I had been prepared to talk to him sternly and contemptuously, but very soon realized that this would have been ridiculous. Not that he made me relent in any way, but I suddenly became aware that I was facing a sparrow on whom only an idiot or a coward would have opened fire from a gun. When I declared to him calmly and politely that I refused to give any evidence, he wrinkled up his nose and grunted: “Of course, of course. That’s what you all do, nowadays. Well—it means a little stay in prison. Hm…youngsters that you are…”

It almost seemed that the colonel was pleased with my irrevocable decision. It did not occur to me that he might be wanting to hurry off to his dinner and that this was the reason why all had been settled so smoothly and briskly between us. It is possible that it would have been better for me if I had come across another type of man, a regular beast in uniform, a person of determined opinion, in one word, not an official, but an enemy. Life is so queerly arranged that a man’s best teacher is his enemy.

However, although since 1905 I have been in prison three times and have been questioned about ten times, I never happened to encounter a man who succeeded in rousing in me a feeling of hostility and hatred. They were all the commonest of officials, some of them quite decent people, too. I say that not in order to irritate my orthodox friends, but to state a fact, perhaps an accidental one. Thin, sallow Colonel Ossipov, dying of cancer, said as he announced my verdict to me:

“You are lucky—your verdict is a light one. You deserve greater punishment, for you are a very dangerous man.”

These words sounded to me like praise, although he was uttering them with regret and astonishment.

He was a man of intelligence, with a good understanding of human nature, and one day he embarrassed me with a remark which he need not have made: at the last interrogation he said, watching me through his glasses:

“In my opinion, Karazin, you are either playing the fool or simply have made a mistake and are doing the wrong job.”

This offended me greatly. Here I lost my temper and became impudent, but he stopped me short:

“I had no desire to hurt you at all, I was just giving you my opinion, as man to man. You are playing a dangerous game and it seems to me that you are not violent enough for a revolutionary and—forgive me!—too clever.”

I believe that Ossipov was an honorable man, besides, all the men who had been in his hands testified to this.

One day the son of my landlady, a schoolboy and a pupil of mine, was arrested together with me. I gave my word of honor to Ossipov that he was in no way involved in my activities, begged that he be released and not expelled from school.

“Very well, I will do it,” said Ossipov, and gave the order for his release then and there. When I thanked him for it, he explained:

“But, my good man, it is in our interest to diminish, not to increase the number of rebels such as you are, whereas it would have been in your interest to leave the boy in prison, thoroughly embitter him and so on.…” With these words he seemed to teach me a lesson of revolutionary behavior. So I said to him: “Thank you for the lesson.”

Probably he, too, had a dual personality. People are divided, of course, into those who work and those who live on the work of others—the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. But that is an external division, internally in all classes they are divided into people with whole and split personalities. The first always