The Symbolism of Prince Myshkin
The Dostoevsky Doppleganger
Fyodor Dostoevsky
--Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, Pt. 2, Ch. 4 (trans. Carlysle)
•	Listen, Parfyon, you asked me a question before, and here's my answer: the essence of religious feeling doesn't depend on reasoning, and it has nothing to do with wrongdoing or crime or atheism.  There is something else there and there always will be, and atheists will always pass over it and will never be talking about that.  But the important thing is that you will recognize it most quickly and clearly in the Russian heart-- that's my conclusion!  It's one of the main convictions I have received from our Russia.
MYSHKIN: THE “WHOLLY BEAUTIFUL INDIVIDUAL”
•	Myshkin’s goodness evokes a response from the reader.
•	The slap in the face by Ganya shows Myshkin as a persecuted Christfigure.  He says, “Oh, how you’ll be ashamed of what you’ve done!”  Rogozhin exclaims, “You’ll be ashamed, Ganya, of having insulted such a sheep!”  This equates Myshkin with the lamb of God.
The Bedroom Scene
•	The climactic ending is not necessarily apocalyptic.  Evil does not triumph, although Myshkin has been rejected again (like Christ.)
•	Myshkin has sacrificed himself for the redemption of others.  He passes his hands over others, illustrating he has made the ultimate transcendant leap through self annihilation.
CHRIST ENTOMBED

•	  The hand and side wounds suggest that this is Christ. 
•	Dostoevsky, who was haunted by the work from the time he saw it hanging in Basel, expresses dismay at the decomposing Christ through The Idiot's Prince Myshkin: "Why, some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture" (236). 

•	Idiot (1869; The Idiot), influenced by Hans Holbein's painting Christ Taken from the Cross and by Dostoyevsky's opposition to the growing atheistic sentiment of the times, depicts the Christ-like protagonist's loss of innocence and his experience of sin. Dostoyevsky's profound conservatism marked his political thinking following his Siberian experience, and especially his in reaction against revolutionary socialism.
Ippolit, a double for Myshkin, elaborates:

•	Strange to say, as one looks at the dead body of this tortured man, one cannot help asking oneself the peculiar, arresting question: if such a corpse (and it must have been just like that) was seen by all His disciples, by His future chief apostles, by the women who followed Him and stood by the cross, by all who believed in Him and worshipped Him, then how could they possibly have believed, confronted with such a sight, that this martyr would rise again? (418-20) 

•	As Myshkin's outcry suggests, such vivid distress and decay imputed to the body of Christ disputes the Gospels' story of Resurrection. Is this Christ, then?
•	Holbein likely did not title the painting, and this gives rise to another possibility: that this man is not Christ, that he is not destined for resurrection. 

•	More than other non-spiritualized dead Christs produced in the sixteenth century (by Basaiti, Carpaccio, and Mantegna), Holbein's painting is striking for its stark and haunting representation of an ordinary mortal, his body rotting. 
•	The painting is known by different titles, none of which is given by Holbein: The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, Dead Christ, and Christ in the Tomb .

•	http://www.unet.brandeis.edu/~teuber/dostoevskybio.html