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
Fyodor Dostoevsky dogmatic content and with a strong emphasis on giving Christian love a social application." This book may have prompted his later interest in Christian socialism. Through the literature of Hoffmann, Balzac, Eugène Sue and Goethe, Dostoevsky created his own belief system, similar to Russian sectarianism and the Old Belief. After his arrest, aborted execution and subsequent imprisonment, he focused intensely on the figure of Christ and on the New Testament, the only book allowed in prison. In a January 1854 letter to the woman who had sent him the New Testament, Dostoevsky wrote that he was a "child of unbelief