Later that morning, Dostoyevsky was told his new sentence: four years hard labor in Siberia, to be followed by a stint in the army. Barely affected, he wrote that day to his brother, “When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness, … then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift … every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If youth only knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn.”
