If Christianity often went by default in educated Russian families in Dostoevsky's day (as it did, for example, in the Herzen, Tolstoi and Turgenev families), this was certainly not the case with the Dostoevskys. In 1873, now aged 52, Dostoevsky recalled that he had been brought up in a pious Russian family and had been familiar with the Gospels from an early age (XXI, 134). Both factors — the early memories and the pious family environment — were vitally important to his development. As a child, he would sometimes be called on to recite prayers in the presence of guests. His brother Andrei remembered that they would attend mass every Sunday, preceded by vespers the previous night, in the Church attached to the Moscow hospital where their father worked as a doctor. They would do the same thing on Saints' days as well. Their parents were evidently not just conventional observers of religious practice. Both, especially their mother, said Andrei, were deeply religious: every significant event in the life of the family would be marked by the appropriate religious observance. Dostoevsky himself received religious instruction from the deacon at the hospital. Before he even learned to read, his imagination had been fired by events from the ancient lives of saints (XXV, 215), who provided models of asceticism, compassion, suffering, humility and self-sacrifice, based on the example of Christ.