Nikolay Speshnev

While abroad he studied a number of political philosophers including Feuerbach, Marx and Proudhon, and was influenced by the amoralist egoism of Max Stirner.

[1][2] In Dresden and Paris he associated with Polish émigrés opposed to Russian rule, which piqued his interest in the techniques of underground conspiracy.

The poet Pleshcheyev, a fellow former member of the Petrashevsky Circle, recommended him to Dobrolyubov, writing that Speshnev was "a man very close to my heart...He is in the highest degree an upright character with a will of iron.

He and Petrashevsky held meetings with charismatic Siberian figure Rafael Chernosvitov to discuss the possibility of co-ordinated armed revolts.

Speshnev's associate, the army lieutenant Nikolay Mombelli, initiated a series of conversations promoting the idea of organized infiltration of the bureaucracy to counter government measures.

According to Dostoevsky, the original purpose of this group had been to publish a literary almanac, but Speshnev follower Pavel Filippov convinced them to actively produce and distribute anti-government propaganda.

The first, a sketch entitled "A Soldier's conversation" written by another Speshnev follower, the army officer Nikolay Grigoryev, was an exhortation of the popular uprising in France aimed at a peasant audience.

However, Dostoevsky's reading of Belinsky's anti-establishment Letter to Gogol produced a response of universal approval and excitement that transcended the deepening divisions.

Among the documents found in Speshnev's apartment after his arrest was a prototype 'oath of allegiance', in which the signer would pledge obedience to a central committee and a willingness to be available at any time for whatever violent means were deemed necessary for the success of the cause.

[14] Although Dostoevsky was a devout Christian and never particularly sympathetic to the socialist cause, he was nonetheless an active member of Speshnev's secret revolutionary society and had no illusions about its aims.

The apparent incongruity can be partly explained by Speshnev's charismatic personality and Dostoevsky's compassion for the terrible sufferings of the Russian peasantry,[15] but there were other factors at play as well.

Speshnev despised what he saw as Petrashevsky's passivity in matters of social change, while Dostoevsky was repelled by his scornfully dismissive attitude toward Christianity.

The aim of the society was "to set up a secret printing press" and work "to produce a revolution in Russia", and Maykov recalls an overwrought Dostoevsky "lavishing all his eloquence on the sanctity of this action, on our obligation to save the fatherland, etc.

"[17][18] Dostoevsky's friend and doctor, Stepan Yanovsky, reports that in the months leading up to the arrests his patient became anxious, irritable and melancholy, and often complained of giddiness.

"[20] Stavrogin, like Speshnev, is a mysterious aristocratic figure moving in revolutionary circles, and a Byronic type who holds a strange fascination for everyone with whom he is involved.

[25] Frank argues that the somewhat diabolical Stavrogin is not to be identified with Speshnev the man, but is rather a kind of imagined non plus ultra of his atheistic moral-philosophical ideas, particularly those derived from Feuerbach and Max Stirner.

Like Stirner, he argues that since such abstractions have no real authority over the individual ego, it follows that there are no objective criteria for anything at all: "Such categories as beauty and ugliness, good and evil, noble and base, always were and always will remain a matter of taste."