Fodor Dostoevsky's life often resembles the life of a tragic character in his novels. Dostoevsky was the second son of a Moscow physician apparently as unloving as he was unloved-he was murdered by his own serfs in 1844. Dostoevsky's education at the St. Petersburg Military Engineer's School hardly seems the type of education that would produce the writer whose brooding philosophic excursions into the spiritual and psychological depths of the human soul would make him one of the most controversial artists of his day and the most frequently read Russian novelist. Dostoevsky was, however, an insatiable reader, an intense analyst of human character, and compassionate and introspective individual who, a even in his passionate youth, displayed the"purity of heart and nobility of mind" his daughter Aimee speaks of in her biography of her father.