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
In Return: Just a Book jump across geographical distances and centuries. It employs the real-life story of how the life and work of the great Russian master Dostoevsky inspired the Indian writer, Perumpadavam Sreedharan, to write a novel about him which, incidentally, became a best-seller. Perumpadavam Sreedharan's novel in Malayalam Oru Sankeerthanam Pole (‘Like a Psalm’) was written in 1993 and dealt with 21 days in the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Those were the days Dostoevsky fell in love with Anna Gregoryevna Snitkina, who was his new stenographer taking down his novel The Gambler. In heavy debt to his publisher, Dostoevsky was facing a deadline