The principal character of the novel was meant to be “a Russian man of our society, _not young_, not highly educated, but not uneducated, of some standing, and _suddenly_, when already on in years, he loses his belief in God. All his life he was occupied with his business, and never got out of the rut, and distinguished himself in nothing until the age of forty-five. (The solution of the problem is psychological: deep feeling, a man, and a Russian.) The loss of his belief in God affects him tremendously (indeed, the action in the novel, the setting, are huge, Dostoevsky wrote on Dec. 11, 1868, to A. Maikov). He looks about everywhere among the younger generation, among atheists, Slavophils and Westerners, among Russian fanatics and hermits, among priests; by the way, he gets stuck fast on the hook of a Jesuit propagandist, a Pole; from him he descends into the abyss of Khlistovshchina [a fanatical Russian sect], and at last he finds Christ and Russia, the Russian Christ and the Russian God.” “Two or three characters have shaped very well in my head, among them a Catholic enthusiast, a priest (of the kind of Fanier’s St. Francis),” Dostoevsky wrote to Madame S. A. Ivanov-Khmirov on March 8, 1869, confident that his novel is “a real poem”; “it must have a great effect on account of its theme”; “it will attract the reader involuntarily.” But that novel was not written—new ideas crowded in.... Yet the mysterious threads of the creative idea were not torn. They are combined in other entanglements, in another novel of which Dostoevsky wrote to Strakhov on March 24, 1870, that its “idea has been alive in me for three years.”[101] That new novel was intended for the magazine _Sarya_. The author wrote that the “whole plan of the novel was ‘ripe.’” “During three years a great deal has become ripe”; “the idea of the novel demanded a large volume”; in its bulk at any rate, the same as Tolstoi’s _War and Peace_. “The novel will consist of five very long stories (about fifteen printed folios each). The stories are quite separate from one another, so that they could even be sold separately, and published in various magazines (except the two stories in the middle),” so he wrote to A. Maikov on March 25, 1870. “The common title will unite them into a whole novel.” Footnote 101: “This future novel has been tormenting me now for more than three years.”