I suffered terribly during my final year on Sakhalin. Between the ages of 23 and 35 I was not alone in struggling with the knowledge that this most favorable period, when all the fundaments of one's future life are laid down and one pursues a career and ties the marriage knot that ensures one's own family, was first being spent in pitiful vegetation in a stiflingly malodorous ward, then later in an atmosphere of unremitting humiliation. Had we on Sakhalin not the memories of previous lives among cheerful, healthy, satisfied people, had we not previously experienced the fortune of womanly love, not been delighted by theater, music, and the other arts, and, finally, had we not anticipated returning in the future to a cultured life in the cities where we’d spent our youths, then we would likely have given in to our baser instincts and, resigning ourselves to the circumstances of our stalls, soon approximated speechless animals. Such indeed was the tragedy of our banishment that, for twelve years, we constantly experienced the precipices of thinking about our past, of sleeping and envisioning our return to it again, and during that time, I distinctly remember the years, “all the best years,” going by and, along with them, my youth, strength, and energy. You’d look, as it were, at your own sickened body, as you pondered what remained of your cultural existence, your shattered nerves, your lofty status among others— and your spirit turned more bitter. And those who at first patiently counted down their exile practically by the minute, waffled until the end over the decisive question: Go back to Russia or remain in the Far East?

Worse even than our sojourn on the island was the depth of sorrow felt at being outcast and alienated. Being an exile from the peasantry or tradesmen was much easier: there, he finds himself in a society of the same simple working people as he, and soon finds fellow countrymen, friends, and even a girlfriend among the female exiles, and so for him, the circumstances of settler life don't pose much that's new and the manual labor isn't alien to him. The educated exile is a different matter.