17 March 2026
On how the colour grey tests a person’s resilience and why the main source of light must be sought within oneself
By Lev Shlosberg*
Source: Novaya Gazeta
I found myself in the prison in Pskov Castle in early December — during the shortest days of the year, which in our region are very rarely sunny.
Prison is a gloomy place in and of itself. The cell windows are small, the walls thick; seeing a direct ray of sunlight in a prison cell is a small joy.
For two weeks, I lived in a cell on the first floor, where direct sunlight cannot physically penetrate — another prison building stands right next to it, and the sky could not be seen from that cell window.
The cell windows in this early 19th-century building are above head height; you cannot walk up to the window to look through it. But there’s no great desire to look out the window anyway: one set of bars before the window, inside the cell; two after the window, outside—that’s the view. The windows are about half a metre by half a metre, a square of light between the bars. The only place where this view would not be out of place is in Dima Markov’s photo album Russia in a Square. A prison square where the sky is crossed out by three bars — a very Russian picture of the world.
A bunk bed stands right up against the wall with the window. Several times a day I climb up to the top bunk to open the window slightly to air out the room. In those moments, I see before me a bit of Gogol Street, the domes of the Aleksandr Nevsky Church on the prison grounds, the roofs of the lower prison buildings lined with barbed wire, and the chimney of the prison boiler room. I never had any desire to sit on the top bunk and look out of the window. For me the small window of the prison cell is not a window on the world — the living world looks different, and I know this.
Prison drastically reduces the amount of natural light in a person’s life. Light lives beyond the prison walls and stops at them. The reduction of living light in a person’s world is meant to make that world weak and lifeless.
A person is torn from their roots in the Solar System and handed over to the power of the gloom that envelops you from all sides and seems to suffocate you. The lack of light in prison can be compared to a lack of oxygen.
The dominant colour inside the prison is grey. The cell doors, the door jambs, and all metal structures — the doors in the corridors and stairwells, bars, and cell furniture (bed, table, bench, shelf, stand) — are painted grey, heating pipes and radiators, the walls in the passageways between sections of the building, and the window frames in the hallways.
The grey adds its tint to all the other colours in the prison. The cell walls are covered in light ochre, but next to the ubiquitous grey, it becomes colder, more lifeless.
The walls of the corridors inside the building are covered with many Soviet-era ceramic tiles — bluish-grey — but the prevailing grey adds its own gloom to the colour of the tiles, and there is no sun to clear the grey film from the tiles.
The floors in the prison corridors are mostly laid with Soviet-era tiles of various shades of ochre and carmine, but the grey colour weighs down on the floor, mixing a grey shadow into the tile’s colour.
A distinctive feature of the colour grey is its coldness. In the absence of direct sunlight, which brings warmth, the grey colour in the prison takes the place of natural light, displaces sunlight from a person’s life, and replaces it with its all-encompassing colourlessness. The grey colour bleaches out all the other colours in the prison, drains them of their strength and brightness, and absorbs them into itself.
There are no flowers in prison, not a speck of vibrant green, because all objects in prison must be bolted to the floor or walls. There are no trees or bushes in the prison yard.
There is no sky in prison. A person in prison can see the sky in a few cases: if the windows of your cell face an open space under the sky; if the area next to the narrow stone ‘exercise yard’ isn’t blocked by another building; and — very briefly — when you’re led from the residential block to the administrative building for visits with family or defence lawyers or for investigative procedures: a few dozen metres there and a few dozen metres back.
Through the cell window facing open space and behind the bars of the narrow exercise ‘yard,’ you see a checkered sky; on a cloudy day, the bars seem to harmonise with the backdrop of a grey, gloomy sky, but on a sunny day, the blue sky, divided by the bars of the grille, looks as if it has been deprived of freedom — as if the sky itself has been imprisoned.
On a clear day, the sun creeps into the window of my cell. At first, its rays gild the rusty bars of the outer grilles, quietly colouring the outer vertical windowsill on the right, then gradually passing through all three grilles and squeezing their way into the cell. A slanted diamond of light, broken into pieces by the shadows of the bars, slowly moves across the cell wall, briefly illuminating everything that falls within the beam’s path: the upper curve of the bed’s headboard, the shelf with books and a backpack, the dull ochre wall, washing the grey from the ochre and saturating it for brief moments with living light. The length of the sunny part of the day increases each day, and now the sunny patch, streaked with shadows, reaches all the way to the grey cell door, as if trying to shine right through it.
On clear days, when the sun shines into the room, I stand on the bench and, closing my eyes, turn my face to the sun. Sunlight carries warmth, warms my skin, and gently touches my head with its rays.
At such moments, the small window becomes blindingly bright — so much so that the intense sunlight seems to dissolve the bars of the grate, melt the cold metal, and free the window space from iron, creating a vision of pure light.
Artificial light burns around the clock in prison. It is an integral part of prison life. The space from which natural light has been banished is filled with light of a man-made origin. You get used to this light quickly, because artificial light is better than darkness. At first, the light from the lamp is irritating at night, but you shield yourself from it with a sleep mask and thus retreat into your inner night.
By severing a person’s daily natural connection to living light, by surrounding them with the grey colour of everyday existence, the prison poses a question to everyone who finds themselves within its walls: how will you live without the sun, you – a person born under the sun? Will you stretch upward like a green sprout in a dungeon, turning pale in the darkness? Will you wither away in the twilight? How will you live, leaving the sun on the other side of the prison walls?
A person in prison, if they wish to preserve themselves, to preserve the colours of their world, must shift their focus from the external to the internal. How strong is your inner battery? How much power has it accumulated over a lifetime? How long is it ready to work without being connected to a source of living light? A person cannot know the answers to these questions before prison. The answers come only in prison.
A person is the main source of light in prison for themselves. The power of this source does not depend on the natural or artificial lighting around them. The inner light is a product of one’s own making.
Sunlight is the light of freedom. The colours of prison are the hues of unfreedom. By keeping the light within you while in prison, you maintain a connection to freedom — a feeling whose roots and strength will always lie within you.
Pskov Prison Fortress
* Designated by Russian authorities as a ‘foreign agent.’
Translated by RiR
