BISHOP TIKHON, to whom Stavrogin makes his “Confession,” was conceived by Dostoevsky as one of the principal characters in the great—unnamed—novel in five books, the plan of which he communicated in 1870 to A. N. Maikov. The action of the second book, on which Dostoevsky rested all his hopes, was to take place in a monastery to which a boy, who had committed a criminal offence, had been sent by his parents. He was “fully developed and depraved” (a type, as Dostoevsky says, well known to him), “a little wolf and a nihilist,” who comes in the end to feel the beneficent influence of Bishop Tikhon. “I want to make Tikhon Sadonsky in the second book the central figure,” Dostoevsky wrote, “of course under a different name, but he is also a bishop and will live in a monastery in retirement.... It is no longer a Konstanjhoglo, nor the German (I forget his name) in _Oblomov_, nor the Lopukhovs and Rakhmetovs. True, I shall not create anything, but shall only reveal the actual Tikhon whom I have long since taken to my heart with rapture.” When Dostoevsky later conceived the idea of _The Life of a Great Sinner_, the hero of _The Life_, “sometimes a believer, sometimes an atheist,” had indeed to be spiritually reborn in a monastery under the influence of the “holy and grand” figure of Tikhon, and to issue into life as “the greatest of men.” When Dostoevsky finally decided on his conception of _The Possessed_, his intention was to give a conspicuous place to Tikhon, to whom Stavrogin (the prince) was to give his Confession, and this Confession adds considerably to Peter Stepanovich Verkhovensky’s story about the Petersburg period of Nikolai Vsevolodovich’s life (_The Possessed_, Part I. chap. v.). In the notes published by L. P. Grossman in his book on Dostoevsky (notes taken from the Dostoevsky Note-books in the Historical Museum), there are hints as to Stavrogin’s (prince) meeting with Tikhon, and also as to the subject of their conversation and the crime of which Stavrogin repents in his Confession. Thus Dostoevsky intended the following words to appear in Stavrogin’s “document”: “And I did all this as an aristocrat, an idler, a man uprooted from the ground. I admit, though, that the chief factor was my own wicked will, and had nothing to do with my environment; of course nobody commits such crimes. But all, who are uprooted from the ground, do the same kind of things, although more feeble and watery. Many people do not even notice their nasty acts and think themselves honest.” Tikhon, who in the note appears under the name of “Bishop,” advises that this passage shall be struck out, and Stavrogin replies in a grumbling tone: “I am not a man of letters.”