“It will soon be ten months since I took up my new life. As for the other four years, I look upon them as a period when I was buried alive and closed in a coffin. What terrible years! I cannot, my friend, tell you how terrible. Unspeakable suffering without end, for every hour, every minute lay heavy on my soul. During the whole of these four years, not a moment but what I was conscious of my prison walls.”[43] But, immediately after, watch how far his optimism rises above it all: “I was so busy all summer that I had scarcely time for sleep. But now I have grown used to things. My health too has improved slightly. And, hope not wholly lost, I can look at the future with moderate fortitude.”[44] Three letters from the same period were given in the _Niva_, April, 1898. Of these the French edition of Dostoevsky’s _Correspondence_ includes the first only. In one (August 21, 1855) there is reference to a letter of the previous October, which has not been traced. “When, in my letter of last October, I repeated my complaints at your silence, you answered that these had made very painful reading for you. Oh, Mysha! for the love of God, bear me no ill-will; remember my loneliness. I am like a pebble cast aside. I’ve always been of a gloomy, sickly, susceptible disposition. I am myself thoroughly convinced I was in the wrong.” Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg on November 29, 1859. At Semipalatinsk he had married the widow of a deportee, mother of a growing son whose intelligence seemingly was less than mediocre. Dostoevsky adopted the boy, for whom he made himself answerable. He had a perfect mania for assuming burdens. “He was but little altered,” his friend Miliukov tells us. “His mien is more confident than of yore, and his features have lost none of the energy they used to express.” In 1861 he published _Insulted and Injured_; in 1861-2 his _Memories of the House of the Dead_. _Crime and Punishment_, the first of his great novels, did not appear till 1866. During the years 1863-1865, he busied himself actively with a review. One of his letters speaks so eloquently of the years between that I must read further passages: this is, I think, the last time I shall quote to you from his correspondence! This particular letter is dated March 31, 1865. “I am going to recount my life during this time. Not the whole of it, though. That is impossible, for in such a case one never tells in letters the essential facts. There are things I cannot narrate simply. That’s why I shall confine myself to a summary account of the past year of my life.