayed: "Please, God! I have done everything I could. Please help me! Please help me continue!"

At this time he was entitled to receive one book every ten days. In the meager prison library were several different editions of Demyan Bedny's Red Concert, which kept coming around to each cell again and again. Half an hour passed after his prayer; they came to exchange his book; and as usual, without asking anything at all, they pushed a book at hi, It was entitled A Course in Astrophysics! Where had it come from? He simply could not imagine such a book in the prison library. He threw himself on it and began to memorize everything he needed immediately. After just two days, there was an unscheduled inspection by the prison chief. His eagle eye noticed immediately. "But you are an astronomer?" "Yes." "Take this book away from him!" But its mystical arrival had opened the way for his further work, which he continued in the camp in Norilsk.

Own nothing! Possess nothing! Buddha and Christ taught us this, and the Stoics and the Cynics. Greedy though we are, why can't we seem to grasp that simple teaching? Can't we understand that with property we destroy our soul?

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory!

While we had been fighting for four years at the front, a while new generation had grown up here. And had it been very long since we ourselves had tramped the university corridors, considering ourselves the youngest and most intelligent in the whole country and, for that matter, on the earth? And then suddenly pale youths crossed the tile floors of the prison cells to approach us haughtily, and we learned with astonishment that we were no longer the youngest and the most intelligent—they were. But I don't take offense at this; at that point I was already happy to move over a bit to make room. I knew so very well their passion for arguing with everyone, for finding out everything, I understood their pride in having chosen a worthy lot and in not regretting it.

During the war years (on war rations), the camp inmates called three weeks at logging "dry execution".

But you have forgotten Vyshinsky: "work, the miracle worker which transforms people from nonexistence and insignificance into heroes" If there were a crane, then these women would simply wallow in insignificance!

The village club manager went with his watchmen to buy a bust of Comrade Stalin. They bought it. The bust was big and heavy. They ought to have carried it in a hand barrow, both of them together, but the manager's status did not allow him to. "All right, you'll manage it if you take it slowly." And he went off ahead. The old watchman couldn't work out how to do it for a long time. If he tried to carry it at his side, he couldn't get his arm around it. If he tried to carry it in front of him, his back hurt and he was thrown off balance backward. Finally he figured out how to do it. He took off his belt, made a noose for Comrade Stalin, put it around his neck, and in this way carried it over his shoulder through the village. Well, there was nothing here to argue about. It was an open-and-shut case. Article 58-8, terrorism, ten years.

They were building an apartment building and the free employees stole several bathtubs. But the tubs had been supplied to match the number of apartments. So how could they hand off the apartment building as completed? They could not confess to the construction superintendent, of course -- he was triumphantly showing the official acceptance committee around the first stair landing, yes, and he did not omit to take them into every bathroom too and show them each tub. And then he took the committee to the second-floor landing, and the third, not hurrying there either, and kept going into all the bathrooms -- and meanwhile the adroit and experienced zeks, under the leadership of an experienced foreman plumber, broke bathtubs out of the apartments on the first landing, hauled them upstairs on tiptoe to the fourth floor and hurriedly installed and puttied them in before the committee's arrival.

At the Samarka Camp in 1946 a group of intellectuals had reached the very brink of death: They were worn down by hunger, cold, and work beyond their powers. And they were even deprived of sleep. They had nowhere to lie down. Did they go and steal? Or squeal? Or whimper about their ruined lives? No! Foreseeing the approach of death in days rather than weeks, here is how they spent their last sleepless leisure, sitting up against the wall: Timofeyev-Ressovsky gathered them into a "seminar," and they hastened to share with one another what one of them knew and the others did not -- they delivered their last lectures to each other. Variously they spoke of patristics, dogmatics, electrical engineering, economics, microphysics. From one session to the next, participants were missing -- they were already in the morgue.

That is the sort of person who can be interested in all this while already growing numb with approaching death -- now that is an intellectual!

Pardon me, you love life? You, you! You who exclaim and sing over and over and dance it too: "I love you, life! Oh, I love you, life!" Do you? Well, go on, love it! Camp life -- love that too! It, too, is life!

There where there is no struggle with fate,

There you will resurrect your soul...

You haven't understood a thing. When you get there, you'll collapse.

If it is the essence that counts, then the time has come to reconcile yourself to general work. To tatters. To torn skin on the hands. To a piece of bread which is smaller and worse. And perhaps... to death. But while you're alive, you drag your way along proudly with an aching back. And this is when -- when you have ceased to be afraid of threats and not chasing after rewards -- you become the most dangerous character in the owl-like view of the bosses. Because what hold do they have on you?

Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you -- and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels -- patience.

You are ascending...

It is particularly in slavery that for the first time we have learned to recognize genuine friendship!

[This is from later, p. 365:] A man is the product of his whole experience -- that is how we come to be what we are.

The defeat of Tsarism came... much earlier. It was overthrown without hope of restoration once Russian literature adopted the convention that anyone who depicted a gendarme or policeman with any hint of sympathy was a lickspittle and a reactionary thug; when you didnt have to shake a policeman's hand, cultivate his acquaintance, nod to him in the street, but merely brush sleeves with him in passing to consider yourself disgraced.

I was anxious and unsure of myself to begin with. Could I keep it up? We were unhandy cerebral creatures...

But the day when I deliberately let myself sink to the bottom and felt it firm under my feet -- the hard, rocky bottom which is the same for all -- was the beginning of the most important years in my life, the years which put the finishing touches to my character. From then onward there seem to have been no upheavals in my life, and I have been faithful to the views and habits acquired at that time.

Memory was the only hidey-hole in which you could keep what you had written and carry it through all the searches and journeys under escort.

Meeting the religious poet Silin was a suprise I owed to the Baptists. Day in and day out he was meek and gentle with everyone, but reserved. Only when we began talking to each other freely, and strolling about the camp for hours at a stretch on our Sundays off, while he recited his very long religious poems to me (like me, he had written them right there in the camp), I was startled not for the first time or the last to realize what far from ordinary souls are concealed within deceptively ordinary exteriors.

He cannot do otherwise! That is how he is made. A bird cannot renounce seasonal migration, and a committed escaper cannot help running away.

This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century: is it permissible merely to carry out orders and commit one's conscience to someone else's keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil?

The kites were also shot at, but ... the enemy soon discovered that sending up counter-kites to tangle strings with them was cheaper than keeping a crowd of warders on the run. A war of kites in the second half of the twentieth century! And all to silence a word of truth.

Both Tommy-gunners and tank crews had been given vodka first. However special the troops may be, it is easier to destroy unarmed and sleeping people with drink inside you.

The victorious generals descended from the towers and went off to breakfast. Without knowing any of them, I feel confident that their appetite that June morning left nothing to be desired and that they drank deeply. An alcoholic hum would not in the least disturb the ideological harmony in their heads. And what they had for hearts was something installed with a screwdriver.

Each year on the anniversary of my arrest I organize for myself a "zek's day": in the morning I cut off 650 grams of bread, put two lumps of sugar in a cup and pour hot water on them. For lunch I ask them to make me some broth and a ladleful of thin mush. And how quickly I get back to my old form: by the end of the day I am already picking up crumbs to put in my mouth, and licking the bowl. The old sensations start up vividly.

But one stream never dried up in the USSR, and still flows. A stream of criminals which flowed uninteruptedly through all those decades -- whether under Lenin, Stalin, or Kruschev.

I mean the believers. Those who resisted the new wave of cruel persecution, the wholesale closing of churches. Monks who were slung out of their monasteries. Stubbord sectarians, especially those who refused to perform military service: there's nothing we can do about it, we're really very sorry, but your directly aiding imperialism; we let you off lightly nowadays -- it's five years first time around.

These are in no sense politicals, they are "religionists," but still they have to be re-educated. Believers must be dismissed from their jobs merely for their faith. They must be compelled to attend antireligious lectures, church doors must be cut down with blow-torches, domes pulled down with hawsers [thick cables] attached to tractors, gatherings of old women broken up with fire hoses.

The Baptists are persecuted because they do not accept preachers sent by an atheist plenipotentiary of the state, but prefer their own... There is a directive: put them on trial and forcibly take their children from them. Although the government says it fights "discrimination in the sphere of education," and that "parents must be allowed to provide for the religious and moral education of their children." But that is precisely what we cannot allow! Anyone who speaks in court and tries to clarify this issue is invariably interrupted: "How can you talk about the end of the world when we are committed to the building of Communism?"

All you freedom-loving "left-wing" thinkers in the West! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday -- but only when you yourselves hear "hands behind your backs there!" and step ashore on the Archipelago.

Literature... becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way, literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation. (In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the leveling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization... [But] the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

Of those who have lived more and undersand, those who could oppose these young -- many do not dare oppose, they even suck up, anything not to appear "conservative." Another Russian phenomenon of the Nineteenth Century which Dostoevsky called slavery to progressive quirks.