Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: Oxford World's Classics (2008)

110

The prison administrators are sometimes surprised that one convict or another can have lived quietly for several years, a model of good behaviour, even being made a head prisoner for good conduct, when suddenly for no apparent reason whatever - as if the devil had got into him - he starts to behave waywardly, to go on binges, get mixed up in brawls, and sometimes even takes the risk of committing a criminal offence: he is openly disrespectful to a senior official, or he commits murder or rape, etc. The administrators view him with astonishment. But all the while the cause of this sudden outburst in the man of whom one least expected it is nothing more than an anguished, convulsive manifestation of the man's personality, his instinctive anguish and anguished longing for himself, his desire to declare himself and his humiliated personality, a desire which appears suddenly and which sometimes ends in anger, in frenzied rage, in insanity, fits, convulsions. So, perhaps, a man who has been buried alive in his coffin and who has woken up in it hammers on its lid and struggles to throw it open, although of course his reason tells him that all his efforts will be in vain. But this is not a matter of reason; rather it is one of convulsions.