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
Demons (Dostoevsky novel) darkness of Stavrogin is confronted by the radiance of Bishop Tikhon, a character inspired by Tikhon of Zadonsk. Of Pyotr Verkhovensky, Dostoevsky said that the character is not a portrait of Nechayev but that "my aroused mind has created by imagination the person, the type, that corresponds to the crime... To my own surprise he half turns out to be a comic figure." Most of the nihilist characters associated with Pyotr Verkhovensky were based on individuals who appeared in the transcripts of the trial of the Nechayevists, which were publicly available and studied by Dostoevsky. The character of Shatov represents