"Some of the guards often raped the boys, too; this usually happened in the showers. You were allowed to take a shower once a week if you were in the ordinary regime, whereas in the special regime, where I was, you could only do so once a month. We used to improvise with plastic bottles, rigging up a shower over the toilet, since we always had plenty of hot water. When we went to the shower block it was like a military operation: we all walked close together; if there were any weak or sick boys among us we put them in the middle and always kept an eye on them; we moved like a platoon of soldiers."

"If you would prefer Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs without their ingenious wit and structure, this may be a book for you."

"This book reads like a fantasist's ravings [...]. The success of Educazione siberiana implies that Italian publishing is floundering in the same cesspit as Italian television. One can only hope that British readers are not so gullible."

"He has never lived in Siberia and this whole criminal story about the Urka people in Siberian Education (Einaudi), who never existed, is fiction from beginning to end. Nicolai easily and even skillfully collects artistic facts that can actually be found in Russian and Soviet writers, for example, Dostoevsky, and which, over time, turn into stereotypes and prejudices about Russia and Siberia in the minds of readers. And on this basis it transforms them into presumed facts of modern, current reality. This is called an artistic hoax."

"If we summarize the information from Nicolai Lilin's book, his interviews in the Western press and speeches at book fairs, then by the age of 23 the author had managed to: serve two terms in a Transnistrian prison, be under investigation in Russia, serve three years as a sniper in Chechnya and a couple more years as a mercenary in Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. At 24, he got a job as a fisherman on a ship in Ireland, then moved to Italy, where he got married, opened a tattoo parlor, wrote a bestseller and almost became a victim of a politically motivated assassination attempt. Now Nikolai Lilin is 30 years old, he has his own fan club and he seriously discusses why Anthony Hopkins is not suitable for the lead role in the Hollywood film adaptation of his book."

"The weapons in our house, as in all Siberian houses, were kept in particular places. The so-called 'personal' guns – the ones Siberian criminals carry around with them and use every day – are placed in the 'red corner', where the family icons hang on the walls, along with the photographs of relatives who have died or are serving prison sentences. Below the icons and the photographs there is a shelf, draped with a piece of red cloth, on which there are usually about a dozen Siberian crucifixes. Whenever a criminal enters the house he goes straight to the red corner, pulls out his gun and puts it on the shelf, then crosses himself and places a crucifix over the gun. This is an ancient tradition which ensures that weapons are never used in a Siberian house: if they were, the house could never be lived in again. The crucifix acts as a kind of seal, which can only be removed when the criminal leaves the house."

"Grandfather Kuzya was an elderly criminal who lived in our district in a small house by the river. He was a very strong old man; he still had a full head of black hair and was covered all over with tattoos, even on his face. Usually he took me into the garden to show me the river, and told me fairy tales and various stories about the criminal community. He had a powerful voice, but spoke in a quiet, languid way, so that his voice seemed to be coming from far away, not from inside him. Down the left side of his wrinkled face ran a long scar, a souvenir of his criminal youth. But the most striking thing about him was his eyes. They were blue, but a dirty, muddy blue, with a hint of green; they seemed not to belong to his body, not to be part of it. They were deep, and when he turned them on you, calmly and without agitation, it was as if they were X-raying you – there was something really hypnotic about his gaze."

"The pike, as the traditional weapon of the Siberian criminals is called, is a flick-knife with a long, thin blade, and is connected with many old customs and ceremonies of our community. A pike cannot be bought. It has to be earned. Any young criminal can be given a pike by an adult criminal, as long as he is not a relative. Once it has been given, the pike becomes a kind of personal cult symbol, like the cross in the Christian community. The pike also has magic powers, lots of them. When someone is ill, and especially when he is suffering extreme pain, they put an open pike under his mattress, with the blade sticking out, so that, according to the beliefs, the blade cuts the pain and absorbs it like a sponge. What's more, when an enemy is struck by that blade, the pain collected inside it flows out into the wound, making him suffer even more. The umbilical cord of newborn babies is cut with a pike, which must first have been left open overnight in a place where cats sleep. To seal important pacts between two people – truces, friendships or brotherhoods – both criminals cut their hands with the same pike, which is then kept by a third person, who is a kind of witness to their pact: if either of them betrays the agreement he will be killed with that knife. When a criminal dies, his pike is broken by one of his friends. One part, the blade, is put in his grave, usually under the dead man's head, while the haft is preserved by his closest relatives. When it is necessary to communicate with the dead man, to ask for advice or a miracle, the relatives take out the haft and put it in the red corner, below the icons. In this way the dead man becomes a kind of bridge between the living and God. A pike keeps its powers only if it is in the hands of a Siberian criminal who uses it respecting the rules of the criminal community. If an unworthy person takes possession of a knife that does not belong to him, it will bring him bad luck – hence our idiom, 'to ruin something as a pike ruins a bad master'. When a criminal is in danger, his pike can warn him in many ways: the blade may suddenly open of its own accord, or become hot, or vibrate. Some think it can even emit a whistle. If a pike is broken, it means that somewhere there is a dead person who cannot find peace, so offerings are made to the icon, or dead relatives and friends are remembered in prayers, visits are made to graveyards, and the dead are remembered by talking about them in the family and telling stories about them, especially to children."

