Words Will Break Cement Read Online Free Page B

true creativity begins. That’s what I worked on. Of course, I might have gone overboard. She might have taken my instruction too literally. But we will see what happens when she is released from prison.” When Nadya returned from a visit with Andrei at the age of seven, Katya’s new husband, Misha, demanded to know what Andrei had done to the child: a wallflower had been transformed into a rebel.
    For most of the dark majority of her year, Nadya studied. “She was a straight-A student,” Andrei told me without a hint of pride or admiration. “She would spend five or six hours a day studying at home. There is a picture of her sleeping at her computer. I don’t know where she got it: certainly not from me or her mother. And it’s not like her mother made her study. It may have been a way to escape from reality, by running not into the street or to bad company, but to textbooks.”
    By her penultimate year of secondary school, Nadya had worked out an autodidact program she followed rigorously. “My education began the moment I came home from school,” she wrote to me. “I would sit down with alternative textbooks I had ordered from the library, books on literary criticism and books for the soul.” For the soul she read turn-of-the-century Russian existentialist philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov, as well as Sartre, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard. Whatever gave Nadya the idea she should be reading these books—I was never able to pin her down on this matter in our correspondence—the books gave her ideas. “During regular classes I was either dying from the emptiness of what was going on or actively fighting to impress upon the school administration the primacy of the critical impulse in education.”
    Whatever ammunition Nadya used in this fight—this too she would not describe in detail, possibly for fear of arming her jailers with the means to assail her character in her endless court and disciplinary hearings—it led to conflict. One time she was directed to write an explanatory note to the school principal. Instead of the standard acknowledgment of wrongdoing and assurances of reform, Nadya wrote a paragraph on the importance of “crisis, watershed moments” in the development of young people. “I have devoted myself to creating such critical moments,” she wrote. “And I do this solely out of concern for the school, so it may develop faster and better.”
    That particular incident centered on a jar of glue. The way Andrei remembered Nadya telling him about it, she had borrowed the glue from a classroom windowsill to use on a school project. The way a former teacher recalled it, still outraged, Nadya had taken a jar of linoleum glue being used by repair workers and moved it to a girls’ bathroom—“she was just testing the teachers, but technically it was theft and the policeman told us if we had filed a report she would have gotten two years.” I do not know what Nadya remembers of the glue taking because we could not correspond about something that could, however absurdly, be considered a crime.
    The principal summoned Nadya to his office over the PA system. She took the opportunity to lecture him on her crisis-fosters-growth theory. “He didn’t understand a word of it but asked me angrily why I had signed my statement the way I did.” Rather than the customary juvenile “Nadya Tolokonnikova, grade 11A,” fifteen-year-old Nadya had signed “Tolokonnikova, Nadezhda Andreevna,” as an adult would have. The principal demanded she rewrite her statement and append a proper signature. “This is exactly the way my relationships with representatives of the state have developed ever since,” she wrote to me in a letter from her penal colony.
    The books or Andrei or both—and something else too—gave Nadya the idea, rarely expressed in Russia, especially in Norilsk, that things could be different—and she demanded that they be so. When she was fifteen, she submitted an article