Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the second of seven children, was born on October 30, 1821 in Moscow, Russia. Shortly after his mother's death from tuberculosis in 1837, he and his brother Mikhail were sent to the Academy of Military Engineering in Saint Petersburg. Furthermore, although not known with certainty, it is believed that Mikhail Dostoyevsky was murdered by his own serfs, who became enraged during one of Mikhail's drunken bouts of violence, held him down and poured money on him. vodka in his mouth until he drowns. Another story was that Mikhail had died of natural causes and a neighboring landowner had invented this story of peasant rebellion so he could buy the estate cheaply. Regardless of what may have actually happened, Sigmund Freud focused on this story in his famous article, Dostoyevsky and Parricide. Dostoyevsky was arrested and imprisoned in 1849 for engaging in revolutionary activity against Tsar Nicholas I. On November 16 of the same year, he was sentenced to death for anti-government activities linked to a liberal intellectual group, the Petrashevsky Circle. After a mock execution in which he was blindfolded and ordered to stand outside in freezing weather while waiting to be shot by firing squad, Dostoyevsky's sentence was commuted to several years of exile and forced labor in a Katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. The incidence of epileptic seizures, to which he was predisposed, increased during this period. He was released from prison in 1854 and had to serve in the Siberian regiment. Dostoyevsky spent the next five years as a corporal (and latterly lieutenant) in the regiment's seventh line battalion stationed at the Semipalatinsk Fortress in Kazakhstan. Dostoyevsky suffered from a severe gambling addiction as well as its consequences. According to one account, Crime and Punishment, perhaps his best-known novel, was completed in a mad rush because Dostoyevsky urgently needed an advance from his publisher. He had found himself virtually penniless after a gambling trip. Dostoyevsky wrote The Gambler simultaneously in order to satisfy a deal with his publisher Stellovsky who, had he not received a new work, would have claimed the rights to it. author on all of Dostoyevsky's writings. Motivated by the twin desires of escaping his domestic creditors and visiting casinos abroad, Dostoyevsky traveled to Western Europe. There he attempted to rekindle a romance with Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a young student with whom he had had an affair several years before, but she refused his marriage proposal..