"In the Russian criminal communities there is a strong culture of tattoos, and each tattoo has a meaning. The tattoo is a kind of identity card which places you within the criminal society – displaying your particular criminal ‘trade’, and other kinds of information about your personal life and prison experiences. Each community has its own tradition of tattooing, symbology and different patterns, according to which the signs are positioned on the body and eventually read and translated. The oldest tattooing culture is that of Siberia; it had been the forebears of the Siberian criminals who had created the tradition of tattooing symbols in a codified, secret manner. Later this culture was copied by other communities and spread throughout prisons all over Russia, transforming the principal meanings of the tattoos and the ways in which they were executed and translated. The tattoos of the most powerful criminal caste in Russia, which is called Black Seed, are all copied from the Urka tradition, but have different meanings. The images may be the same, but only a person who is able to read a body can analyse their hidden meaning and explain why they are different. Unlike the other communities, Siberians tattoo only by hand, using various kinds of small needle. Tattoos done with electrical tattoo machines or similar devices are not considered worthy. In the tradition of the Siberian Urkas the process of tattooing continues throughout the life of a criminal. The first few signs are tattooed when he is twelve years old. Then, over the years, other details are added, gradually building up a narrative. Each experience he has in his life is encoded and concealed within this single large tattoo, which becomes increasingly complete as time goes on. It has the structure of a spiral, starting from the extremities – the hands and feet – and ending at the centre of the body. The last parts of the body to be tattooed are the back and chest; this is done when the criminal is about forty or fifty years old. You will never see young people with large, complete tattoos in the Siberian criminal community, as you do in other communities. To be able to read bodies decorated with such complex tattoos you need a lot of experience and to know the tattooing tradition perfectly. As a result the figure of the tattooist has a special place within the Siberian criminal community: he is like a priest, trusted by everyone to act on their behalf."

"After 1992, when the military forces of Moldova tried to occupy the territory of Transnistria, our town was abandoned by everybody; we were left to fend for ourselves, as in fact we always had done. All the armed criminals resisted the Moldovan soldiers, and after three months of battles they drove them out. When the danger of an all-out conflict had passed, Mother Russia sent us her so-called ‘help’: the Fourteenth Army, led by the charismatic general Lebed. When they arrived in our town, which had already been free for several days, they applied the policy of military administration: curfew, house-to-house searches, the arrest and elimination of undesirable elements. During that period the river often brought to the bank the bodies of the people who had been shot, their hands tied behind their backs with wire and signs of torture on their bodies. I myself fished out four corpses of people who had been executed, so I can confirm with all my youthful authority that shootings by the Russian military were very common in Transnistria. The Russians tried to exploit the circumstances to install among us, in the land of criminals, their government representatives, who would have the job of administering what had previously been solely in our hands. Many Siberian criminals during that period ran a serious risk of being killed; my father, for example, was the target of three attacks, but he miraculously escaped and, not wanting to wait for a fourth, left Transnistria and moved to Greece, where he had friends as a result of some old trading connections. The criminals of the town tried to join forces to fight the Russian military, but many members of the communities were frightened and in the event proved willing to collaborate with the new regime. The Siberians renounced all contact with the rest of society, and by 1998 were completely isolated; they didn’t collaborate with anyone and didn’t support anyone. Other communities reached a compromise with the regime, which had proposed one of its own men as president of the country and political watchdog over all business. Very soon new government forces eliminated the people involved in those terms, taking over the administration of affairs."

