Not men but strange and terrible creatures

The phrase "Not men but strange and terrible creatures" crystallizes a moment of profound moral shock in Dmitri Ivanovitch Nekhludoff's journey. It occurs as he watches the convict gang—over six hundred men and women—march through the streets of Moscow on a sweltering July day, and the sight overwhelms his capacity to recognize the prisoners as fellow human beings. The expression is not merely a description of appearance but a symptom of the psychological mechanism that allows society to sustain a system of mass punishment: the transformation of persons into a species apart, a category of being that no longer demands the sympathy owed to a man.

The Moment of Dehumanization

As the gang moves down the middle of the street, Nekhludoff sees row upon row of figures dressed in identical grey cloaks, their heads shaved, their feet moving in chains. They are so numerous, so alike in their degraded uniform, and placed in such "unusual, peculiar circumstances" that they seem to him "not men but some sort of strange and terrible creatures." The perception is instantaneous and visceral: the prisoners have lost the individuality that marks a person, and what remains is a mass that inspires fear and revulsion rather than recognition. This moment echoes an earlier, internal division Nekhludoff has long recognized in himself—the struggle between the "animal man" and the "spiritual man" that has governed his own moral collapses and recoveries. Now the same split is projected outward: the prisoners become the animal, the strange, the terrible, while he, the observer, remains safely on the side of the human.

The Collapse of the Perception

Yet the perception does not hold. Almost immediately, Nekhludoff recognizes individuals within the mass—the murderer Fedoroff, the witty thief Okhotin, a tramp who had appealed to him for help—and the abstract "creatures" become particular men again. The moment of dehumanization is followed by a counter-movement of recognition, and this oscillation between seeing the prisoners as a terrifying species and seeing them as specific, suffering persons becomes the moral rhythm of Nekhludoff's entire journey. The phrase itself, once uttered, cannot be un-thought; it remains as a warning of how easily the machinery of justice turns men into monsters in the eyes of those who judge them.

The Return of the Repressed

Later, in the halting station, the image returns with renewed force. Nekhludoff sees a boy of about twelve lying asleep in the passage, his head resting on the leg of a convict, on the filthy floor near a leaking tub. This child, innocent and vulnerable, is embedded in the same "strange and terrible" world, and the sight becomes more dreadful than all the rest. The phrase now carries its opposite: the creatures are not strange at all—they are ordinary people, including children, who have been made terrible by the conditions imposed on them. Nekhludoff's earlier perception is revealed as a lie that the system requires, and the truth is that the prisoners are men, and that the system that makes them appear otherwise is itself the true monstrosity.

The Thematic Significance

The expression "Not men but strange and terrible creatures" thus functions as a hinge in Nekhludoff's moral education. It marks the point at which he first fully sees the dehumanizing power of the penal system, and it also marks the point at which that vision begins to break down. The phrase is not a conclusion but a question: can the observer hold onto the recognition that the prisoner is a man, even when every institutional arrangement—the shaved heads, the chains, the identical cloaks, the stench, the crowding—is designed to make that recognition impossible? Nekhludoff's answer, worked out over the course of the novel, is that the only place befitting an honest man in such a society is a prison, because the prison is where the lie that some men are not men is most nakedly exposed.