and three years as a private soldier, having married, in the meantime, the widow of one of his fellow-prisoners.
When he returned, in 1859, after ten years, his deliverance was but the beginning of a new life of ceaseless privation and suffering. Unpractical, improvident, generous, ruined by journalistic ventures, in the grip of epilepsy and of the moneylender, not a single day was he free from harassing cares, and twice he had to fly abroad to escape imprisonment for debt. When national recognition came at last, when his later books had made him the cynosure of the younger generation, it was too late. His constitution was irretrievably shattered. He died in 1881, one month before the assassination of the Tsar—a turning-point in Russian history. The funeral of Dostoevsky was the occasion of a demonstration unique perhaps in the history of literature. A procession of a hundred thousand mourners and spectators, princes of the Imperial Court, Cabinet Ministers, students, tradesmen, and artisans conducted to his last resting-place the former Siberian convict, the bankrupt journalist, the idol of the Russian people.
