"Knout" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... protection against every attack on the Fatherland. This is it, then! We, too, wish to defend the Fatherland. Suppose that instead we had said in the hour of need: Yes, we want to protect our Fatherland against the knout regiments of the Czar all right enough, but we demand that protection from the militia! Since we do not as yet have the militia, we shall make no use of the standing army, for we would rather let the Cossacks into ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... military governor of a fair-sized town in the government of Pultava. The first spectators had been attracted by the preparations which they saw had been made in the middle of the courtyard for administering torture with the knout. One of the general's serfs, he who acted as barber, was to be ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the rub." Then what a vein of pleasantry is preserved through the whole of Og! So light and delicate is the handling, that you might be charmed into the soft delusion, that you beheld Christopher with his Knout. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... shoulders, sprang to his saddle, and cried a retreat. The Cossacks, unable to turn in the aisle, backed cumbrously with a manifold thudding and rearing and clanking, but ere the congregation had finished rubbing their eyes, the last conical hat and leaded knout had vanished, and only the tarry reek of their boots was left in proof of their actual passage. A deep silence hung for a moment like a heavy cloud, then it broke in ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... missing, and full soon The boatswain's cat, sagacious smelt him out, Gave him a clawing to some tune— This cat's a cousin Germam to the Knout ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the King" was played as the English soldiers marched out, in a comic manner which made one think of it as "Gawd save the King." Other national anthems were burlesqued in a similar fashion, but none quite so successfully. A ridiculous effigy of the Tsar with a knout in his hand now occupied the symbolic position and dominated the scene. The incidents of the war which affected Russia were then played. Spectacular cavalry charges on the road, marching soldiers, batteries of artillery, a pathetic procession of cripples ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... was little moved by desire for real reform or by pity for the peasants. She had the heavy whip—the knout—applied to the bared backs of earnest reformers. Her court was scandalously immoral, and she violated the conventions of matrimony without a qualm. For some excuse or another, the promised constitution was never written, and the lot of the serfs tended to become actually worse. To the governor ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... denounced the practice, the Sultan Amurath IV. making it punishable with death. The Viziers of Turkey spitted the noses of smokers with their own pipes; the more considerate Shah of Persia cut them entirely off. The knout greeted in Russia the first indulgence, and death followed the second offence. In some of the Swiss cantons smoking was considered a crime second only to adultery. Modern republics ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... bigot who will justify the rancorous lampoons of Gregory Nazianzen. Are we, then, angry on behalf of Julian? So far as he was interested, not for a moment would we have suspended the descending scourge. Cut him to the bone, we should have exclaimed at the time! Lay the knout into every "raw" that can be found! For we are of opinion that Julian's duplicity is not yet adequately understood. But what was right as regarded the claims of the criminal, was not right as regarded the duties of his opponent. Even ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... measure, substituted imaginary afflictions for real ones. I cannot but confess, however, that the relief which it has afforded has been produced by the counteraction of one pain by another; very much like that of the Russian criminal, who gnaws his own flesh while undergoing the punishment of the knout.'" ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... too saucy since you ceased to be serfs, and the knout is the best school for you to learn politics in. ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... houri's, resulting in considerable jealousy and consequent discord—or some trifle of that sort (Joe had never been in a harem, and was therefore indefinite), when the blackamoor, to punctuate his remarks, slashed the odalisque across her thinly covered shoulders with a knout—a not uncommon mode of enforcing discipline, ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... was their lot. Their communities, perhaps the happiest then to be found in rural Russia, were broken up, to be flung into remote corners of Transcaucasia or Siberia, and there doomed to the regime of the knout or the darkness of the mines[234]. According to present appearances the persecutors have succeeded. The evangelical faith seems to have been almost stamped out even in South Russia; and the Greek Church has regained its hold ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... dug up ten splendid rifles of American make, with fixed ammunition, of the most improved kind, the whole inclosed in a rubber bag to keep out the damp. Nine other peasants were arrested; they were all subjected to the knout; but neither they nor their captain could tell anything more than he had at first revealed. The Russian newspapers