 After appeals elsewhere failed, Dostoevsky turned as a last resort to the publisher Mikhail Katkov and sought an advance on a proposed contribution.He offered his story or novella (at the time he was not thinking of a novel) for publication in Katkov's monthly journal "The Russian Messenger"—a prestigious publication of its kind, and the outlet for both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy.Dostoevsky, having carried on quite bruising polemics with Katkov in the early 1860s, had never published anything in its pages before.