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) fear. But Stavrogin himself does not even believe in his own atheism, and as Shatov and Tikhon recognize, drives himself further into evil out of a desire to torture himself and avoid the truth. Kirillov sums up Stavrogin's dilemma thus: "If Stavrogin believes, then he doesn't believe that he believes. But if he doesn't believe, then he doesn't believe that he doesn't believe." Dostoevsky saw Russia's growing suicide rate as a symptom of the decline of religious faith and the concomitant disintegration of social institutions like the family. Self-destruction as an end result of atheism or loss of faith is