have been full of speculations as to how the rifles came there, but could arrive at ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... fancied himself in some subterranean place of vast dimensions, through the grim galleries of which men and women with evil faces crept like animals. And towering above them, unreal in size, his scornful face an epitome of sin, the knout which he wielded symbolical and ghastly, driving his motley flock with the leer of the evil shepherd, was the man from whom he had already learnt to recoil with horror. The picture came and went in a flash. Francis found himself ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Democracies, Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies, Mirror my wildest passions like the sea And give my rage a brother—! Liberty! For this sake only do thy dissonant cries Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades Rob nations of their rights inviolate And I remain unmoved—and yet, and yet, These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... she has talent. Maria Theresa believed that her daughter's beauty would prove more powerful over France than her own armies. Like Catharine II., her envied contemporary, she consulted no ties of nature in the disposal of her children,—a system more in character where the knout is the logician than among nations boasting higher civilization: indeed her rivalry with Catharine even made her grossly neglect their education. Jealous of the rising power of the North, she saw that it was the purpose of Russia to counteract ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... reign of Czardom and grand dukes when there were massacres of mobs in Moscow, bloody Sundays in St. Petersburg, pogroms in Riga, floggings of men and girls in many prisons, and when free speech, liberal ideas, and democratic uprisings had been smashed by Cossack knout and by ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... she is here," repeated Samuel Brohl, pointing to an alabaster statuette, posed on a piedouche. The statuette represented a woman bound tightly, on whom two Cossacks were inflicting the knout; the socle bore the inscription, ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... unintelligible period, gazing intent and troubled at the throng. He shivered perceptibly: under the hard blue sky the wind swept with the sting of an icy knout. Then, turning his obscure, infinitely dejected back upon the silent menace of the bitter, sallow countenances, the harsh angular forms, of Greenstream, he walked slowly to the door. He paused, his hand upon the knob, as if arrested ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Its swaggering port, and low petition make (Driven by those Treasury thirsts which never slake) For help from those it harries? PHARAOH's scourge Was the taskmaster's weapon, used to urge The Hebrew bondsmen to their tale of toil, But they round whom the Russian's knout thongs coil, Are of the breed of those the Russian palm Can make petition to. Could triumph balm The wounds of ages, here were balm indeed; But blood revolts. Race of the changeless creed, And ever-shifting sojourn, SHAKSPEARE's type Deep meaning hides, which, when the world is ripe For wider ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... of the unceasing efforts of those who happen to be in authority to conceal this and attribute some other significance to it, authority has always meant for man the cord, the chain with which he is bound and fettered, or the knout with which he is to be flogged, or the ax with which he is to have hands, ears, nose, or head cut off, or at the very least, the threat of these terrors. So it was under Nero and Ghenghis Khan, and so it is to-day, even under the most liberal government in the Republics ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... the ground, and his hands tied behind, the thongs that bound them being held by a man standing close in his rear. Thus disposed, he received a tremendous flogging from a whip with a fearful heavy leathern lash, which made me think of the Russian knout. The blows fell with a thud that made my nerves shiver, and the back of the sufferer was covered with blood, which was thrown here and there by the ensanguined instrument of torture as it whistled through the air. He took his punishment, however, to ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... the eyes of all. The victim was stripped and stretched against a pillar, or bent over a low post, his hands being tied, so that he had no means of defending himself. The instrument of torture was a sort of knout or cat-o'-nine-tails, with bits of iron or bone attached to the ends of the thongs. Not only did the blows cut the skin and draw blood, but not infrequently the victim died in the midst of the operation. Some have supposed that Pilate, out of consideration for Jesus, may have moderated ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... of some other life of folly, when I talk like that—I know it, Denzil. It is the harking back to long months of gloom and darkness and snow and the howling of wolves and the fear of the knout. This is not my first Russian life, ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... still be his heavy burden. He had done infinitely more than was generally required to prove a boy's worthiness for acceptance by his fellows. Not a boy in the school but had watched his clothes cut to ribbons before them, under the knout. Not a boy but surmised the hideous state of his bruised body. And yet, not a boy in the school offered the slightest sign of