It was said that the central hero in this work was a real person. Specifically, they said that the great author embodies in his hero Verkhovensky, an extremist murderer, supposedly wanting to strike at the anarchist beliefs of his time, who, of course, represented a hodgepodge of ideologues without any coherence.The truth for us is that the author had different visions when he wrote his work. We know that he saw the need for man to be reborn. He could not bear the idea that man had to distance himself from God and the Christian faith. The ideological upheavals of the time left him essentially indifferent, but analyzing the factor "man" he came to conclusions that inevitably led to the creation of heroes who could not but represent "real" characteristic types. 

This phenomenon is the rule. In every work, the heroes, good or bad, represent some real presence, in other words, every hero of a novel has a "double," if not literally a unique "prototype" of the creator author, but even in this case the rule is essentially not annulled.