As I now write my memoirs, I am ridding myself of Sakhalin by a distance of ten thousand versts and a considerably long time, and the wealth of new impressions given me by my peregrinations through Russia and abroad obscure to a certain extent everything Sakhalin. The many things that were so sickening in katorga have been cleared up, cured, or calmed. As the suffering I endured passes into oblivion, I’m already starting to forget exiled heroes’ names, though I will always remember my Sakhalin exile in general. It is impossible to absolutely forget that foul, hellish, yet at the same time, personally singular and unprecedented, life in Sakhalin katorga.

When you imaginarily transport yourself to the world's end where lies the wretched island, there sweeps across the imagination: barracks, wards, maidany, penal laborers, guards, executioners, mares, rods, whips, wheelbarrows, chains, cassocks, prison sandals, shaved heads, labor quotas, rations, skilly, ramson, keta, sables, bears, Giliaks, yurts, sleighs, vagabonds, cordons, exile-settlers, cohabitants, blizzards, taiga, coal shafts… This Sakhalin kaleidoscope is so complex in consistency, it will hang before my eyes my entire life. Sakhalin by itself, without prisons, might offer an interesting, colorful picture; but, to its grief, its various colors are concealed by the katorga population's gray gloom, discoloring that island of two seas as does the ocean fog sometimes to be found rising over southern Japan's delightful niches.

I try to find the good in everything, and even in the bad, I search for the better. What good did my eight-year life on Sakhalin do me? … I developed no career there, acquired no money, did not become healthy… Perhaps I gained renown? O Sakhalin renown! just as I often had to diligently hide you from people in the Far East, where Russian life is confounded with exiles, so now, in Russia, I’m sometimes obliged to conceal you as a horribly disgraceful thing…

The great Russian penal laborer Fëdor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii sees in the severe punishment on the island and in katorga a means for saving criminals. They, in his expression, purge themselves through suffering. I say: an ascetic life makes a man, to a certain extent.

Only one who has experienced it will understand the grief of another. Only one who has experienced hunger, cold, and pain can sympathize with another's hunger, cold, and pain.