"When we were about ten years old, we went to the cinema to see a film called The Shield and the Sword. The main character, a Soviet secret agent, appeared in various action scenes, shooting his capitalist enemies with his silenced gun and doing a lot of acrobatics. The guy risked his life as if he were doing something perfectly normal and routine, to combat injustice in the NATO countries. It was a kind of Russian response to the many American and British films about the cold war, where the Soviets were usually portrayed as stupid, incompetent monkeys who played about with the atomic bomb and wanted to destroy the world. We, despite the rule imposed by our elders, had gone to see it in the only cinema in town (they hadn't yet built the second cinema, which was to have a very short life, because it was destroyed in the 1992 war: the Romanian soldiers took up their positions there, and our fathers, in order to kill them, one night blew the whole complex up, including the restaurant and the ice-cream parlour). Well, at one point in the film the main character jumped off the roof of a very tall building, using a big umbrella as a parachute, and landed comfortably without getting hurt. You could say he did a Mary Poppins."

"In the criminal world Black Seed was a young but powerful caste, which had succeeded in exploiting the philosophy of personal sacrifice. Its members appeared to be pure and perfect men, who devoted their lives to the welfare of people in prison. They worshipped prison: they referred to it affectionately as 'home', 'church' or 'mother', and were happy to spend time there, even their whole lives. Whereas all the other castes, including that of the Siberian Urkas, despised prison and put up with detention as you might a misfortune. Thanks to the enormous number of scum and lowlifes that had joined its ranks, Black Seed had become the largest caste in the Russian criminal world: but for every wise and good person that you could find among them, you would meet another twenty uncouth and sadistic ones, who showed off and threw their weight around in every possible situation. Then there was another very unusual caste: Red Seed, whose members collaborated with the police and believed in the nonsense purveyed by the prison administrations, such as 'redemption of the personality'. They were called 'cuckolds', 'reds', 'comrades', sucha, padla – all very pejorative words in the criminal community. All the people in the middle were called Grey Seed, or neutrals. They were opposed to the police and observed the rules of criminal life, but they didn't have the responsibilities, let alone the philosophy, of Black Seed, and they certainly didn't want to spend their whole lives in prison. The members of Black Seed were required to disown their relatives; they weren't allowed to have either a home or a family. Like all the other criminals they idolized the figure of the mother, but many of them didn't respect their own mothers; on the contrary, they treated them very badly. Many is the poor woman I've known with sons who, while they were in prison, declared to each other in a theatrical manner that the only thing they really missed was their mother and then, when they got out, turned up at home only to exploit her, and sometimes even rob her, because that is what their rule says: 'Every Blatnoy – member of Black Seed – must take everything away from his home; only in this way can he prove that he is honest through and through...' It was madness – mothers and fathers were robbed, threatened and sometimes even killed. A short and violent life, as the Black Seed described it: 'Wine, cards, women, and then let the world come tumbling down...', with no moral or social commitment. Their whole life becomes one long show, in which they must always demonstrate only the negative and primitive sides of their nature."

"The Urkas and the Cossacks had always been on the same wavelength and got on well: both groups respected the old traditions, loved the nation and their homeland and believed in independence of any form of power. Both were persecuted by various Russian governments in different ages, for their desire for freedom. It was just that the Urkas were more extreme, and had a particular hierarchical structure. The Cossacks, on the other hand, regarded themselves as a free army, and so had a paramilitary structure; in peacetime their main occupation was raising livestock."

