There are three thieves in the cell next to mine, three cheerful lads. The eldest is but a boy, not more than twenty, a student at a naval school. He’s a great one for singing ditties, like:

A bold youngster. I was just like him at his age. Loved danger as much as comrade Tassya loves chocolates. A man always feels at his best in a difficulty. When an ice-floe with fishermen was torn off by a gust of wind and carried away into the sea I jumped in to help them, was torn off in my turn, and floated on alone on a small ice-block with a pole in my hand. It became clear to me at once that the game was up, so clear that for a moment I got all frozen inside. The waves beat against the ice under my feet, one more minute and I would have sunk. The fishermen from the solid ice by the shore threw me a rope—this meant my salvation. And at once as though someone very agile and wicked had jumped into my skin, I shouted to them to throw more ropes while I hurled the one in my hands to the fishermen who were howling in a frenzy of fear some thirty feet away from me. They managed to catch the rope with a pole and pulled me down into the water. But I had had time to seize the second rope flung from the steady block of ice, had tied them together, when there came another one, and the whole lot of men was slowly dragged back to the shore. Of the nine people only one old man was drowned, just pushed into the water accidentally in the bustle. While the ice-floe was being dragged back, the rope almost ate into my body, it had wound itself around me and I was tossed about in the water like a log. Always, when I was faced with danger, as though acting against itself, it multiplied my strength, filled me with cold-blooded assurance, sharpened my wits and allowed me to overcome it. I was impudently reckless and particularly pleased with myself when my life hung on a thread.

There was one funny episode: during an escape from prison which I had organized for a few comrades, the old guard, trying to hold us up, fired his revolver at me four times. After the second shot I stopped. To run seemed a little humiliating and comical. Catching up with me, he fired again, the bullet hitting my boot and scratching my leg. He fired once more straight at my chest—the gun did not go off. I knocked the revolver out of his hand, saying:

“No luck, eh, old man?”

Panting for breath, his voice rattling, he muttered: “You devil, what are you waiting for, why don’t you run, man?”

I believe I was really frightened only once, in a dream, when I was living in exile in a little provincial town in Siberia. It was all a series of coincidences: I had read several books on astronomy, had just got over typhoid and was dragging myself feebly along the earth, when a peculiar little man appeared and started preaching about “Him who was crucified for us by Pontius Pilate.” He hardly ever said Christ, but always “He who was crucified.” He was a pathetic creature, probably not quite in his right mind and obviously not a common pilgrim feeding on the slops in rich women’s kitchens, but of the intellectual class, long and lanky, with a scanty little beard, and gray hair on his temples, although he could not have been more than thirty-five. His eyes were the redeeming, rejuvenating feature, they were starry like those of a young girl in love. The blue irises seemed to thaw away and stream upon the large protruding whites of the eye. I was sitting on a bench outside the gate, basking in the sun, snoozing, when suddenly this man appeared at my side, talking of “Him who was crucified.” He spoke remarkably well, with a childish directness and as though he had himself lived through the whole adventure of Christ—adventure is an expression of comrade Basov, a specialist on atheism.

I started to argue, of course. He asked for something to eat and I took him to my room, where our argument became still more heated. On the whole he did not really argue with me, he just read poetry from the Scriptures and smiled pathetically. Until late into the night I tried to convince him that every man able to think knows very well that there is no God. Christ is but naïve poetry, lyrics, a phantasy, a fallacy, in one word. One believes in God out of ignorance, fear, habit, stubbornness, some people do because of a devastating emptiness in the soul which has to be filled up with the cotton of religion. Others, maybe,