After the commutation of the death sentence, Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia and during the years there, he changed his entire outlook on life. During this time, amidst horrible living conditions — stench, ugliness, hardened criminals, and filth — he began to re-examine his values. There was total change within the man. He experienced his first epileptic seizure and he began to reject a heretofore blind acceptance of new ideas that Russia was absorbing. He underwent a spiritual regeneration so profound that he emerged with a prophetic belief in the sacred mission of the Russian people. He believed that the salvation of the world was in the hands of the Russian folk and that eventually Russia would rise to dominate the world. It was also in prison that Dostoevsky formulated his well-known theories about the necessity of suffering. Suffering became the means by which man's soul is purified; it expiated sin; it became man's sole means of salvation.
When Dostoevsky left Siberia, he resumed his literary career and soon became one of the great spokesmen of Russia. Then, in 1866, he published his first masterpiece, Crime and Punishment. The novel is the story of Raskolnikov, a university student who commits a senseless murder to test his moral and metaphysical theories concerning the freedom of the will. The novel exhibits all the brilliant psychological analyses of character for which Dostoevsky was to become famous and incorporates the theme of redemption through suffering.
Most of Dostoevsky's adult life was plagued with marital problems, epileptic seizures and, most of all, by creditors. Often he had to compose novels at top speed in order to pay his many mounting debts, but by the end of his life, he was sufficiently free of worry so that he was able to devote all his energy to the composition of The Brothers Karamazov and at his death, only a year after the publication of this masterwork, he was universally acknowledged to be one of Russia's greatest writers.
