Page:Crime and Punishment - Garnett - Neilson - 1917.djvu/12

Rh imprisonment was followed by three years of compulsory military service, during the last of which he became an under-officer, and married a widow, Madame Isaiev. He now resumed his literary career, publishing "The Injured and the Insulted" in 1860. In 1862 he visited western Europe, but seems to have made little use of his opportunities to study the civilization or national character of other peoples. He was a confirmed gambler, and his conduct at times reduced his wife and himself to an almost desperate situation. She died in 1863, and in the following year he lost his brother Michael, who had shared with him the management of a periodical. Left alone, he was unable to conduct the business affairs connected with it, and only the success of "Crime and Punishment" in 1866 rescued him from ruin. He had now reached the height of his powers, and the novels written after this period are generally regarded as showing an increasing lack of the proportion and restraint which had never been his to any great degree. The most important of the later works are "The Idiot" (1869), "The Possessed" (1873), "The Adult" (1875), and "The Brothers Karamazov" (1881). He married as his second wife, his stenographer, Anna Grigorevna Svitkine, a girl who, though not highly educated, was capable and devoted; and through her energy his last years were passed in comfort and comparative prosperity. He issued periodically "An Author's Note-Book" to which he contributed an amount of autobiographical matter, and through this and other writings in magazines he exercised a good deal of influence. He came finally to have a very high position in the popular regard, and his death in February, 1881, brought forth an expression of public feeling such as St. Petersburg had seldom seen.

Though Dostoevsky did not regard himself as a martyr in his Siberian exile, and, indeed, even seems to have regarded the suffering of that time in the light of expiation—though of what crime it is hard for a non-Russian to see—he bore the marks of the experience through the rest of his life. His face looked aged and sorrow-stricken, and he became bitter, silent, and suspicious. He was subject to epilepsy, and had strange hallucinations. Probably