The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by the work. In 1867, his wife had to drag him away from the panel lest its grip on him induce an epileptic fit. Dostoevsky saw in Holbein an impulse similar to one of his own main literary preoccupations: the pious desire to confront Christian faith with everything that negated it, in this case the laws of nature and the stark reality of death. In his 1869 novel "The Idiot", the character Prince Myshkin, having viewed a copy of the painting in the home of Rogozhin, declares that it has the power to make the viewer lose his faith. The
Prince Myshkin dramatic convergence of multiple independent voices and perspectives rather than simply being a monological recounting of the event by a narrator. Dostoevsky makes Prince Myshkin a character whose voice is capable of "actively and confidently interfering in the interior dialogue of the other person." He is thus significant not merely to the plot, but to the very consciousness of the individual characters. His insight, compassion, sincerity, candour, disinclination to judge and lack of normal social egoism awaken a responsive consciousness in most of the people with whom he engages, and serve to disrupt the habitual flow of their self-centred thoughts