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
The Double (Dostoevsky novel) see many replicas of himself, has a psychotic break, and is dragged off to an asylum by Doctor Rutenspitz. "The Double" is the most Gogolesque of Dostoevsky's works; its subtitle "A Petersburg Poem" echoes that of Gogol's "Dead Souls". Vladimir Nabokov called it a parody of "The Overcoat". Many others have emphasized the relationship between "The Double" and other of Gogol's Petersburg Tales. One contemporary critic, Konstantin Aksakov, remarked that "Dostoevsky alters and wholly repeats Gogol’s phrases." Most scholars, however, recognize The Double as Dostoevsky’s response to or innovation on Gogol’s work. For example, A.L. Bem called "The Double" "a