Dostoevsky married a young widow while still in exile. After his exile, he served four more years as an army private, was pardoned, and left Siberia to resume his literary career. He soon became one of the great spokesmen of Russia. Then in 1866, he published his first great masterpiece, Crime and Punishment.
After finishing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky married again and went abroad, hoping to find peace from numerous creditors and also hoping to begin a new novel. The peace of mind Dostoevsky longed for he never found; instead, he accumulated even more guilt in addition to his ever-mounting debts from gambling. The novel Dostoevsky composed abroad was The Idiot, the story of a wholly good and beautiful soul. In his notes, Dostoevsky sometimes called his hero "Prince Christ"; he hoped to create a man who could not hate and who was incapable of base sensuality. The novel is another of his masterpieces, a fascinating, intense study of the destructive power of good.
Dostoevsky's last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, was his great masterwork and is today considered a masterpiece of Western literature. Only a year after its publication, Dostoevsky was dead, but already he was acknowledged to be one of Russia's greatest writers.
