Character: Nekhludoff

The court aims only to preserve society in its present situation and for this purpose it persecutes and executes those who are above the general level and want to raise it, the so-called political criminals, and those who are below it, the so-called criminal types.

The court, in my opinion, is only an administrative tool for maintaining the existing order of things, beneficial to our class.

The fourth category consisted of people who were classified as criminals because they stood morally above the average level of society. These were the political criminals - socialists and strikers, convicted of resisting the authorities.

What was my whole dissolute life for? To understand all this, to understand the whole business of the owner, is not in my power. But to do his will, written in my conscience, is in my power, and I know this beyond doubt.

Only under special cultivation of Vice, like it is done in these institutions, it was possible to bring the Russian people to the state to which he was brought in bums that anticipated the latest teachings of Nietzsche and believes all is possible and nothing is forbidden and spread this teaching first among the convicts and then among all the people.
The only explanation of everything accomplished was the prevention, deterrence, correction, and a natural retaliation, as it is written in the books. But in reality there was no semblance of neither the one nor the other, nor the third, nor the fourth. Instead of restraint it was only the spread of crime. Instead of intimidation, it was the encouragement of criminals, many of whom, as tramps, voluntarily went to jail. Instead it was the systematic contamination of all vices. The need of retaliation, not only did not soften the government's punishment but was raised in the people where it was not.
"So why are they doing it?" he questioned himself and he found no answer.

In prisons - Tyumen, Ekaterinburg, Tomsk and at the stages Nekhludoff saw the goal seemed to have set itself the society successfully achieved. The people are simple, ordinary, with the requirements of the Russian public, peasant, Christian morality, leaving these concepts and assimilate new, cautious, including, most importantly, that all the reproach and violence against human personality, every destruction is allowed when it is beneficial. People who had lived in prison, his entire being knew that, judging by what is happening above them, all those moral laws of respect and compassion for the person who proposedida and the Church and the moral teachers, in fact reversed, and that therefore they should not stay on them. Nekhludoff saw that he knew all the prisoners: on the Fedorov, on Makar, and even on Taras, who, after spending two months on the steps, struck Nekhludoff by the immorality of their judgments. Dear Nekhludoff learned how tramps, escaping into the forest, talk with you friends and then killing them, eating their meat. He saw a living man who was accused and confessed to it. And worse of all was that the cases of cannibalism were not rare, and constantly repeated.

As gruesome as it was senseless suffering inflicted on so-called criminal, yet over them were made before and after his conviction, some semblance of the rule of law; but in matters political, was not even that semblance, as Nekhludoff saw on Chusovoi and then on many of his new acquaintances. These people acted like they do when catching fish with a Seine: pull ashore everything that comes, and then take those big fish that are needed, without worrying about the small fry that die zasyhaya on the shore. So, capturing hundreds of these, obviously are not only not guilty, but not likely to be harmful to the government of the people, kept them, sometimes for years in prisons where they were infected with tuberculosis, went crazy or killed themselves; and kept them only because there was no reason to release them, while being on hand in prison, they would need to clarify some issue in the investigation. The fate of all these, often even from the government point of view, of innocent people depended on the arbitrariness of the leisure, mood, gendarme, police officer, spy, Prosecutor, coroner, Governor, Minister. Bored of such official, or who wants to be different - and making the arrests, and, depending on mood or his superiors, keeps in prison or released. And the higher the head, too, depending on the fact whether it has to differ, or what he is dealing with the Minister, or refers to the edge of the world, or holds in solitary confinement, or sentenced to exile, to prison, to death, or produces, when asked to do so by any lady.

The thing is, "he thought," that these people recognize the law that the law is not, and does not recognize the law that is eternal, unchanging, emergency law, by God written in the hearts of the people. This I is so hard with these people, thought Nekhludoff. - I'm just afraid of them. And really, these people are terrible. Scarier than the robbers. The robber may still regret - the same can't regret: they are insured against pity as these stones from the vegetation. Is this something they're terrible. Say, terrible, Pugachev, Razin. These are a thousand times worse, he continued to think. - If you set a psychological problem: how to make the people of our time, Christian, humane, simple, kind people, committed the most terrible evil deeds without feeling guilty, only one decision is possible: it is necessary to have the very thing that is, it is necessary that these people were governors, overseers, officers, police, that is to, first, were convinced that there is such a thing called public service, in which you can treat people as things, without human fraternal relation to them, and secondly, that the people of this state service was connected so that the responsibility for the consequences of their actions people didn't fall on anyone separately. Out of these conditions there is no possibility in our time of committing such horrible deeds as those which I saw today.

