Nikolay Speshnev chapter of "Demons" when, in the midst of confessing to a terrible crime, he formulates the guiding idea of his life: "that I neither know nor feel good and evil and that I have not only lost any sense of it, but that there is neither good nor evil (which pleased me), and that it is just a prejudice." It is speculated that Dostoevsky also refers to Speshnev on one occasion in "The Idiot". The central character, Prince Myshkin, recounts a long conversation with "a certain S—", an erudite and well-bred man, on the subject of atheism. Nikolay Speshnev Nikolay
Fyodor Dostoevsky dogmatic content and with a strong emphasis on giving Christian love a social application." This book may have prompted his later interest in Christian socialism. Through the literature of Hoffmann, Balzac, Eugène Sue and Goethe, Dostoevsky created his own belief system, similar to Russian sectarianism and the Old Belief. After his arrest, aborted execution and subsequent imprisonment, he focused intensely on the figure of Christ and on the New Testament, the only book allowed in prison. In a January 1854 letter to the woman who had sent him the New Testament, Dostoevsky wrote that he was a "child of unbelief