In 1867, Dostoevsky stood before this painting in Basel's Kunstmuseum: Hans Holbein's "Dead Christ."

It depicts Christ's emaciated, decaying body so convincingly that it rattled Dostoevsky. He stood paralyzed before it until his wife dragged him away, and later wrote it into his novel "The Idiot."

In the novel, a replica hangs in the home of the nihilist Rogozhin. When protagonist Prince Myshkin sees it, he despairs:

"That picture! Why, a man's faith might be ruined by looking at that picture!"

Dostoevsky's intent was to show how different characters respond to the picture. Though it shakes him, the prince (a naive optimist and the titular "holy fool") is able to see through the depressing image and identify something worthy of worship. Rogozhin and others, however, see nothing but a merciless world, and it only hardens them more.

The novel also contains the famous phrase, "beauty will save the world," spoken indirectly by Prince Myshkin. This is not some hopeful platitude, but a challenge to all readers.

Beauty will save the world, but this hinges on our capacity to see it even through plunging darkness. The spectator can observe beauty through the light or darkness of his own mind, and that is his choice to make.

Dostoevsky later wrote that Hell is the suffering of being unable to love — to paraphrase his contemporary, Leo Tolstoy, "it is not beauty that makes us see love, but love that makes us see beauty."

This is the challenge that Dostoevsky saw in Holbein's art and that he drew out in each of his great novels. The challenge is to confront one's Christian convictions with everything that seeks to tear them down, and yet to emerge the other side with an even stronger assertion of love and faith.