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
In Return: Just a Book jump across geographical distances and centuries. It employs the real-life story of how the life and work of the great Russian master Dostoevsky inspired the Indian writer, Perumpadavam Sreedharan, to write a novel about him which, incidentally, became a best-seller. Perumpadavam Sreedharan's novel in Malayalam Oru Sankeerthanam Pole (‘Like a Psalm’) was written in 1993 and dealt with 21 days in the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Those were the days Dostoevsky fell in love with Anna Gregoryevna Snitkina, who was his new stenographer taking down his novel The Gambler. In heavy debt to his publisher, Dostoevsky was facing a deadline