The Idiot’s “Vertical Sanctuary”: The Holbein Christ and Ippolit’s Confession

IN A NOTEBOOK ENTRY on September 15, 1868, Dostoevsky writes: “Ippolit is the main axis of the whole novel” (9:277). Whether or not one can take this remark too seriously, it is certainly true that Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” serves as the intellectual center ofThe Idiot. But there’s not much to the dying Ippolitexcepthis confession. What was it about this frail, dying young man that Dostoevsky thought so important? One answer is that as the embittered, verbose rebel against an unjust world, Ippolit exemplifies Dostoevsky’s most famous type, sharing key features with such thinkers as the underground paradoxicalist