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The Idiot · Part One

The arrival

Money and WealthDeathMadnessCompassion and CharityBeauty

Summary of the part

In a single day, a man with no money, no position, and no guile enters three houses (General Epanchin's, the Ivolgins', Nastasya Filippovna's), and in all of them he is called an idiot. In all of them he also finds a negotiation already under way: Totsky wants to buy his freedom to marry for seventy-five thousand rubles, Ganya accepts a fiancée he despises for her dowry, the general takes pearls to a woman who is not his wife, and Rogozhin raises his bid from eighteen to a hundred thousand. Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is the only one who puts no price on anything. He reads faces (the portrait, the general's daughters, the woman he takes for a lackey) and says what he sees, and his frankness first produces laughter, then confession. The whole part moves toward the birthday party, where the woman everyone is trading takes from each of them their role, receives a marriage proposal from the prince, burns Rogozhin's money in front of the man who was going to marry her for money, and leaves with the buyer. The question that remains is the one Nastasya herself asks as she leaves: whether the compassion of someone who asks for nothing can save a person who thinks herself guilty.

Chapter I: On the Train

Money and WealthMadnessFaith

Chapter summary

On a damp morning at the end of November, the Warsaw train arrives in Petersburg, and in a third-class carriage two young men have been sitting face to face since dawn. One is Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, fair-haired, in a sleeveless Swiss cape and gaiters, unsuited to the Russian winter, with a small bundle that holds everything he owns: he returns after more than four years in Switzerland, where he was treated for a nervous illness, a kind of epilepsy, that was never cured; his benefactor, who paid for the treatment, Pavlishchev, has died, the doctor supported him out of his own pocket, and he has come to look for the wife of General Epanchin, a distant relative who did not answer his letter, because he no longer knows anyone in Russia. The narrator introduces him through his gaze:

Analysis

Глаза его были большие, голубые и пристальные; во взгляде их было что-то тихое, но тяжелое, что-то полное того странного выражения, по которому некоторые угадывают с первого взгляда в субъекте падучую болезнь, his eyes were large, blue, and fixed; there was something quiet but heavy in the gaze, something full of that strange expression by which some guess, at first sight, the falling sickness in the man.

The narrator places the illness in the gaze before naming it, and this quiet, heavy gaze is what the others will read in Myshkin all day long: some will see a sick man, others someone who sees too far. The description prepares the neighbor's reaction, who measures him with the laughter of someone amused by another's misfortune and ends up growing fond of him.

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Chapter II: The Servant and the Guillotine

Death

Chapter summary

The narrator presents the house the prince is about to knock on. General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, fifty-six years old, the son of a soldier and without schooling, has made his fortune (houses, an estate, shares in companies) and cultivates the image of someone who knows his place and carries out other people's ideas. He married early a woman without beauty or dowry, from the old and decayed princely family of the Myshkins, whom he respects and fears; Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina is the last princess of the line and prizes its origins. The three daughters are beautiful, educated, and in no hurry to marry: Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina, twenty-five, a musician; Adelaida Ivanovna Epanchina, twenty-three, a painter; and Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina, twenty, the beauty of the house, for whom the sisters, it is said, would be ready to make sacrifices.

Around eleven, the prince rings the bell. The liveried footman distrusts the bundle and the cape and passes him to the valet, who announces visitors to the general, a man of over forty who knows his own worth and refuses to announce him without the secretary. The prince prefers to wait there, in the antechamber, rather than remain alone in the reception room, and explains everything frankly: he has no urgent business, he only wants to introduce himself, because the general's wife is the last of the Myshkins, apart from him.

Analysis

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Chapter III: The General, the Handwriting, and the Portrait

MadnessBeauty

Chapter summary

General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin receives the prince with curiosity and distrust: he supposes that he has some aim and warns that he has little time to get to know people. The prince replies that he came only to meet them, admits that kinship is no reason, and gets up to leave without any resentment; his look and his smile are so free of rancor that the general changes his tone at once and asks him to wait, since Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina may want to see the namesake.

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Chapter IV: Nastasya's Past

Money and Wealth

Chapter summary

The narrator interrupts the scene to explain the Epanchin family. The three daughters are strong and have good appetites; the mother, more and more capricious, unloads onto her husband whatever she has built up. The general has a system: not to rush the daughters into marriage, letting the growing fortune and position work for them. When Aleksandra turns twenty-five, Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky, fifty-five, very rich, refined, a great connoisseur of beauty and a partner of the general in some business, reveals his old desire to marry and asks advice about one of the daughters. Aglaya, the most beautiful, is not meant for him; Aleksandra, sensible and affable, might accept. The matter moves forward by fits and starts, because there is an obstacle.

Eighteen years earlier, a poor neighbor of Totsky's, the retired officer Filipp Alexandrovich Barashkov, lost his house in a fire in which his wife died; he went mad and died a month later. Totsky, out of generosity, took in the two daughters, aged six and seven; the younger one died. Years later, passing through, he noticed in the house of his steward a girl of twelve who promised unusual beauty, and changed her education: a Swiss governess, four years of study, and then he installed her in a small country house, Otradnoye, where he visited her every summer for four years. When the rumor reached her that Totsky would marry in Petersburg, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova left the little house and appeared alone in the city, before him, another woman. She knew the laws, she knew the world, she laughed at him with sarcasm, and declared that she had always despised him, to the point of nausea, and that she had come to prevent the wedding.

