Dostoevski had a tremendous capacity for enthusiasm. As a boy, he was terribly shaken by the death of Pushkin, and he never lost his admiration for the founder of Russian literature. He read the great classics of antiquity and of modern Europe with wild excitement, and wrote burning eulogies in letters to his friends. The flame of his literary ambition was not quenched by the most abject poverty, nor by the death of those whom he loved most intensely. After his first wife died, he suffered agonies of grief, accentuated by wretched health, public neglect, and total lack of financial resources. But chill penury could not repress his noble rage. He was always planning and writing new novels, even when he had no place to lay his head.