The significance of this novel autobiographically is undeniable. Strakhov has already called Dostoevsky the most subjective of writers. A great many things show that in _The Life of a Great Sinner_ Dostoevsky intended to dissect his soul, to open its wounds, to free himself from the tormenting impulses of his _ego_, to chastise the outbreaks of his spiteful, vicious thoughts, to lay bare before himself the secret places of his soul, and to bring out into the light of day that darkness, so as to disperse it—like Gogol, who fought the defects of his own spirit in describing the characters in his books. The hero of _The Life_ is not of course a portrait of the writer; the details of the description are invented,[107] but _The Life_ gives hints of the most interesting kind for an understanding of the writer’s character. Footnote 107: Evidently Dostoevsky got some material for his “model” in I. N. Shidlovsky, a friend of his youth, who serves also as the prototype of Stavrogin in the first stages of work upon him. The whole background in the first part is steeped in the raw material of real life, of recollections of the writer’s actual experiences. “Brother Misha”—is he not Michael, one of Dostoevsky’s younger brothers? Sushar is Nikolai Ivanovich Souchard, the French teacher who gave lessons to the Dostoevsky children. _Chermak_ is Leontii Ivanovich Chermak, in whose boarding-school Fedor Dostoevsky spent the years 1834-37. _Umnov_ is a playmate of the Dostoevsky brothers who used to come to their house, the Vanichka Umnov who brought them various books and books in manuscript (for instance _The House of the Mad_, by Voyekov, etc.).