Christ did not understand women ... Literary recollections, Belinsky, Granovsky, Herzen .. Turgenev and others.'

Stepan Trofimovich does not merely 'recollect' all these figures of his generation but also represents them because they become part of his own character as well. Dostoevsky's artistic practice, even if he started as here with an identifiable prototype, was never simply to delineate an individual; he allowed himself the greatest freedom to create by amalgamation a 'type' that would portray his conception. Hence Stepan Trofimovich fuses Granovsky with Alexander Herzen, who had taken on Chernyshevsky himself in his slashing article, The Superfluous and the Bilious, and who defended the importance and dignity of art - just as Stepan Trofimovich does in the unsurpassed fête scene of the novel - against what Herzen called 'the Daniels of the Neva'.

If Dostoevsky could immediately grasp the character of Stepan Trofimovich in all the pathetic splendor of his faded glory, it took him a considerable amount of time to arrive at his definitive portrait of Pyotr Verkhovensky. At first, he saw him as another, though much more sinister, incarnation of Bazarov. Now called 'the Student,' he 'appears with the aim of counterfeit money,

proclamations and groups of three .. Troubles his father (Granovsky) by his Nihilism, his sarcasms, contradictions. Simple, straightforward .. Rebuild the world .. Bazarov.' (italics in text) This is very far from being the Pyotr of the novel, who is anything but 'simple, straightforward', though his relation to his father will remain unchanged. Even less like the final Pyotr is another note, in capital letters: 'THE STUDENT AS A HERO OF OUR TIME'. The Student will thus be endowed with some of the Romantic, Byronic traits of Lermontov's Pechorin, the protagonist of his famous novel, A Hero of Our Time. The Prince is still in love with the Ward, and a group of three kill a character called Shaposhnikov (the later Shatov) for fear of being denounced. They attempt to throw the blame on the Prince, between whom and Shaposhnikov there is a supposed mutual hatred because the Prince has dishonored Shaposhnikov's sister (the Ward), etc., etc. (there are a plethora of plot variations that Dostoevsky tries out to motivate the accusation against the Prince). What originated as the idea of an innocent person being accused of the murder eventually becomes that of an innocent person, Kirillov, voluntarily assuming the guilt.

Once such an accusation against the Prince is made, however, this hitherto colorless and conventional Romantic prop 'immediately unravels everything . . obliges Uspensky [a member of the group of three, whose name is that of one of Nechaev's actual accomplices] to confess and firmly denounces to the Governor.' The Prince then marries the Ward, as in Envy, and Dostoevsky notes:

'The principal idea (that is, the pathos of the novel) is the Prince and the Ward - new people who have surmounted temptation and have resolved to begin a new regenerated life.' (italics in text) The problem, though, is that Dostoevsky had not given much thought earlier to the Prince, and now finds himself called upon to provide some adequate motivation for his heroic behavior. 'In general,'

he writes, 'at the end of the novel nobody suspects such a strong and ardent character in the Prince'; but this implies that he would be portrayed as a mediocrity in the eyes of society throughout most of the text. To avoid such an unpromising prospect, Dostoevsky then conceives of him as a haughty aristocrat, contemptuous of all those around him, but then also endows him with a passionate religiosity. 'Despises the atheists to the point of fury, believes furiously. Wishes to be a muzhik; Old Believer.' (italics in text) With this, the political 'pamphlet' begins to move into the realm of the religious thematic to which it had been intended as an alternative.

Dostoevsky had expected that he would be able to write his 'pamphlet-novel' very quickly, but almost a year after beginning he wrote to Strakhov: 'All year I only tore up and made alterations, I blackened so many mounds of paper that I even lost my system of references for what I had written. I have modified the plan not less than ten times, and completely written the first part each time.'

What was causing him so much difficulty? Part of the answer is that, once having begun to provide the Prince with a religious motivation, the character began to deepen in a way that Dostoevsky had not foreseen. Until March 1870, he had clung to his initial plan of the Prince and the Ward as 'new people', who would emerge triumphant from the the machinations of Nechaev and the ordeal of the murder; but suddenly all this is changed. After the Prince unravels the murder plot as before, and declares that 'it is necessary to believe .. [that] Russia and Russian thought will save humanity ..