"But the coat you are wearing—is that yours?" demanded the exasperated judge.
"It is on my back, but it is not mine. It belonged once to a sheep; now it covers me; but who can say whose it will be to-morrow?"
The Negativists invented, long before Tolstoi, the doctrine of inaction and non-resistance to evil. They were deceived, robbed and ruined, but would not apply to the law, or to the police. Their method of reasoning and their way of speaking had a peculiar charm. A solicitor who visited one of the Siberian prisons reports the following details concerning a man named Rojnoff. Arrested and condemned to be deported for vagabondage, he escaped repeatedly, but was at length imprisoned. The inspector was calling the roll of the prisoners, but Rojnoff refused to answer to his name. Purple with rage, the inspector approached him and asked, "What is your name?"
"It is you who have a name. I have none."
After a series of questions and answers exchanged between the ever more furious official and the prisoner, who remained perfectly calm, Rojnoff was flogged—but in spite of raw and bleeding wounds he still continued to philosophise.
"Confess the truth," stormed the inspector.
"Seek it," replied the peasant, "for yourself, for indeed you have need of it. As to me, I keep my truth for myself. Let me be quiet—that is all I ask."
The solicitor visited him several months later, and implored him to give his name, so that he might obtain his passport and permission to rejoin his wife and children.
"But I have no need of all that," he said. "Passports, laws, names—all those are yours. Children, family, property, class, marriage—so many of your cursed inventions. You can give me only one single thing—quietness."
The Siberian prisons swarmed with these mysterious beings. Poor souls! Their one desire was to quit as soon as possible this vale of injustice and of tears!