friendliness, even of recognition. Loneliness he had known—was, indeed, to know again—but never thereafter the loneliness ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... like a fish, and you will never catch her again. Be as inflexible as law. Show no more charity than the headsman. Hit hard, and then hit again. Strike and keep on striking as if you were giving her the knout. Duchesses are made of hard stuff, my dear Armand; there is a sort of feminine nature that is only softened by repeated blows; and as suffering develops a heart in women of that sort, so it is a work of charity not to spare the rod. Do you persevere. Ah! when pain has ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... could see how I cow my peasants with a knout, and grind them to starvation. It would be an interesting picture for her to ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... free instead of taking my part with the rest. Women—beautiful women of noble birth—are going to prison for their opinions. Girl students in Russia go to the gallows; let themselves be cut in pieces with the knout, or driven through the frozen snows of Siberia, sooner than stand looking on tamely at the world being made a hell for the toiling millions. If you were not all skunks and cowards youd be suffering with them instead of battening here on the plunder ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... knout cutting through the decayed fibre of the man and raising a livid welt on his diseased soul. Galled beyond endurance, his countenance convulsed with fury, he struck wickedly; and the vicious blow of his open palm across her mouth brought flecks of blood to the lips as her teeth cut into the ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... unending calm was understandable: Gregor was always ready to die. What to do with a man to whom death was release? To hold the knout and to see it turn to water in the hand! In lying he had overreached. Gregor, having accepted as fact the reported death of Ivan, had nothing to live for. Having brought Gregor here to torture he had, blind fool, ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... demanded that her favorite Chaklovity should be surrendered to the Czar. She had to implore the mediation of the patriarch. Chaklovity was first put to the torture and made to confess his plot against the Czar, and then decapitated. Medviedef was at first only condemned to the knout and banishment for heresy, but he acknowledged he had intended to take the place of the patriarch and to marry Sophia; he was dishonored by being imprisoned with two sorcerers, condemned to be burned alive in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... that even the Cossacks forgot the strict discipline which had been commanded them, and entered the houses, robbing and compelling the inhabitants, by blows of the knout, to give them all they wanted. But yet they were less cruel than the Saxons, less barbarous than the Austrians, who, with scoffing and derision, committed the greatest atrocities. Indeed, it was only necessary to complain to the Russian general in order to obtain justice immediately, and have the ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... little beauty. He has insulted the Empress. He will receive a hundred and one blows of the knout. [He laughs and goes out, nursing his ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... difficulty then, either to flush or to bag sufficient game. But, somehow or other, of late years there has been a sort of panic among the poets. The gentler sort have either been scared by the improvisatore warblings of Mr Wakley, or terrified into silence by undue and undeserved apprehensions of the Knout. Seldom now are they heard to chirrup except under cover of the leaves of a sheltering magazine; and although we do occasionally detect a thin and ricketty octavo taking flight from the counter of some publisher, it is of so meek and inoffensive a kind that we should as soon think of making prize ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Bosinney, and fast after him walked George. If the fellow meant to put his 'twopenny' under a 'bus, he would stop it if he could! Across the street and back the hunted creature strode, not groping as other men were groping in that gloom, but driven forward as though the faithful George behind wielded a knout; and this chase after a haunted man began to have for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Our castles have been burned by the Russians, our fields have been laid waste, our vassals have been massacred, and of our kinsmen, some have died under the knout, while others drag out a ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... saw himself free of his assailants, and as he with Edith pressed against the wall of a house, they remained happily safe from the horses' hoofs as well as from the blows of the knout which were being dealt out ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... his flesh till he dived again beneath the liquid fire! It is the reality of the scene, the images familiar yet magnified in horror, which constitutes its power: we stand by; our flesh creeps as it would at witnessing an auto-da-fe of Castile, or on beholding a victim perishing under the knout ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... fields;[322] Think'st thou to thee Napoleon's victor yields? Better reclaim thy deserts, turn thy swords To ploughshares, shave and wash thy Bashkir[323] hordes, Redeem thy realms from slavery and the knout, Than follow headlong in the fatal route, To infest the clime whose skies and laws are pure 470 With thy foul legions. Spain wants no manure: Her soil is fertile, but she feeds no foe: Her vultures, too, were gorged not long ago; And wouldst thou furnish them with fresher prey? Alas! ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... Omsk and Kolyvan, will defile before you; and if you do not show me Michael Strogoff, you shall receive as many blows of the knout as men ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... chiefly with the soldiers and common people, among whom it made a sensation and was much talked of. This, by the way, is the only reference which occurs in the Memoirs to any interest below that of the highest nobility. As for the people of Russia, the right to draw their blood with the knout and make them sweat roubles into the royal treasury was taken as much for granted as the light and the air, by those who, either through fraud or force, could sit in the seat of Peter the Great. They regarded it as no less an appanage or perquisite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... either?" Humph! N-n-o-o, I can hardly say that! Yet here we are, tripping together, Republics and proud Autocrat! Two cats and a Boreal Bruin!— So satire will say, I've no doubt. And some will declare it must ruin The Russdom once ruled by the knout. I wonder—I very much wonder— What NICK to this sight would have said— I fear he'd have looked black as thunder, And savage as RURIC the Red. For this did we lose the Crimea? For this did we larrup the Jews? I really had not an idea Republics could ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... came the guard full of zeal: Haled in bonds the Pretender: "Shall it be noose or knout, rack or wheel?" But her proud face grew tender. Down she stepped from her throne—made him free; "Love," she said, with a sigh, "What is rank? You are you, we are we, I am ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... fatherly address are furnished by the czaristic Cossacks who hasten to the peasants' aid with the knout, sword and incendiarism. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... despotism: he was ignorant, coarse, and profligate. At his feasts, the dishes were of gold from the Ural Mountains, and the attendants who waited upon the monarch were arrayed in all the grandeur of Eastern princes; but the slightest blunder on their part subjected them to death, to the more dreaded knout, or to banishment in Siberia. Nominally a Christian, the Emperor of China is quite a saint when compared with him, and infinitely more respectable. But the Czar is a fool, chiefly immersed in the pleasures ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... ruin by whispers and detraction Ridicule, than which no weapon is more false or deadly Salique Laws Thank Heaven, I am out of harness Traducing virtues the slanderers never possessed Underrated what she could not imitate Where the knout is the logician ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger
... in the west of Europe. Justice, such as it was, was administered by the General Police Inspector, and in large cities there was a police officer for every ten houses. Servants who failed to keep the house front clean were punished with the knout. Peter created the Bureau of Information, a court of secret police, and thus inaugurated the terrible spy ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... shop one day, and found it was occupied by a saddler, who had two negro boys working at his business. He was a tawny, cadaverous-looking man, with a dark aspect; and he had cut from his leather a scourge like a Russian knout, which he held in his hand, and was in the act of exercising on one of the naked children in an inner room: and this was the cause of the moans and cries we heard every day, ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... became accustomed to the sound as I gradually approached, and mused, with gladness, of an early return to England. Heraine would acknowledge my vindication. Suffering more anguish from a sunbeam or a song than others from the knout or the rack, I had yet run the gauntlet of the intensest horrors, cheered by the certainty of her regard. She would confess her error. We should shut out the world again from our shadowy home at Glengoyle, and go down together, hand in hand, to a deeper stillness. As ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... enough in Mexico just then. On the one hand, Guerrero, Bustamente, Santa Anna; on the other, a race of men to whom, if one wished them their deserts, one could desire nothing better than an Austrian schlague or a Russian knout, to make them sensible of the value of that liberty which they do ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... knout! His countess bade me pay no attention when he said things of that kind. He was in reality the kindest of men and could not bear ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... on as before. That is, the 'martinet' worse than the 'knout de Russe'; the 'poucettes', the 'crapaudine' on neck and ankles and wrists; all, all as bad as the 'Pater Noster' of the Inquisition, as Mayer said the other day in the face of Charpentier, the Commandant of the penitentiary. How pleasant also to think of the Boulevard ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... careless of verbal disrespect, indifferent to censure, from them whose opinions were as impotent as those of an infant. The slave, again, on his side, is described as so thoroughly degraded, that he makes the disfiguration of his own person by the knout, the cancellation of his back