Letter from the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin to his sister, written in the village of Urik on 29 September 1836

I live among people who see me and do not understand me, or with the Invisible One whom I cannot comprehend. The darkness of my sins veils him, even when the deadly lead had grown numb in my body; a gleam of his gaze flashed before me when the blade of the sword turned away from my head. Who followed me into the depths of the casemates? Who eased the weight of my chains and healed their sores? The invisible guardian of my fate. He cannot appear to me before my death, but he surrounds me with proofs of his presence: a hut in confinement has for me all the charm of my parents' roof; I am untroubled amid dangers; independent in constraint, happy in solitude. Now I know for certain that the Lord sent his angel and delivered me from the hand of Herod and from all the expectations of the Jewish people.

The Decembrist Mikhail Lunin wrote on 29 September 1836 to his dear sister, Ekaterina Sergeyevna Uvarova, from his place of settlement in the village of Urik near Irkutsk, where he found himself after serving his term of penal servitude in the Chita Ostrog and at the Petrovsky Zavod.