"Our elders had taught us well. First of all, you had to respect all living creatures – a category which did not include policemen, people connected with the government, bankers, loan sharks and all those who had the power of money in their hands and exploited ordinary people. Secondly, you had to believe in God and in his Son, Jesus Christ, and love and respect the other ways of believing in God which were different from our own. But the Church and religion must never be seen as a structure. My grandfather used to say that God didn't create priests, but only free men; there were some good priests, and in such cases it was not sinful to go to the places where they carried out their activities, but it definitely was a sin to think that in the eyes of God priests had more power than other men. Lastly, we must not do to others what we wouldn't want to be done to us: and if one day we were obliged to do it nonetheless, there must be a good reason. One of the elders with whom I often discussed these Siberian philosophies used to say that in his opinion our world was full of people who went down wrong roads, and who after taking one false step went further and further away from the straight path. He argued that in many cases there was no point in trying to persuade them to return to the right road, because they were too far away, and the only thing that remained to do was to end their existence, 'remove them from the road'. 'A man who is rich and powerful,' the old man would say, 'in walking along his wrong road will ruin many lives; he will cause trouble for many people who in some way depend on him. The only way of putting everything right is to kill him, and thereby to destroy the power that he has built upon money.' I would object: 'But what if the murder of this person were also a false step? Wouldn't it be better to avoid having any contact with him, and leave it at that?' The old man would look at me in amazement, and reply with such conviction that it made my head spin: 'Who do you think you are, boy – Jesus Christ? Only He can work miracles; we must only serve Our Lord... And what better service could we do than to remove from the face of the world the children of Satan?' He was too good, that old man."

"I invented the method of setting fire to the cars in the yard of the police station using a catapult. The yard was surrounded by a very high wall, and in order to fire something into it you had to venture too close and they would, inevitably, catch you as soon as they saw you arrive. Molotov cocktails were too heavy to throw, and whenever we tried they didn't even reach halfway up the wall before smashing. We would always end up exchanging disconsolate looks, thinking that all the effort we'd made to prepare those bottles was burnt up in an instant against that grey wall. We had begun to lose heart, until one day I came across some liquor belonging to my uncle in the cupboard. What I found was a lot of small bottles containing various kinds of spirit – those little bottles for alcoholic dwarves. I emptied some of them; after all my uncle was in jail, and in any case he wouldn't have scolded me, because I was making good use of them. I made a mini-molotov, then I constructed a special catapult, slightly stronger than usual, and after carrying out some preliminary tests, which it passed with flying colours, I prepared a box full of mini-molotovs (which we called 'mignons') and ten catapults for firing them."

"Our little bottles flew spectacularly, whistling like bullets as they disappeared over the wall of the police station. When I heard the small explosions followed by the cries of the cops and the first signs of black smoke, which rose in the air like fantastic dragons, I felt like bursting into tears, I was so happy."

"In the Siberian community all material goods, and particularly money, are despised, so they are never even mentioned. If the Siberians speak of money, they call it 'that', or 'rubbish', 'cauliflower', or 'lemons', or they simply specify the figures, pronounce the numbers. The Siberians do not keep money in the house because it is said to bring bad luck into the family – it destroys happiness and 'scares off' good fortune. They keep it near the house, in the garden, for example, in a special hiding place, such as an animal hutch. So before beginning a tattoo they never mention a fixed price – they don’t mention anything connected with money. Only afterwards, when the work is finished, does the client ask the tattooist 'What do I owe you?' and the tattooist replies, 'Give me what is right.' This is the answer that is considered most honest, and is therefore most frequently used by the Siberian tattooists."

"Grandfather Kuzya had been one of the first Siberians to arrive in Transnistria. He told the story of that move with sorrow, and it was clear that he had many dark feelings inside him, connected with that time. [...] In present-day Russia hardly anyone knows about the deportation of the Siberians to Transnistria; some remember the times of communist collectivization, when the country was criss-crossed by trains full of poor people being moved from one region to another for reasons known only to the government. Grandfather Kuzya used to say the communists had planned to separate the Urkas from their families so as to make our community die, but that instead, by an irony of fate, they had probably saved it. From Transnistria many young men went to Siberia, to participate in the war against the communists: they robbed trains, ships and military stores and created a lot of difficulties for the communists. At regular intervals they returned to Transnistria to lick their wounds, or to spend time with their family and friends. Despite everything, this land has become a second home, to which the Siberian criminals have bound their lives."

