Foolishness for Christ appears several times in the novels of Dostoevsky. "The Idiot" explores the ramifications of placing a holy fool (the compassionate and insightful epileptic Prince Myshkin) in a secular world dominated by vanity and desire. According to Joseph Frank "though the gentlemanly and well-educated prince bears no external resemblance to these eccentric figures, he does possess their traditional gift of spiritual insight, which operates instinctively, below any level of conscious awareness or doctrinal commitment." In "Demons", the madwoman Marya Lebyadkina displays many of the attributes of the holy fool, as do the characters of Sofya Marmeladova and Lizaveta in "Crime and
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