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Beginning the Writing Life After several petitions and a long wait, Dostoevsky was in 1859 permitted to return to St. Petersburg. He returned to a political climate very different from the one he had left. Tsar Nicholas was dead, and the new, more liberal reign of Alexander II had begun. Alexander's government was more responsive to public opinion. A freer press had been established. The liberation of the serfs was imminent. Inspired by his brother's return from exile, Mikhail Dostoevsky determined to start the magazine Vremya. Dostoevsky - who had continued to write throughout the second part of his exile -- would be the chief contributor. Vremya was designed to advance the pochva movement. The movement was based on yet another idealistic notion of the Russian peasant and suggested that Russia might be saved by a return to her roots. Followers of the movement believed that class antagonism did not exist in Russia, and that all groups - rural and urban, peasants and nobility - could join together to govern the nation. Dostoevsky liked this movement because it championed the moral superiority of the Russian people - an idea that would grow stronger in every year of Dostoevsky's life. Dostoevsky's writings for Vremya were concerned with trying to unite Russia. He was sympathetic to the disenfranchised people and their anger, and he encouraged love and compassion for the oppressed. In Vremya, Dostoevsky would also publish the aforementioned Notes from the House of the Dead, which reported on his prison years, painting portraits of his fellow prisoners as capable of rehabilitation and spiritual regeneration. This theme of the essential goodness in the hearts of all sinners would recur in many of Dostoevsky's works, including Brothers Karamazov. Meanwhile, in opposition to utopian journals like Vremya, revolutionary ideas were stirring. In May 1862, a revolutionary document appeared at Dostoevsky's door, calling for a social and democratic government and for the destruction of the tsar and his family. Fires broke out all over St. Petersburg, and Vremya was investigated. Alexander II decided to let the magazine continue to operate, but he kept it under secret investigation. The reprieve would be short lived. Early in 1863, an insurrection occurred in Poland, which the Russians quickly put down. The question on the minds of all Russian intellectuals was: should Poland be occupied or independent? For three months Vremya kept quiet. Then they published "The Fateful Question," which argued for a controversial but spiritual solution: the question of Poland's fate should be decided by determining which of the two countries, Poland or Russia, was spiritually superior. The article was in fact a call to Russia to act in morally and spiritually superior ways, so that it might justify its occupation of Poland. However, the Tsar perceived the article as defiantly pro-Polish. They had had enough of Vremya. In 1863, the journal was shut down. The year that followed the closing of Vremya dealt three terrible blows to Dostoevsky. First, he and his brother would attempt a second magazine, Epokha. The journal promised great things for Dostoevsky, whose brilliant Notes from the Underground began serial publication in its first issue. In Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky had created an anti-hero: a cynical, self-loathing Russian man who wants to be better than he is. He can't achieve his desire, however, because his world is corrupt and will not provide him an opportunity for goodness. Though this work would survive as one of Dostoevsky's masterpieces, the magazine that published it would not be so fortunate. Epokha would fail after just a few months of publication. Dostoevsky's bitterness over the collapse of the magazine and its utopian ideals was made more acute by the fact that his wife Maria was losing her battle with consumption. Near the end, she began to hallucinate that devils were occupying the corners of her room. She would not rest until the doctors opened the windows and made a show of letting the devils out. Spring only worsened her disease. In April she had a terrible hemorrhage from which she would not recover. She died on April 15, 1864. Though he had not been happy with Maria, Dostoevsky had loved her and, perhaps more important, he had suffered for her. In the end he came to feel that the suffering he had done in Maria's name had given his life meaning and weight. He grieved her. The third embittering loss was still to come. Not long after Dostoevsky buried his wife, he found out that his brother, Mikhail, was very ill. Mikhail's liver was failing him. Despite warnings, Mikhail refused to pay attention to his diagnosis. He did not take the rest cure, nor was he willing to stop working. In a few short months the disease ravaged him, and he died on July 10, 1864, leaving a family and a host of debts behind. In losing his brother, Dostoevsky had lost an important partner: his brother had worked for his return from exile, and he had run the literary magazines in which Dostoevsky published. Without Mikhail, there would be no more magazines. Further, there would be no more income for his brother's family. Dostoevsky felt responsible for his brother's children and for the very large publishing debts his brother had accrued. The events of 1864 had embittered Dostoevsky in a way that his time in prison had not. In order to escape his bitterness (and the financial woes that accompanied it), Dostoevsky lost himself in romances with several complicated but unattainable women. He traveled. And he began to work on a novel, the idea for which had occurred to him half a decade before. This novel was to be about murder: its causes and its consequences. For the novel, Dostoevsky envisioned a proud and intelligent protagonist, impoverished by circumstance, who commits a "perfect" crime and then suffers from an attack of a conscience that he did not know he had. Furthermore, the book would reflect Dostoevsky's long-standing interest in the nature of crime and criminals, as well as the social problems caused by the financial crisis and extreme poverty of Russia of the 1860s. The book was, of course, Crime and Punishment. In it, Dostoevsky would explore many of the same themes that he would take up in Brothers Karamazov, including the ideas that:
Read on: Love and Marriage 
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