III.

Imprisonment and Exile

In The House of the Dead (1861-1862), published in Vremya (“Time”), the journal he founded in 1861, Dostoyevsky described the sadistic beatings, the filthy conditions, and the total lack of privacy among the convicts, who treated him, “a gentleman”, with animosity. He also recorded the change in his spiritual and psychological outlook. His reading, limited to the Bible, led to the rejection of the Western-inspired atheistic socialism of his youth. Christ's teachings became for him the supreme affirmation of the ethical ideal and of the possibility of salvation through suffering. The brutality of the hardened criminals, alternating with displays of courage, generosity, and sensitive feelings, deepened the writer's insight into the complexity of human behaviour. Released from prison in 1854, Dostoyevsky was sent to a garrison town near Mongolia. Five years later he received permission to return to St Petersburg with a young, consumptive widow he had married. The marriage was not a happy one.