Chapter IX

. (At Tikhon’s) in view when he says to Katkov, in his letter of October 8, 1870, that in _The Possessed_, which was at that time being published in the _Russkìi Vèstnik_, he “wants for the first time ... to deal with a certain group of people which has as yet been little dealt with in literature. I take Tikhon Sadonsky to be the ideal of such a character. He too is a priest living in a monastery in retirement. With him I confront the hero of my novel and bring them together for a time.”[95] That is, up to the end of writing the novel, Dostoevsky himself considered that