ABSTRACT
Dostoevsky's involvement with the Petrashevsky circle and the Speshnyov conspiracy included some potential contacts in Moscow. At a crucial meeting at Petrashevsky's, Golovinsky, attacked Petrashevsky over his insistence on the primacy of legal reform, and declared himself in favour of immediate peasant insurrection, with a transitional military or clerical dictatorship to bring it about. The police spy Antonelli recorded that Dostoevsky sided with Golovinsky on this issue. Dostoevsky rejected the relevance of Western socialist creeds pointing out that the desperate proletariat of the West might seek any appropriate banner under which to fight against the powers that be, whereas in Russia such proletarian conditions had not yet arisen. Maikov, Dostoevsky and the Beketovs were influenced by French Utopian Socialism which at that time owed much to St Simon's 'Le nouveau christianisme'. Dostoevsky's attitude towards the Westernisers, the privileged, supercilious generation of the 1840s, was "profoundly influenced" by his early relations with the 'Pleiade'.
