Nechayev's ideas were the basis for Dostoyevsky's "The Demons" (aka "The Possessed"). Dostoyevsky had himself been a young nihilist, and spent ten years in a Siberian labour camp as a result. He came back a determined enemy of everything Nechayev believed. "The Demons" is a "dark comedy, cruelly funny in its depiction of high-minded intellectuals toying with revolutionary notions without understanding anything of what revolution means in practice".