He remembered the indifference Maslennikova, when he told him about what was happening in the prison, the rigor of the overseer, the cruelty of the convoy officer when he was not allowed on the carts and didn't pay attention to the fact that the train suffers childbirth woman. "All these people, obviously, was invincible, impermeable to the simplest feelings of compassion only because they served. They, like servants, were impermeable to the feelings of humanity, as this paved ground for rain, thought Nekhludoff, looking at paved in multicolor stones, the slope of the recess on which the rain water is not absorbed into the ground, and oozing streams. - Maybe you need to put the stones cut, but sad to see this devoid of vegetation land, which could have bread, grass, bushes, trees, as those are at the top of the recess. It's the same with people, "he thought," can be, and we need these governors, caretakers, policemen, but I hate to see people deprived of their main human qualities - love and mercy to each other.

Yeah, I thought about what all these people: the caretaker, the guards, all of these employees, mostly gentle, good people became evil only because they serve.

Became all this because, thought Nekhludoff that all these people - governors, overseers, police officer, policemen - consider that there are such provisions in which the human relationship with the person doesn't have. After all, these people - and Maslennikov, and the caretaker, and guard, all of them, if they were not governors, caretakers, officers, or twenty times I would think about whether sending people in such heat and so much, twenty times as expensive and would have stopped seeing that man weakens, gasps, brought him out of the crowd, brought him into the shade, would have given water, allowed to relax and, when the accident happened, would have showed compassion. They didn't even bothered to do it to others just because they saw before them not the people and their responsibilities towards them, and the service and its requirements which they placed above the demands of human relations. In all, thought Nekhludoff. - If you can admit that whatever is more important than the feelings of humanity, at least for one hour, and even in some one exceptional case, there is no crime that one could not do with people not considering themselves to blame.

In his memory was the village people: women, children, the elderly, poverty and izmuchennoe that he seemed now for the first time saw, especially the smiling old man, a baby sukashi bezkarnie legs - and he involuntarily compared them with what was in the city. Passing by stalls of meat, fish and ready-made clothes, he was struck by exactly the first time I saw it - full of a huge number of such pure and fat shopkeepers, no one person in the village. These people, obviously, were firmly convinced that their efforts to deceive the people who are kind in their product, be not idle, but very useful exercise. The same was fed Kucher with huge bottoms and buttons on the back, such as porters in caps, trimmed with braid, the same maids in aprons and curls, and in particular cabs-cabs with the backs of their heads trimmed, sat, lolling, in their cabs, contemptuously and wickedly considering passing. All of these people he could not help saw now those same rural people are deprived of their land and this deprivation is driven in the city. Some of these people were able to take advantage of the urban conditions and have become same as the Lord, and rejoiced in his position while others were in the city in even worse conditions than in the village, and was even more pathetic. Such a pathetic thought Nekhludoff, those shoemakers, whom he saw working in the window of one of the basement; the same was thin, pale, dishevelled washerwomen, thin bare arms stroking in front of open Windows, from which poured soap couples. Those were two of the Dyer in aprons and walkers on her bare feet, everything from head to toe covered in paint, met Nekhludoff. In rolled-up above the elbow tanned sinewy weak hands they carried a bucket of paint and incessantly scolded. Their faces looked haggard and angry. The same faces were dusted with black faces cart-cabs, shaking on his perch. The same was with puffy ragged men and women, with children standing on street corners and asking for alms. The same faces were to be seen at the open Windows of the Inn, past which Nekhludoff had to pass. Dirty with bottles and tea utensils tables, between which, swaying, scurrying white sex, sat shouting and singing red, perspiring men with red odarennyj persons. One sat by the window with lifted brows and putting her lips, staring in front of him as if trying to remember something.

Since his last visit to maslennikoff, and in particular after his visit to the village, Nekhludoff not what is decided, but the whole being disgusted with his environment in which he lived still, to an environment where so carefully hidden was the suffering borne by millions of people to ensure the facilities and pleasures of a small number of that people in this environment do not see, can not see the suffering because of the cruelty and crime of his life. Nekhludoff now could not without embarrassment and reproach to himself to communicate with people in this environment. Meanwhile, in this environment attracted his habits of his former life, drew and family and friendships and, most importantly, what order to do things that now one thing concerned him: to help Maslova and all of the suffering that he wanted to help, he had to seek help and services from people that environment is not only respected, but often causing in him a resentment and contempt.

The mutual love between people is the fundamental law of human life.