strives to affirm his will in the face of his impotence. Despite their apparently opposite orientations, Ippolit and the Prince have much in common. It is occasionally evident that Ippolit shares Myshkin's sense of the sacred and the beautiful, and he consciously addresses himself to that sensibility when constructing his atheistic philosophy. Ippolit's interpretation of the book's key religious symbol, Holbein's painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, as something that perfectly illustrates the omnipotence of 'blind nature', is posited precisely because it is Christ who is depicted: 'nature' has "senselessly seized, smashed and devoured, dully and without feeling, a great priceless Being, a Being worth all of nature and its laws, worth the whole Earth, which was created perhaps solely for the emergence of that Being." Myshkin remains silent in response to Ippolit's sarcastic barbs about Christian humility, and does not make any attempt to refute his convoluted atheistic arguments. When engaging only with each other, the Prince's quietism and sincere empathy occasionally elicit a corresponding consciousness in Ippolit, but he always later reverts to his cynical bitterness. References Fyodor Dostoyevsky characters Fictional Russian people in literature Fictional princes The Idiot Male characters in literature Literary characters introduced in 1869 Fictional characters with epilepsy and seizures