“...First of all, one should firmly remember that it is not immorality in general, not depravity or cruelty that leads people to prison and hard labor, but only certain and fully proven violations of the laws existing in the country. However, we all know (and the professor even more so) that, for example, fifty years ago, at the time of “Notes from the House of the Dead,” there was a law in Russia according to which one person owned another as a thing, like cattle, and the latter’s violation of this law often entailed exile to Siberia and even hard labor. There was also another law, by virtue of which a person, “shaved” into a soldier, became a dead man, only in rare cases returning to his former free life (Nikolaev’s service lasted a quarter of a century), and it is not surprising that, in the words of the poet, “ the horror of the people at the word recruitment was similar to the horror of execution..."