So I could work!
I could hardly express now the immensity of relief I then felt at being
enabled to resume writing. I would have consented to live on nothing
but bread and water, in the dampest of cellars, if only permitted to
work.
I was, however, the sole prisoner to whom writing materials were
allowed. Several of my comrades spent three years and more in
confinement before the famous trial of ‘the hundred and ninety-three’
took place, and all they had was a slate. Of course, even the
slate was welcome in that dreary loneliness, and they used it to
write exercises in the languages they were learning, or to work out
mathematical problems; but what was jotted down on the slate could last
only a few hours.
My prison life now took a more regular character. There was something
immediate to live for. At nine in the morning I had already made
the first three hundred pacings across my cell, and was waiting for
my pencils and pens to be delivered to me. The work which I had
prepared for the Geographical Society contained, beside a report of
my explorations in Finland, a discussion of the bases upon which the
glacial hypothesis ought to rest. Now, knowing that I had plenty of
time before me, I decided to rewrite and enlarge that part of my work.
The Academy of Sciences put its admirable library at my service, and
a corner of my cell soon filled up with books and maps, including the
whole of the excellent Swedish Geological Survey publications, a nearly
full collection of reports of all Arctic travels, and whole sets of
the _Quarterly Journal of the London Geological Society_. My book grew
in the fortress to the size of two large volumes. The first of them
was printed by my brother and Polakóff (in the Geographical Society’s
Memoirs); while the second, not quite finished, remained in the hands
of the Third Section when I ran away. The manuscript was only found in
1895, and given to the Russian Geographical Society, by whom it was
forwarded to me in London.
At five in the afternoon--at three in the winter--as soon as the
tiny lamp was brought in, my pencils and pens were taken away, and
I had to stop work. Then I used to read, mostly books of history.
Quite a library had been formed in the fortress by the generations of
political prisoners who had been confined there. I was allowed to add
to the library a number of staple works on Russian history, and with
the books which were brought to me by my relatives I was enabled to
read almost every work and collection of acts and documents bearing
on the Moscow period of the history of Russia. I relished in reading,
not only the Russian annals, especially the admirable annals of the
democratic mediæval republic of Pskov--the best, perhaps, in Europe
for the history of that type of mediæval cities--but all sorts of dry
documents, and even the Lives of the Saints, which occasionally contain
facts of the real life of the masses which cannot be found elsewhere. I
also read during this time a great number of novels, and even arranged
for myself a treat on Christmas Eve. My relatives managed to send
me then the Christmas stories of Dickens, and I spent the festival
laughing and crying over those beautiful creations of the great
novelist.