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I am the second child born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoevsky. My father was a retired military surgeon and he liked more than the occasional drink, thus becoming violent at times. He served as a physician in the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor in Moscow. As a young kid, I enjoyed to pass time with hospital patients and hear their stories in the hospital garden.
My father's despotic nature towards his children inlcuded making my brothers and myself swat flies from his head while he slept making sure that we kept complete silence. Ultimately, my father was killed by his servants because of the way he mistreated and tortured them. He made an indeleble impression in myself and as a result I wrote about him in my later work as an adult.
I studied at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering at the request of my father after my mother's death but I despised math and only studied for my examinations at the institution. My love has always been literature and although I graduated from the academy and began a career in military service I never stopped writting and shortly after my father's tragic death I resigned my commission and devoted myself to literature completely.
I struggled with episodes of epilepsy throughout my life since the age of nine which seemed to be intensified by the gloomy and depressing experiences that as a child I was exposed to. Some doctors that treated me suspect that the frightening experience of my father's death played a vital role in my illness.
I was discharged from the service for family reasons with the rank of liutenant. A year later I wrote my first novel entitled Poor Folk and it was met with great acclaim and I became a literary celebrity at the age of twentyfour.
I was arrested and imprisoned for being a part of a liberal intellectual group that was viewed by the Tsar Nicholas I as a threat to authocracy and so I was sentenced to death along with the other members of the group but after a mock execution I was sent into exile for four years in Siberia and obligated to do hard labor during that time.
After my release from prison I was demoted to private and forced to work for the government for five more years making my way up the ranks until receiving the grade of liutenant once again. There I met Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the wife of an acquaintance who I married after her husband died.
The time that I spent in prison was of great influence in most of my later works, with conversion and Christianity present in almost all aspects of them and almost arguably autobiographical.
I was a great critic of the Socialist and nihilist movements of my time and I tried to reconcile them with conservatism. The Possessed and the House of the Dead are proof of my efforts.
I loved to bet on dominoes and craps but later I kind of developed a problem with the roulette, I frequented casinos and gambled most of my earnings in this game, I was actually under pressure while writing my novel Crime and Punishment because I had already gambled the earnings of that work.
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