The doubting element is represented by Ivan Karamazoff, who is tortured by a constant conflict with anxious questions.

In "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor," which the author puts into Ivan's mouth, Dostoevsky's famous and characteristic power of analysis reached its greatest height.
Belonging to no class, and famous for but one book, which does not even count as literature, yet chronologically a member of this period, was Nikolai Gavrilovitch Tchernyshevsky (1828-1889).

After 1863 he exerted an immense influence on the minds of young people of both sexes; and of all the writers of the "storm and stress" period, he is the most interesting, because, in his renowned book, "What Is to Be Done ?" he applied his theories to practical life.

His success was due, not to the practicability of his theories, to his literary qualities, to his art, but to the fact that he contrived to unite two things, each one of which, as a rule, is found in a writer; he simultaneously touched the two most responsive chords in the human heart--the thirst for easy happiness, and the imperative necessity for ascetic self-sacrifice.
Hence, he won a response from the most diametrically conflicting natures.
"What Is to Be Done" is the story of a young girl who, with the greatest improbability, is represented as being of the purest, most lofty character and sentiments, yet the daughter of two phenomenally (almost impossibly) degraded people.

Instead of marrying the rich and not otherwise undesirable man whom her parents urge on her, and who is deeply in love with her, she runs away with her teacher, and stipulates in advance for life in three rooms.