I talked to Corey Madore, a graduate student studying art history at the University of Guelph, about Hans Holbein’s “The Dead Christ.” A fairly grotesque 16th century depiction of Christ in his tomb, that Dostoevsky wrote several scenes about in The Idiot.

Mike: What would you say your specialty is, in regards to art history?

Corey: Medieval, as a period, it would be medieval, but then as an interest it would be… institutional. So museums, art institutions.

Mike: I guess we should talk about Holbein. Who Dostoevsky loved so much.

Mike: So his first interaction with this painting was one of surprise I think. The Russian Orthodox depiction of Christ tends to be of the more “beautiful” or “beatific” Christ as opposed to the more Catholic version of the…

Corey: I don’t know if this is the Catholic version of the Christ, as much as a Reformation depiction. Because he (Holbein) was working in the northern Renaissance, after the Protestant Reformation that’s where that’s going to be the most immediate, visible influence.

Corey: So that’s (“The Dead Christ”) some of his early work. Later he was doing Tudor portraits.

Mike: So the religious work…

Corey: That’s a subject adaptation, out of necessity, the Tudor portraits. There was no work after the Reformation brought on the Iconoclasm.

Mike: I guess what I’m getting at is, is he… sincerely a person of faith? Because Dostoevsky saw something in that painting and he sort of… I think he described Holbein as a kindred soul to him, because it does this thing that he does in his own work which is sort of confronting Christianity with everything that negates it, which is the humanity…

Corey: Well in that way, that work would say that I think. Or could. Because it’s the complete dead Christ before the resurrection. Decaying body. You know they thought that he (Holbein) actually pulled a body out of the Rhine, and used it as a model.

Mike: (laughing) That’s very ghoulish.

Corey: It’s insane, and it’s not even really necessary at that time. It’s not like he wouldn’t have seen a corpse.

Mike: Right 16^th century Europe…

Corey: Right you confront death in a different way at that time.

Corey: So to say that he would be religious, you have to think in the larger context of the period, it would have been odd to not be religious in Europe.

Mike: Yeah I guess by Dostoevsky’s time it was more of a pressing question, because nihilism and atheism were coming into fashion which… disturbed him so… forcefully (both laughing).

(At this point I show Corey a picture of the painting on my phone, so we can talk about the specific, unusual physical characteristics.)

Mike: The frame is a little coffin-y, is that something Holbein would have… Would a gallery go so far as to add a thematically relevant frame?

Corey: I mean… maybe. But there’s other stuff going on in the frame. There’s figures (carved) in there. That’s the thing there’s kind of a mystery about what the heck it was made for. Whether or not it was a commission, if it was made for himself. Or if it was a commission, what was it made for. What was the purpose?

Corey: Is it hanging somewhere, or is it going somewhere. When you consider the dimensions, it’s interesting. It’s possible that it’s for a casket. You’d have to be pretty wealthy but…

Mike: There’s something I’m missing I think. I mean I’m trying to imagine Dostoevsky looking at it and I’m seeing the first part, where the physical… the effect of earthly life on… but I’m not seeing the second part. Where he looks at that and has his faith refreshed somehow.

Corey: I’m not sure that’s in the painting, but that would come from his own theological understanding of it. There’s something being revealed about the nature of death. Before being resurrected.

Corey: I don’t know anything about the book but…

Mike: Well that’s the reason I wanted to talk to you about it, it’s very unusual that he (Dostoevsky) was so… it comes up three or four times in the book and Dostoevsky doesn’t really talk about visual art at all (in other books), he’s completely obsessed with his own stuff, you know, he’s always talking about the world of writers. But he really loved that painting.

Corey: So it must be some kind of response. He has some kind of profound experience.

Corey: What does that say about his… what else has he experienced. To see death and decay and have a different response to it than the nihilist response. But that’s pushed aside (by Holbein) as assumed knowledge. To understand that it’s Christ.

Corey: His profound experience of this work could be Dostoevsky confronting that moment, the true nature of the death, and being unable to escape that understanding. It’s not a passing thing. He doesn’t have a turn of faith, or a sense of overwhelming guilt.

I thanked Corey for his time and his insight toward understanding our most treasured megalomaniac, but Dostoevsky’s obsession with this particular painting still eludes me; post in the comments if you have any ideas.