"Around this time, in 1992, there was a war in Transnistria. After the fall of the USSR, Transnistria stayed outside the Russian Federation and no longer belonged to anybody. The neighbouring countries, Moldova and Ukraine, had designs on it. But the Ukrainians already had difficulties of their own, because of the massive corruption in the government and the ruling administration. The Moldovans, meanwhile, despite the catastrophic situation in their country – the predominantly rural population lived in abject poverty, not so say squalor – made a pact with the Romanians, and tried to occupy Transnistrian territory by military force. According to the agreement with the Romanians, Transnistria would be divided up in a special way: the Moldovan government would control the land, leaving the Romanian industrialists the job of running the numerous munitions factories, which had been built by the Russians in the days of the USSR and afterwards had remained completely under the control of the criminals, who had turned the Transnistrian territory into a kind of weapons supermarket. Without any warning the Moldovan military swung into action. On 22nd June a division of Moldovan tanks, accompanying ten military brigades, including one of infantry, one of special infantry and two of Romanian soldiers, reached Bender, our town on the right bank of the River Dniester, on the Moldovan border. In response, the inhabitants of Bender formed defence squads – after all, they were not short of weapons. A brief but very bloody war broke out, which lasted one summer, and ended with the criminals of Transnistria driving the Moldovan soldiers out of their land. Then they began to occupy Moldovan territory. At that point Ukraine, fearing that the criminals, if they won the war, would bring turmoil to their territory too, asked the Russians to intervene. Russia, recognizing the inhabitants of Transnistria as its own citizens, arrived with an army to 'assist the peace process'. This army set up a military regime, reinforced the police stations and declared Transnistria an 'area of extreme danger'. Russian soldiers patrolled the streets in armoured vehicles and imposed a curfew from eight in the evening to seven in the morning. Many people began to disappear without trace; the bodies of the tortured dead were found in the river. This period, which my grandfather called a 'return to the Thirties', lasted a long time. My Uncle Sergey was killed in prison by his guards: many people, to save themselves, were forced to abandon their land and take refuge in various other parts of the world."

"Grandfather Kuzya hated everything American because, like all Siberian criminals, he opposed what represented power in the world. If he heard anyone talk about people who had fled to America, of many Jews who had made a mass exodus from the USSR in the 1980s, he would say in amazement: 'Why on earth does everyone go to America, saying they seek freedom? Our ancestors took refuge in the woods, in Siberia, they didn't go to America. And besides, why flee from the Soviet regime, only to end up in the American one? It would be like a bird that had escaped from its cage going voluntarily to live in another cage...' For these reasons, in Low River it was forbidden to use anything American. The American cars which circulated freely all over town couldn't enter our district, and items of clothing, domestic appliances and all other objects that were 'made in the USA' were banned. For me personally this rule was rather painful, since I was very keen on jeans but I couldn't wear them. I secretly listened to American music – I liked blues, rock and heavy metal, but I was taking a big risk in keeping the records and cassettes in the house. And when my father carried out an inspection of my hiding places and finally found them, all hell would break loose. He would beat me and make me break all the records with my own hands in front of him and my grandfather, and then every evening for a week I would be made to play Russian tunes on the accordion for an hour and sing Russian folk or criminal songs. I wasn't attracted by American politics, only by the music and by the books of some writers. Once, choosing the right moment, I tried to explain this to Grandfather Kuzya. I hoped that he would be able to intercede and give me permission to listen to the music and read American books without having to hide from my family. He looked at me as if I had betrayed him and said: 'Son, do you know why when there's an outbreak of the plague people burn everything that belonged to the victims?' I shook my head. But I already imagined where this was leading. He gave a sad sigh and concluded: 'The contagion, Nikolay, the contagion.' And so, since everything American was forbidden, just as it was forbidden to flaunt wealth and power through material things, the people of our district dressed very humbly. We boys were in a terrible state as far as clothing was concerned, but we were proud of it. We wore like trophies our fathers' or elder brothers' old shoes, and their unfashionable clothes, which were meant to emphasize Siberian humility and simplicity."

"As a young man Grandfather Kuzya had belonged to a gang of Urkas led by a famous criminal called 'Cross', a man of old Siberian faith who had opposed first the power of the tsar and later that of the communists. In Siberia, Grandfather Kuzya explained to me, no criminal ever supported a political force; everybody lived only following their own laws and fighting any government power. Siberia has always been coveted by the Russians because it is a land that is very rich in natural resources. Besides the fur-bearing animals, which in Russia are considered a national treasure, Siberia had large amounts of gold, diamonds and coal; later oil and gas were discovered too. All governments have tried to exploit the region as much as possible – of course without the slightest regard for the population. The Russians would arrive, said Grandfather Kuzya, build their towns in the middle of the woods, dig up the land, and carry off its treasures on their trains and ships. The Siberian criminals, expert robbers whose ancestors had for centuries attacked the mercantile caravans coming from China and India, had had no difficulty in attacking the Russian ones too. In those days the Urkas had a particular philosophy, a world-view, which they called the 'Great Pact'. It was a plan which made it possible to maintain a concerted resistance against the government. According to the old criminal law, each individual gang could carry out no more than one robbery every six months: in this way the quality of criminal activity was kept at a high level, because it is clear that if a group has only one chance to rob a caravan, it must prepare well and take no risks, avoiding any false moves. People were keen to organize the job well, otherwise they would have to go half a year without eating. The Great Pact eliminated this rule, allowing the gangs to carry out robberies continually, because the aim was not that of self-enrichment, but of driving the Russian invaders out of Siberia. Old criminals joined forces with the new ones, forming very large gangs. The most famous were those of Angel, Tiger and Tayga."

