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) a Russian nationalist response to socialist ideas, and was initially based on Nechayev's victim Ivanov, but later on the contemporary slavophile ideas of Danilevsky and to some extent on Dostoevsky's own reformed ideas about Russia. Stepan Verkhovensky began as a caricature of Granovsky, and retained the latter's neurotic susceptibilities, academic interests and penchant for writing long confessional letters, but the character was grounded in the idealistic tendencies of many others from the generation of the 1840s, including Herzen, Belinsky, Chaadaev, Turgenev and Dostoevsky himself. Liberal figures like Stepan Trofimovich, Varvara Petrovna, Liputin, Karmazinov and the Von Lembkes, and minor authority