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
The Double (Dostoevsky novel) for total freedom of expression becomes a self-destructive impulse.’" This individualistic focus is often contextualized by scholars, such as Joseph Frank, who emphasize that Golyadkin's identity is crushed by the bureaucracy and stifling society he lives in. The final context of understanding for "The Double" that transcends all three categories is the ongoing debate about its literary quality. While the majority of scholars have regarded it as somewhere from "too fragile to bear its significance" to utterly unreadable, there have been two notable exceptions. Dostoevsky wrote in A Writer's Diary that "Most decidedly, I did not succeed with that novel;