by stripes and scars—a subject of continual merriment. Between two parties thus incapacitated by law and usage for manly intercourse, the result was exactly such by consummation as on many parts of the Continent it still is by tendency. The master welcomed from his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... the baseness of to-day by the baseness of yesterday, a school which explains every cry of the serf against the knout as rebellious, once the knout becomes a prescriptive, a derivative, a historical knout, a school to which history only shows itself a posteriori, like the God of Israel to his servant Moses, the historical juridical school ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... practical execution were followed, in the case of the Jews, by an unprecedented recrudescence of legislative discrimination and a monstrous increase of their disabilities. The Jews were lashed with a double knout, a military and a civil. In the same ill-fated year which saw the promulgation of the conscription statute, barely three months after it had received the imperial sanction, while the moans of the Jews, fasting and praying ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... viceroyalty of Germany. In place of her living and real socialism,[G] we shall have the doctrinaire socialism of the Germans, who will say no more than the Prussian bayonets will permit them to say. The bureaucratic and military intelligence of Prussia, combined with the knout of the Czar of St. Petersburg, are going to assure peace and public order for at least fifty years on the whole continent of Europe. Farewell, liberty! Farewell, socialism! Farewell, justice for the people and the triumph of humanity! All that could have grown out of the present disaster ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... interpret the words 'proper measures' as understood in the land of the knout. The mistress of Field Marshal Keith could not be got at; she had gone to Sweden, and this chivalrous proposal failed. The woman was not tortured in Russia to discover a Prince who was in or ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... "children" of the wonderful White Tsar, Steadfast patience from staunch loyalty have borrowed, Slaved for Slavdom still in Peace, and died in War; We have borne the yoke of power, and its abuses, We have trusted cells and shackles served their turn; Nay, that e'en the ruthless knout had noble uses; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging hook, the knout I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave of old. You're in for it this time! I'll make you remember me for the balance of your natural life. (His forehead veins swollen, his face congested) I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the same with the Russian soldier, and in fact with everybody. Honour stands for nothing, but with the knout and brandy one can get anything from ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... lashed them with scorn. He looked into the mirror and seeing a potential snob he straightway inveighed against snobbery. The punishment does not always fit the crime—it is excess. But I still contest that where his ridicule is most severe, it is Thackeray's own back that is bared to the knout. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... see a fond father employing A deuce of a knout For to bang her about. To a sensitive lover's annoying." Said the bagman, "Crusader, ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... cried a rough voice near by, and the next instant the burly form of a keeper stood between them. "Nineteen, you have already made trouble enough. You must have the knout," and unlocking the door of his cell, he seized him by the hair of the head and dragged him out and down through ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... "When do they ever get anything out of us? One of the outer-circle fellows like Louka and Gasin, who know nothing, who are instruments and nothing more, may tell all they know for gold, or for fear of the knout, but never once have they learned anything from one who knows. Fortunately the press was a very old one and there was but little type there, only just enough for printing small hand-bills; we have two ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... sneeringly. "In truth, it is mere imagination to compare the Russian serf—the blood in whose veins is frozen by Siberian cold, and whose back is cut up and bowed by the knout—with the Spaniard, passionate and free beneath a torrid sun, and who in his rags still feels himself noble and a grandee. But these exaggerations shall not influence me! The die is cast: I cannot recede! Great Heaven! this tedious old Europe! I will bring from Russia the keys ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... Cafe de la Rochefoucauld. A hermit he was during the dozen hours a day he toiled, but he was a sociable man, nevertheless, a cultured man fond of music, possessing a tongue that was feared as much as is the Russian knout. Mr. Moore has printed many specimens of his caustic wit. Whistler actually kept silent in his presence—possibly expecting a repetition of the mot: "My dear friend, you conduct yourself in life just as if you had no talent ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... fifteenth century the Muscovite ideas of right were subjected to the strong mind of Ivan the Great and compressed into a code. Therein were embodied the best processes known to his land and time: for discovering crime, torture and trial by battle; for punishing crime, the knout and death. