Resurrection

Though hundreds of thousands had done their very best to

disfigure the small piece of land on which they were crowded

together, by paving the ground with stones, scraping away every

vestige of vegetation, cutting down the trees, turning away birds

and beasts, and filling the air with the smoke of naphtha and

coal, still spring was spring, even in the town.

The sun shone warm, the air was balmy; everywhere, where it did

not get scraped away, the grass revived and sprang up between the

paving-stones as well as on the narrow strips of lawn on the

boulevards. The birches, the poplars, and the wild cherry

unfolded their gummy and fragrant leaves, the limes were

expanding their opening buds; crows, sparrows, and pigeons,

filled with the joy of spring, were getting their nests ready;

the flies were buzzing along the walls, warmed by the sunshine.

All were glad, the plants, the birds, the insects, and the

children. But men, grown-up men and women, did not leave off

cheating and tormenting themselves and each other. It was not

this spring morning men thought sacred and worthy of

consideration not the beauty of God's world, given for a joy to

all creatures, this beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to

harmony, and to love, but only their own devices for enslaving

one another.

Thus, in the prison office of the Government town, it was not the

fact that men and animals had received the grace and gladness of

spring that was considered sacred and important, but that a

notice, numbered and with a superscription, had come the day

before, ordering that on this 28th day of April, at 9 a.m., three

prisoners at present detained in the prison, a man and two women

(one of these women, as the chief criminal, to be conducted

separately), had to appear at Court. So now, on the 28th of

April, at 8 o'clock, a jailer and soon after him a woman warder

with curly grey hair, dressed in a jacket with sleeves trimmed

with gold, with a blue-edged belt round her waist, and having a

look of suffering on her face, came into the corridor.

"You want Maslova?" she asked, coming up to the cell with the

jailer who was on duty.

The jailer, rattling the iron padlock, opened the door of the

cell, from which there came a whiff of air fouler even than that

in the corridor, and called out, "Maslova! to the Court," and

closed the door again.

Even into the prison yard the breeze had brought the fresh

vivifying air from the fields. But in the corridor the air was

laden with the germs of typhoid, the smell of sewage,

putrefaction, and tar; every newcomer felt sad and dejected in

it. The woman warder felt this, though she was used to bad air.

She had just come in from outside, and entering the corridor, she

at once became sleepy.