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) for total freedom of expression becomes a self-destructive impulse.’" This individualistic focus is often contextualized by scholars, such as Joseph Frank, who emphasize that Golyadkin's identity is crushed by the bureaucracy and stifling society he lives in. The final context of understanding for "The Double" that transcends all three categories is the ongoing debate about its literary quality. While the majority of scholars have regarded it as somewhere from "too fragile to bear its significance" to utterly unreadable, there have been two notable exceptions. Dostoevsky wrote in A Writer's Diary that "Most decidedly, I did not succeed with that novel;