What It Is
A copy of Hans Holbein's Dead Christ hangs over a door in the gloomy house of Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, on Gorokhovaya Street, in a room full of portraits of bishops. It is a painting of an odd shape, long and low, showing the Savior just taken down from the cross. Rogozhin's father bought it at auction for two rubles, people have already offered five hundred for it, and the son has kept it for himself. Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin saw the original abroad and cannot forget it. The novel shows the painting twice: through the prince's eyes, who says a single sentence about it, and through the long description by Hippolyte Terentyev, who places it at the center of his Explanation. Beside it, the novel sets two images that answer it: the Madonna by the same painter, with which the prince reads a living face in Part One, and the Christ alone with a child that Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova says she would paint.
Where It Appears
In ch. VI of Part One, when he keeps his promise to say what he sees in the faces of the Epanchin girls, the prince compares that of Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina to a Madonna by Holbein in Dresden. It is the first time the painter's name enters the book, and it enters through the sad beauty of a living face.
У вас, Александра Ивановна, лицо тоже прекрасное и очень милое, но, может быть, у вас есть какая-нибудь тайная грусть; душа у вас, без сомнения, добрейшая, но вы не веселы. У вас какой-то особенный оттенок в лице, похоже как у Гольбейновой Мадонны в Дрездене, you, Aleksandra Ivanovna, also have a face that is beautiful and very sweet, but perhaps you have some secret sadness; your soul is, without doubt, very kind, but you are not cheerful. There is a special shade in your face, like that of Holbein's Madonna in Dresden.
In ch. IV of Part Two, Rogozhin leads the prince back through the dark rooms, and the painting hangs over a door. The prince recognizes it as a good copy; Rogozhin drops the subject, takes a few steps, suddenly asks whether he believes in God, and says he likes to look at that painting. The prince's answer comes out almost as a joke, and Rogozhin confirms it in earnest.
на эту картину! Да от этой картины у иного еще вера может пропасть! — Пропадает и то, at this painting! Why, from this painting a person's faith can even be lost! And Rogozhin: and it is lost.
Still in ch. IV of Part Two, already on the stairs, the prince answers the question about faith with four encounters from the previous week. The last one, with a peasant woman who crosses herself because her son smiled for the first time, is the answer he gives to the painting without speaking of it again.
такая же точно бывает и у бога радость всякий раз, когда он с неба завидит, что грешник пред ним от всего своего сердца на молитву становится, the very same joy God feels every time he sees from heaven a sinner begin to pray before him with all his heart.
In ch. V of Part Two, walking aimlessly through Petersburg, the prince returns to the scene of the morning: he remembers that Rogozhin said gloomily that faith can be lost, concludes that Rogozhin does not like to look at the painting but needs it, that he is a fighter who wants to win back by force the faith he lost, and once again finds that Holbein painting strange. That same night, Rogozhin's eyes wait for him in the niche of the hotel staircase.
In ch. VI of Part Three, in the Explanation, Hippolyte says that he saw the painting when he returned a visit to Rogozhin, in a house that seemed to him like a cemetery, and he describes it as a corpse, with no beauty at all.
В картине же Рогожина о красоте и слова нет; это в полном виде труп человека, вынесшего бесконечные муки [...] На картине это лицо страшно разбито ударами, вспухшее, со страшными, вспухшими и окровавленными синяками, глаза открыты, зрачки скосились; большие, открытые белки глаз блещут каким-то мертвенным, стеклянным отблеском, In Rogozhin's painting there is not a word about beauty; it is, in its entirety, the corpse of a man who endured endless torments [...] In the painting this face is terribly battered by blows, swollen, with terrible, swollen and bloodied bruises, the eyes open, the pupils turned aside; the large, open whites of the eyes gleam with a deathly, glassy sheen.
From the description he moves to the question the painting asks him, put in the names of the disciples and the women who stood by the cross.
каким образом могли они поверить, смотря на такой труп, что этот мученик воскреснет?, how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this martyr would rise again?
And he gives the nature that ground that body the form of a mute beast and of a modern machine.
Природа мерещится при взгляде на эту картину в виде какого-то огромного, неумолимого и немого зверя [...] в виде какой-нибудь громадной машины новейшего устройства, которая бессмысленно захватила, раздробила и поглотила в себя [...] великое и бесценное существо — такое существо, которое одно стоило всей природы и всех законов ее, всей земли, Looking at this painting, nature takes shape as an enormous, implacable, mute beast [...] as some gigantic machine of the newest design, which senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up [...] a great and priceless being, a being that alone was worth all of nature and all its laws, the whole earth.
Still in ch. VI of Part Three, that same night, feverish, Hippolyte sees Rogozhin enter his room at one in the morning and sit down in silence under the icon lamp, and he says that this visit, and not logic, decided his death.
In ch. X of Part Three, in one of the letters to Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina, Nastasya Filippovna describes the painting she would make: Christ alone with a child, at sunset, pensive, with a sad face. Only a few hours separate that image from the corpse Hippolyte read aloud.
Христос его слушал, но теперь задумался [...] мысль, великая, как весь мир, покоится в его взгляде; лицо грустное, Christ listened to him, but now he has grown pensive [...] a thought, great as the whole world, rests in his gaze; the face is sad.
What It Means
The painting is the strongest objection the novel raises against faith, set in an image rather than an argument. Before it, the prince says that faith can be lost, Rogozhin says that it is lost, and Hippolyte draws from this the question of how anyone could believe in the resurrection while looking at a corpse like that. None of the three refutes it. The prince answers with a scene he has witnessed, the peasant woman and her son's first smile, and Part Three answers with the living, pensive Christ that Nastasya Filippovna imagines beside a child.
The painting lives in Rogozhin's house, and the two times the book shows it end in the same figure. In ch. V of Part Two, hours after the sentence about faith, Rogozhin waits for the prince on the stairs with the knife; in ch. VI of Part Three, on the night Hippolyte saw the painting, Rogozhin appears silent in his room, and Hippolyte says that this visit is what decided him. The painting does not stay still on the wall: it is faith being lost, seen up close by a man who is about to kill and by a man who wants to kill himself. There are two readings. In one, Rogozhin looks at the painting because he has already lost his faith and likes to confirm the loss; in the other, which is the prince's own in ch. V of Part Two, he looks at it because he needs it and wants to win back by force what he has lost.
Relationships
- Default themes: Faith, Death, Beauty.
- Themes in the novel: Faith, Death, Beauty.
- Characters: Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, Hippolyte Terentyev, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina, Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina.
- Related symbols: the exchange of crosses, which takes place on the same visit, right after the sentence about faith, and the knife, which Rogozhin raises the same night.