"In our district there was always someone going to prison or coming out of it every day, so there was nothing strange to us children in seeing a man who had been in prison; we had been brought up to expect that we would go there ourselves sooner or later, and we were accustomed to talking about prison as something quite normal, just as other boys might talk about military service or what they're going to do when they grow up. But in some cases the characters of certain former prisoners took on a heroic stature in our stories – they became the models that we wanted to be like at all costs, we wanted to live their adventurous lives which shone with criminal glamour, those lives we heard the grownups discussing and which we then talked about among ourselves, often changing the details, making those stories similar to fairy tales or fantasy adventures."

"When the police arrived, we usually blocked their path: we'd sit or lie down in front of their cars, forcing them to stop. They'd get out and move us with a kick up the backside or by pulling us by the ears, and we would fight back. We usually singled out the youngest one and jumped on him as a group – someone would hit him, someone else would grab his arm and bite it, someone else would cling on to his back and snatch off his hat, yet another would rip the buttons off his uniform or take his pistol out of his holster. We'd go on like this till the cop couldn't stand any more, or till his colleagues started hitting us really hard. The unluckiest of us got hit on the head with a truncheon, lost some blood and ran away."

"According to the rules of criminal behaviour, Siberian men cannot communicate with policemen. It is forbidden to address them, answer their questions or establish any relationship with them. The criminal must behave as if the police were not there, and use the mediation of a female relative, or friend of the family, provided she is of Siberian origin. The criminal tells the woman what he wants to say to the policeman in the criminal language, and she repeats his words in Russian, even though the policeman can hear what he says perfectly well, since he is standing there in front of him. Then, when the policeman replies, the woman turns round and translates his words into the criminal language. The criminal must not look the policeman in the face, and if he refers to him in the course of his speech he must use derogatory words like 'filth', 'dog', 'rabbit', 'rat', 'bastard', 'abortion', etc."

"'Some enjoy life, some suffer it; we fight it.' Old saying of the Siberian Urkas"

"From my birth onwards, perhaps out of habit, I continued to be a source of worry and distress to my parents (or rather to my mother, because my father didn’t really care about anything: he went on with his life as a criminal, robbing banks and spending a lot of time in prison). I've lost count of the number of scrapes I got into when I was small. But it was natural: I grew up in a rough district – the place where the criminals expelled from Siberia were re-settled in the 1930s. My life was there, in Bender, with the criminals, and the people of our villainous district were like one big family."

"In the Siberian community you learn to kill when you're very small. Our philosophy of life has a close relation to death; children are taught that taking someone else's life or dying are perfectly acceptable things, if there is a good reason. Teaching people how to die is impossible, because once you’ve died there is no coming back. But teaching people to live with the threat of death, to 'tempt' fate, is not difficult. Many Siberian fairy tales tell of the deadly clash between criminals and representatives of the government, of the risks people run every day with dignity and honesty, of the good fortune of those who in the end have got the loot and stayed alive, and of the 'good memory' that is preserved of those who have died without abandoning their friends in need. Through these fairy tales, the children perceive the values that give meaning to the Siberian criminals' lives: respect, courage, friendship, loyalty. By the time they are five or six, Siberian children show a determination and a seriousness that are enviable even to adults of other communities. It is on such solid foundations that the education to kill, to take physical action against another living being, is built."

