Explore "The Murderer" by Aleksandr Kuprin on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
They were talking over current events, executions, people being shot, burnt alive, women being violated, old men and children killed, gentle, liberty-loving souls disfigured forever, trampled into the mud by the loathsome force of violence.
The master of the house said: "It is terrible to think how the scale of life has altered. Was it long ago? -- no, only about five years ago -- when our whole Russian society was distressed and shocked over any solitary instance of violence. The police had beaten a Tchinovnik in prison, some rural authority had arrested a newly-arrived student for disrespect. And now... a crowd has been fired on without warning; a man has been executed through error, having been mistaken for his namesake; nowadays, people are shot casually, out of mere idleness, just to let off a round or two. An intellectual young man is seized in the middle of the street and whipped with knouts, whipped for no reason at all, just as a gratuitous distraction for the soldiers and officers. And already this sort of thing provokes no astonishment, no alarm. Everything goes on as though nothing at all had happened."