Doestoevsky on Holbein

But, strangely, when you look at the corpse of this tortured man, a particular and curious question arises: is all his disciples, his chief future apostles, is the women who followed him and stood by the cross, if all those who belived in him and worshipd him had seen his corpse like that (and it was bound to be exactly like that), how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect? Here the notion involuntarily occurs to you that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature are so powerful, how can they be overcome? How overcome them, if they were not even defeated now, by the one who defeated nature while he lived, whom nature obeyed, who exclaimed "Talitha cumi" and the girl arose, "Lazarus, come forth" and the dead man came out? Nature appears to the viewer of this paintinf in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctley, much more correctely, strange thout it is - in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which, which has senselessly siezed, crushed, and swoled up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being - seing such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, and the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems percisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly erternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily. The people who surrounded the dead man, none of whom is in the painting, must have felt horrible angush and confusion on that evening, which at once smashed all their hopes and almost their beliefs. They must have gone off in terrible fear, though each carried wihin himself a tremendous thought that could never be torn out of him. And if this same teacher could have seen his own image on the eve of the execution, would he have gone to the cross and died as he did? This question also comes to you involuntarily as you look at the painting.

The Idiot