Fyodor Dostoevsky, 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 Military Engineering Academy in St. Petersburg. On a side note, although it is not known for certain, Mikhail Dostoevsky is believed to have been murdered by his own servants, who reportedly became enraged during one of Mikhail's drunken bouts of violence, restrained him and they poured vodka into his mouth until he drowned. Another story was that Mikhail died of natural causes and a neighboring landowner made up this story about a 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, Dostoevsky and Parricide. Dostoevsky 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 waiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to several years of exile and hard labor in the prison camp of Katorga in Omsk, Siberia. During this period, the incidence of epileptic seizures, to which he was predisposed, increased. He was released from prison in 1854 and required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. Dostoevsky spent the next five years as a corporal (and latterly a lieutenant) in the 7th Line Battalion of the regiment stationed at the Semipalatinsk Fortress in Kazakhstan. Dostoevsky suffered from an acute compulsion to gamble and its consequences. According to one account Crime and Punishment, perhaps his best-known novel, was completed in a mad rush because Dostoevsky urgently needed an advance from his publisher. He had been left virtually penniless after a gambling spree. Dostoevsky simultaneously wrote The Gambler to fulfill an agreement with his publisher Stellovsky that, if he did not receive a new work, he would claim copyright in all of Dostoevsky's writings. Motivated by the dual desire to escape his creditors at home and visit casinos abroad, Dostoevsky traveled to Western Europe. There he attempted to rekindle a romance with Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a young university student with whom he had had an affair several years earlier, but she rejected his marriage proposal..