"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."
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The Eight-Gored Hat and the Flick-Knife
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Siberian_Education
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Siberian Education
Siberian Education (2009) by Nicolai Lilin. It was followed by a sequel, Free Fall: A Sniper's Story from Chechnya.
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