them in so-called “dog’s feet,” [a kind of cigarette that the peasants smoke, made of a bit of paper and bent at one end into a hook] took part in their fist fights, and explained to them how they were all being deceived by the State, and how they ought to disentangle themselves out of the deception they were kept in.  When he thought or spoke of what a revolution would do for the people he always imagined this people from whom he had sprung himself left in very nearly the same conditions as they were in, only with sufficient land and without the gentry and without officials.  The revolution, according to him, and in this he differed from Novodvoroff and Novodvoroff’s follower, Markel Kondratieff, should not alter the elementary forms of the life of the people, should not break down the whole edifice, but should only alter the inner walls of the beautiful, strong, enormous old structure he loved so dearly.  He was also a typical peasant in his views on religion, never thinking about metaphysical questions, about the origin of all origin, or the future life.  God was to him, as also to Arago, an hypothesis, which he had had no need of up to now.  He had no business with the origin of the world, whether Moses or Darwin was right.  Darwinism, which seemed so important to his fellows, was only the same kind of plaything of the mind as the creation in six days.  The question how the world had originated did not interest him, just because the question how it would be best to live in this world was ever before him.  He never thought about future life, always bearing in the depth of his soul the firm and quiet conviction inherited from his forefathers, and common to all labourers on the land, that just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but continually changes its form, the manure into grain, the grain into a food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak, so man also does not perish, but only undergoes a change.  He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face, and bravely bore the sufferings that lead towards it, but did not care and did not know how to speak about it.  He loved work, was always employed in some practical business, and put his comrades in the way of the same kind of practical work.

The other political prisoner from among the people, Markel Kondratieff, was a very different kind of man.  He began to work at the age of fifteen, and took to smoking and drinking in order to stifle a dense sense of being wronged.  He first realised he was wronged one Christmas when they, the factory children, were invited to a Christmas tree, got up by the employer’s wife, where he received a farthing whistle, an apple, a gilt walnut and a fig, while the employer’s children had presents given them which seemed gifts from fairyland, and had cost more than fifty roubles, as he afterwards heard.