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
Demons (Dostoevsky novel) into a single larger scale project, which became "Demons". As work progressed, the liberal and nihilistic characters began to take on a secondary role as Dostoevsky focused more on the amoralism of a charismatic aristocratic figure—Nikolai Stavrogin. Although a merciless satirical attack on various forms of radical thought and action, "Demons" does not bear much resemblance to the typical anti-nihilist novels of the era (as found in the work of Nikolai Leskov for example), which tended to present the nihilists as deceitful and utterly selfish villains in an essentially black and white moral world. Dostoevsky's nihilists are portrayed in their