"When he is about ten, the child is a full member of the clan of the youths, which actively cooperates with the criminals of the Siberian community. There he has the chance to face many different situations of the criminal life for the first time. The older kids teach the younger ones how to behave and through the fights and quarrels and the handling of relations with the youths of other communities, each boy is broken in. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, Siberian boys often have a criminal record, and therefore some experience of juvenile prison. This experience is seen as important, indeed fundamental, to the formation of the individual's character and view of the world. By that age many Siberians already have some black marketeering and one murder, or at least attempted murder, to their name. And they all know how to communicate within the criminal community, how to follow, hand down and safeguard the founding principles of Siberian criminal law."

"This memoir is based on the author's own experiences. Names have been changed, characters combined and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative recreation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events."

"A verbal message is called a 'puff'. When an adult criminal wants to make a puff he calls a boy, perhaps one of his own children, and tells him the content of the message in the criminal language fenya, which derives from the old language of the forebears of the Siberian criminals, the Efey. Oral messages are always short and have a firm meaning. They are used for relatively straightforward, everyday matters."

"Why was it, do you think, I was able to recognize you and understand you? … Because it’s the same for me as for you, because I am alone exactly as you are, because I’m as little fond of life and men and myself as you are and can put up with them as little. There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness. … You are surprised that I should be unhappy when I can dance and am so sure of myself in the superficial things of life. And I, my friend, am surprised that you are so disillusioned with life when you are at home with the very things in it that are the deepest and most beautiful, spirit, art, and thought! That is why we were drawn to one another and why we are brother and sister. I am going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me to think and to know and yet not be happy."

"Harry, the thinker, is a hundred years old, but Harry, the dancer, is scarcely half a day old. It’s he we want to bring on, and all his little brothers who are just as little and stupid and stunted as he is."

"There he lives, I thought, and carries on his labors year by year, reads and annotates texts, seeks for analogies between western Asiatic and Indian mythologies, and it satisfies him, because he believes in the value of it all. He believes in the studies whose servant he is; he believes in the value of mere knowledge and its acquisition, because he believes in progress. … He is a good, unthinking, happy child, who takes himself seriously; and, in fact, he is much to be envied."

"Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction than between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul."

"Just as I dress and go out to visit the professor and exchange a few more or less insincere compliments with him, without really wanting to at all, so it is with the majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs. Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead. ... Let no one think that I blame other men, though now and then in these pages I scorn and even deride them, or that I accuse them of the responsibility of my personal misery. But now that I have come so far, and standing as I do on the extreme verge of life where the ground falls away before me into bottomless darkness, I should do wrong and I should lie if I pretended to myself or to others that that machine still revolved for me and that I was still obedient to the eternal child’s play of that charming world."

"Man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit, a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired."

"You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him—the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints—is a fool and a Don Quixote. Good. And it has been just the same for me, my friend. I was a gifted girl. I was meant to live up to a high standard, to expect much of myself and do great things. I could have played a great part. I could have been the wife of a king, the beloved of a revolutionary, the sister of a genius, the mother of a martyr. And life has allowed me just this, to be a courtesan of fairly good taste, and even that has been hard enough. That is how things have gone with me. For a while I was inconsolable and for a long time I put the blame on myself. Life, thought I, must in the end be in the right, and if life scorned my beautiful dreams, so I argued, it was my dreams that were stupid and wrong headed. But that did not help me at all. And as I had good eyes and ears and was a little inquisitive too, I took a good look at this so-called life and at my neighbors and acquaintances, fifty or so of them and their destinies, and then I saw you. And I knew that my dreams had been right a thousand times over."

"These men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment’s happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own."

"As every strength may become a weakness (and under some circumstances must) so, on the contrary, may the typical suicide find a strength and a support in his apparent weakness. … Harry … fashioned for himself out of this tendency a philosophy that was actually serviceable to life. He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open, and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape. There are a great many suicides to whom this thought imparts an uncommon strength."

"All who got to love him, saw always only the one side in him. Many loved him as a refined and clever and interesting man, and were horrified and disappointed when they had come upon the wolf in him. And they had to because Harry wished, as every sentient being does, to be loved as a whole and therefore it was just with those whose love he most valued that he could least of all conceal and belie the wolf. There were those, however, who loved precisely the wolf in him, the free, the savage, the untamable, the dangerous and strong, and these found it peculiarly disappointing and deplorable when suddenly the wild and wicked wolf was also a man, and had hankerings after goodness and refinement, and wanted to hear Mozart, to read poetry and to cherish human ideals."

"Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold."

"The Steppenwolf stood entirely outside the world of convention, since he had neither family life nor social ambitions. He felt himself to be single and alone, whether as a queer fellow and a hermit in poor health, or as a person removed from the common run of men by the prerogative of talents that had something of genius in them. Deliberately, he looked down upon the ordinary man and was proud that he was not one. Nevertheless his life in many aspects was thoroughly ordinary. … He was secretly and persistently attracted to the little bourgeois world, to those quiet and respectable homes with tidy gardens, irreproachable stair-cases and their whole modest air of order and comfort. It pleased him to set himself outside it, with his little vices and extravagances, as a queer fellow or a genius, but he never had his domicile in those provinces of life where the bourgeoisie had ceased to exist. He was not at ease with violent and exceptional persons or with criminals and outlaws, and he took up his abode always among the middle classes, with whose habits and standards and atmosphere he stood in a constant relation, even though it might be one of contrast and revolt."

"With our Steppenwolf it was so that in his conscious life he lived now as a wolf, now as a man, as indeed the case is with all mixed beings. But, when he was a wolf, the man in him lay in ambush, ever on the watch to interfere and condemn, while at those times that he was a man the wolf did just the same. For example, if Harry, as man, had a beautiful thought, felt a fine and noble emotion, or performed a so-called good act, then the wolf bared his teeth at him and laughed and showed him with bitter scorn how laughable this whole pantomime was in the eyes of a beast, of a wolf who knew well enough in his heart what suited him, namely, to trot alone over the Steppes and now and then to gorge himself with blood or to pursue a female wolf. Then, wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and misplaced, stupid and vain. But it was exactly the same when Harry felt and behaved as a wolf and showed others his teeth and felt hatred and enmity against all human beings and their lying and degenerate manners and customs. For then the human part of him lay in ambush and watched the wolf, called him brute and beast, and spoiled and embittered for him all pleasure in his simple and healthy and wild wolf’s being."

"Do you think I can’t understand your horror of the fox trot, your dislike of bars and dancing floors, your loathing of jazz and the rest of it? I understand it only too well, and your dislike of politics as well, your despondence over the chatter and irresponsible antics of the parties and the press, your despair over the war, the one that has been and the one that is to be, over all that people nowadays think, read and build, over the music they play, the celebrations they hold, the education they carry on. You are right, Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, and yet you must go to the wall. You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easygoing and easily contented world of today. You have a dimension too many. Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours."

"He gave at the very first glance the impression of a significant, an uncommon, and unusually gifted man. His face was intellectual, and the abnormally delicate and mobile play of his features reflected a soul of extremely emotional and unusually delicate sensibility. When one spoke to him and he, as was not always the case, dropped conventionalities and said personal and individual things that came out of his own alien world, then a man like myself came under his spell on the spot. He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to appear always in the right."

"Steppenwolf threw me a quick look, a look which criticized both the words and the speaker of them—an unforgettable and frightful look which spoke volumes! It was a look that did not simply criticize the lecturer, annihilating the famous man with its delicate but crushing irony. That was the least of it. It was more sad than ironical; it was indeed utterly and hopelessly sad; it conveyed a quiet despair, born partly of conviction, partly of a mode of thought which had become habitual with him. This despair of his not only unmasked the conceited lecturer and dismissed with its irony the matter at hand, the expectant attitude of the public, the somewhat presumptuous title under which the lecture was announced—no, the Steppenwolf’s look pierced our whole epoch, its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated intellectuality. And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one who knew the full worth and meaning of man’s life. It said: See what monkeys we are! Look, such is man! and at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a monkey’s trick!"

"“This morning I came on a passage in Novalis. … ‘Most men will not swim before they are able to.’ Is not that witty? Naturally, they won’t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.” … He was so convinced and conscious of his isolation, his swimming in the water, his uprootedness, that a glimpse now and then of the orderly daily round … acted on him as a stimulus without in the least arousing his scorn. … He actually really admired and loved our little bourgeois world as something solid and secure, as the home and peace which must ever remain far and unattainable, with no road leading from him to them."

"There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. … What I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity."

"It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another’s words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes."

"I read that when I was thirteen. It had a huge impact on me, it gave me a terrible fever, and I started to write...“Steppenwolf” turned me upside down."