Fyodor Dostoevsky inspiration for his writing. They continued their trip through Germany, visiting Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Heidelberg and Karlsruhe. They spent five weeks in Baden-Baden, where Dostoevsky had a quarrel with Turgenev and again lost much money at the roulette table. The couple travelled on to Geneva. In September 1867, Dostoevsky began work on "The Idiot", and after a prolonged planning process that bore little resemblance to the published novel, he eventually managed to write the first 100 pages in only 23 days; the serialisation began in "The Russian Messenger "in January 1868. Their first child, Sonya, had been conceived in Baden-Baden, and
Demons (Dostoevsky novel) In Soviet Russia, a number of dissident authors found a prototype for the Soviet police state in the system expounded by Shigalev at the meeting of Pyotr Verkhovensky's revolutionary society. Boris Pasternak, Igor Shafarevich, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, have called Dostoevsky's description of Shigalevism prophetic, anticipating the systematic politicide which followed the October Revolution. Pasternak often used the term "Shigalevism" ("shigalevshchina") to refer to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. According to Richard Pevear, Dostoevsky even presaged the appearance of Lenin himself with his description of the final reader at the ill-fated literary gala: "a man of about forty, bald front and back,