Chekhov @ Sakhalin

 At Korsakovsk I was accompanied round the cabins by the convict Kislyakov, quite a strange man. Very probably the court reporters still have not forgotten him. This was the same Kislyakov, a military clerk, who, at St Petersburg, killed his wife on St Nikolai’s Street with a hammer and presented himself before the City Governor to announce his crime. According to his story, his wife had been beautiful, and he had loved her very much, but one day after quarrelling with her he had sworn before an icon to kill her, and from that time right up to the murder some invisible power had whispered without ceasing in his ear: “Kill, kill!” Up to the trial he had been in St Nikolai’s Hospital; very probably because of this he himself considered he was a psychopath, for he more than once asked me to plead on his behalf that he should be recognized as a lunatic and shut up in a monastery.* His entire penal servitude consisted of the following: in the prison he had been entrusted with making the pegs for fastening the makeweights to portions of bread* – not hard work, one would think, yet he would hire somebody in his place, while he himself “gave lessons” – that is, did nothing. He was dressed in a lounge suit of sailcloth and had a prepossessing appearance. He was not a very bright fellow, but he was a talker and philosopher. “Where there are fleas, there you’ll find kids,” he’d say in a sweet, rich baritone voice every time we saw children. When people asked, while he was present, why I was drawing up the census, he would say: “They’re doing it so as to send us all off to the moon. You know where the moon is?” And when, late in the evenings we would be returning on foot to Alexandrovsk, he would repeat several times right out of the blue, “Revenge is the most noble emotion.”