On November 21, 1869 Ivan Ivanov a student attending Petrov Agricultural Academy was murdered after being lured into retrieving a printing press. This came after Ivanov chose to protest against the nihilist dictator Sergei Nechaev. In Dostoevsky’s works preceding Demons the writer created fictional characters that as Joseph Frank put it “could be considered ‘historical’ in a broad sense” but with Demons, the confrontation of Ivanov became the initial base of the novel.