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... officers, but this did not satisfy the savage soldiery, who insisted on their being delivered into their hands. This done, the unfortunate officers were sentenced to be scourged, some of them by that fearful Russian whip called the knout. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the oracle at Delphi, and the response has been in the highest degree encouraging." But his Germanic laurels did him no good in France. The Parisians would have none of him except as a writer of feuilletons, who pleased them by the vigor with which he handled the knout, and tickled the levity of the million, who laughed while they saw the half-dozen or more victims flayed by merciless satire. Berlioz wept tears of blood because he had to do such executioner's work, but did it none the less ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... torture, or to require him to name his accomplices. The culprit was sentenced to have his hands and feet cut off, and then to be quartered. By order of the empress, however, he was first beheaded. Eight of his accomplices were also executed, eighteen underwent the knout, and were then exiled to Siberia. Thus terminated a rebellion which cost the lives of more than a ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... periodically appear during the holiday season. Climatically the journey is a delightful one in winter time, for Siberia is then at its best—not the Siberia of the English dramatist: howling blizzards, chained convicts, wolves and the knout, but a smiling land of promise and plenty even under its limitless mantle of snow. The landscape is dreary, of course, but most days you have the blue cloudless sky and dazzling sunshine, so often sought in vain on the Riviera. ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... there has been a continual triangular conflict between critic, composer, and singer, which up to date, it must be admitted, has been won by the academic pundits, for, although the singer has struggled, she has generally bent under the blows of the critical knout, thereby holding the lyric drama more or less in the state it was in a hundred years ago (every critic and almost every composer will tell you that any modern opera can be sung according to the laws of bel ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... mare. It is an inclined plane, on which the sufferer is tied, his back is stripped naked, his arms embrace the higher end of the plank, his hands are tied under it, his feet are fastened on the lower end, all movement being thus rendered impossible. Hacking down upon the naked back of the victim, the knout falls with its concave side upon the skin, which the metalized edge of the instrument cuts like a knife, the blades of the groove burying themselves in the flesh; the instrument is not lifted up by the operator, but is drawn horizontally toward himself, tearing away, by ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... starved, while you and yours have feasted. You have lavished millions in vain display upon your palaces, while they have died in their hovels for lack of bread; and when men have asked you for freedom and justice, you have given them the knout, the ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... suddenly reminded of his wrongs, 'that's right. Exercise a little ordinary care, you ivory-skulled young son of a gun. Do you think Miss Delane is made of twopences? Keep an eye on him,' he urged the manager. 'These young fellows nowadays want someone standing over them with a knout all the time. Be more careful another time, young man. Eleven-fifteen, remember. Make a note of it, or you'll ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... that the Streltsy had broken out again. His vengeance was terrible, for he had a barbarous strain and wielded the axe and knout with his own hands. The rebellious soldiers were deprived of the privileges that had long been theirs, and those who were fortunate enough to escape a cruel death were {140} banished. In future the army was to know the discipline that such soldiers ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... replied the corporal respectfully. "My orders are strict to allow no one to communicate with the prisoners, and the knout is the least I may expect ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Siberia, or the Caucasus—but my world they none of them believed in. It didn't exist they said. It was simply my imagination that had painted it, and they laughed at me and said it was held together by the lashes of the knout, and when those went Russia would go too. As I grew up some of them thought that I was revolutionary, and they tried to make me join their clubs and societies. But those were no use to me. They couldn't give me what I wanted. They wanted to destroy, to assassinate some ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... knout Whip with a lash of leather thongs, formerly used in Russia for flogging criminals. To flog with ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... trembling all over, gasping for breath, moving sideways, with a sort of unnatural spasmodic action—it's awful in Nekrassov. But that's only a horse, and God has given horses to be beaten. So the Tatars have taught us, and they left us the knout as a remembrance of it. But men, too, can be beaten. A well-educated, cultured gentleman and his wife beat their own child with a birch-rod, a girl of seven. I have an exact account of it. The papa was glad that the ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