For most of his life, as far as I can tell, the famously standoffish, narcissistic  curmudgeon, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, didn’t really care about anything that didn’t directly somehow involve either himself, the serfs (until they were freed in 1861), or the Russian Orthodox Church.

Dostoevsky didn’t engage with visual arts in any real way beyond a general and fairly robust and unshakable appreciation for Russian culture (a Slavophile through and through).

Dresden

Things changed abruptly in April of 1867. After finishing work on The Gambler, Dostoevsky was effectively exiled from his native Russia when (and the irony was obvious to pretty much everybody but him) two of his creditors threatened him with debtors prison. What his wife, Anna Grigorievna, would describe in her diaries as their “European vacation,” began in Dresden.

The couple was living frugally, for obvious reasons, and one of their few diversions (other than walking around and sitting in public parks), was visiting the local art museum – the Gemäldegalerie.

His wife described the single-minded Dostoevsky as hurrying around the gallery, stopping only to look at his favourite pictures, which were – unsurprisingly – almost exclusively religious images. But here in Dresden the images of Christ were unlike the formalized iconic images that he would have encountered before, in the Russian tradition. These were images of a real human being upon whose body real pain was being inflicted. Dostoevsky’s ideas for his next novel were beginning to take shape.

Holbein’s “Dead Christ”

By August of that year, the couple had moved on to Switzerland, where they visited the Basel Museum for the first time. It was here that Dostoevsky got his first glimpse at Hans Holbein’s mid-16th century work, “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb.”

The work had a profound effect on him. As Anna describes it in her memoirs:

“The painting made an overwhelming impression on my husband, and he stood before it as if dumbstruck… When I returned some fifteen or twenty minutes later, I found my husband still standing in front of the painting as if riveted to it. There was in his agitated face that expression as of fright which I had seen more than once in the first moments of an epileptic fit.”

Dostoevsky’s confrontation with this abject, physically destroyed portrayal of Christ affected him deeply, but it also corresponded with something he had explored in his own work, and which he intended to examine more precisely in his next book.

A book about a character described in his notes as “Prince Christ.” A man endowed with the perfect morality of Christ, destroyed by the moral-psychological cruelty of the earthly world. A concept which Dostoevsky apparently saw in Holbein’s painting.

The Idiot

This incorruptible character would eventually become “Prince Myishkin” in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. And unusually (for Dostoevsky at least) Holbein’s painting would play a central symbolic role, becoming the literal, physical site of a number of ideological clashes in the novel. Dostoevsky re-imagines his own confrontation with the painting – i.e. the conflict between the physical decay of the Christian icon and the faithful affirmation that follows – as taking place between characters in the novel. The nihilistic Ippolit reacts to the painting with only the revulsion of the physical, and the spiritual refreshment is unattainable for him. Therein Dostoevsky repeats one of his most used devices; the psychological subjection of the ideologue to the consequences of his own ideology. But before The Idiot, this device manifests internally. Here the work is outsourced to Holbein’s painting, and depicted in the physical world of the book. As Richard Pevear writes in his introduction to a 2003 edition of The Idiot: “It is perhaps the most physical and even physiological of Dostoevsky’s novels.”

Kenosis

Though rarely depicted in 19th century Russian religious art, there is a unique feature of Russian religious tradition which might explain Dostoevsky’s fixation with Holbein’s work.

In his seminal book Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, literary historian Joseph Frank describes Russian kenoticism thusly:

“The glorification of passive, completely nonheroic and nonresisting suffering, the suffering of the despised and humiliated Christ… It was [this] that nourished Dostoevsky’s unshakeable conviction that the soul of the Russian peasant was imbued with the Christian ethos of love and self-sacrifice.”

Later Works

Though this preoccupation with a particular work of art would not be repeated in later novels, The Brothers Karamazov re-imagines a version of the concept. Alyosha Karamazov, the youngest brother, must engage with the concept made flesh, when his saintly mentor dies and his body does not maintain its incorruptibility, but is instead subjected to mortal putrefaction.

Post in the comments if you know any other paintings referenced in Dostoevsky’s novels or other writings.

Sources:

Dostoevsky, F. (2003). The Idiot. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.   Toronto, Canada: Random House of Canada Limited.

Frank, J. (2010). Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.