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
What Is to Be Done? (novel) work for the revolution, and ruthlessly subordinate everything in their lives to the cause, the work furnished a blueprint for the asceticism and dedication unto death which became an ideal of the early socialist underground of the Russian Empire. The book is perhaps better known in the English-speaking world for the responses it created than as a novel in its own right. Fyodor Dostoevsky mocked the utilitarianism and utopianism of the novel in his 1864 novella "Notes from Underground", as well as in his 1872 novel "Demons". Leo Tolstoy wrote a different "What Is To Be Done?", published in 1886,