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Chapter V: The Condemned Man Before the Scaffold

DeathFaith

Chapter summary

The general introduces the prince to his wife as a poor idiot, almost a beggar, subject to fits; he wants to distract her from the pearls. She, jealous of the lineage, is startled, orders a napkin tied around the visitor's neck, and asks whether he makes gestures during his fits. The general hurries off to see the count; Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina knows very well which count he is going to see. The prince eats lunch with appetite, converses well, and she declares him not strange at all. In the little sitting room she demands that he tell her things, because she wants to see how he speaks; Aleksandra whispers to Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina that he may be a rogue and not an idiot, and Aglaya thinks it base to play a part. The prince tells of his arrival in Switzerland, after a series of fits, in a stupor from which he woke in Basel, when he heard a donkey bray in the market; the donkey pleased him and everything became clear. The girls laugh, and the general's wife:

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Chapter VI: Marie and the Children

MadnessCompassion and Charity

Chapter summary

Pressed to talk about Switzerland, the prince speaks of the village children and of Marie, a consumptive girl seduced and abandoned by a traveling salesman, whom the village hounds until he explains to the children that she is only unhappy: they begin to love her, and she dies almost happy. Then he says that they also take him for an idiot, and he keeps his promise to say what he reads in the faces of the general's daughters. About the children, he says he did not teach them (there was the teacher, Thibaut), he was with them and hid nothing from them, and so the parents, the teacher, and even Schneider turned against him. Thibaut was envious:

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Chapter VII: Beauty Is a Riddle

MadnessCompassion and CharityBeauty

Chapter summary

The general's wife is delighted: the prince chose them, not the other way around, and his character is the same as hers. Aglaya reminds them that he said he had an intention in speaking of faces, and hers is still missing. In praising Aglaya's beauty, the prince compares it to that of Nastasya Filippovna, and the comparison brings her portrait into the room. Ganya, wounded by the indiscretion, secretly asks the prince to deliver a note to Aglaya; she reads it, writes in the album that she does not haggle, and returns it without a reply, because Ganya wanted a guarantee without giving up the other woman's money. On the street, when he learns that the prince read the note at her request, Ganya insults him out of envy, blind to the intelligence he shows. The face of Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina is still missing:

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Chapter VIII: The Ivolgins' House

MadnessTruth and Lies

Chapter summary

Ganya's apartment has six or seven rooms and is expensive for the family; for two months the mother and sister have been renting furnished rooms with meals, and Ganya, who feels this as a humiliation before the society in which he wants to shine, endures it only because he is determined to change everything soon. The father, a retired general, sleeps in a cubbyhole beside the kitchen with the youngest son, Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin, Kolya, thirteen years old, who keeps watch over the father. The mother, Nina Alexandrovna, has dignity and firmness; the sister, Varvara Ardalionovna Ivolgina, Varya, twenty-three, is even more energetic; Ptitsyn, a serious young man who lends money at interest, courts her and is Ganya's friend. The prince stays in the middle room. Ganya asks him not to speak of what happened with Aglaya, nor of what he will see there.

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Chapter IX: Nastasya Arrives Unexpectedly

Truth and Lies

Chapter summary

Everyone falls silent. It is the first visit of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova to the family, on the day she promised to decide, and Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin reads it as the decision itself. She enters laughing, Ganya introduces her to his sister, and the two exchange a strange look; he threatens Varya with his eyes, and she smiles slightly. Nastasya barely hears Nina Alexandrovna, asks where the lodgers are and whether the house makes a profit, and laughs at Ganya's face, which is twisted with hatred. It is the prince who steps forward and whispers that she should drink some water and not look at him that way; Ganya seizes him by the shoulder and, the next instant, laughs and introduces him as a most precious specimen. Nastasya discovers she took a prince for a servant, apologizes, and wants to know why he was petrified. He speaks of the portrait, of the Epanchins, of Rogozhin on the train, and of how he had imagined her:

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Chapter X: The Eighteen Thousand and the Slap

Money and WealthCompassion and Charity

Chapter summary

Parfen Semyonovich Rogozhin comes in with the morning's gang (Lebedev, Zaliozhev, a man with enormous fists, a medical student), shouting at Ganya that he is a Judas and a scoundrel. On seeing Nastasya there he turns pale to the lips: so it was true, this is the end. He reminds Ganya of the two hundred rubles of his father that he lost to him at cards, by cheating, and says he would crawl on all fours to Vasilievsky Island for three rubles; he came to buy him, to buy everyone. He asks Nastasya, as to a goddess and with the courage of a condemned man, whether she is going to marry Ganya. She, glancing at the mother and sister, answers seriously that by no means. Rogozhin, beside himself with joy, offers Ganya three thousand to withdraw, and then, advised by Lebedev, turns to her:

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Chapter XI: Ganya's Confession

Money and Wealth

Chapter summary

Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin goes to console the prince in his room, speaks of a friend even more unhappy whom he wants to introduce to him, and finds it absurd that a slap can be washed away only with blood, as in Lermontov's drama Masquerade. Varvara Ardalionovna Ivolgina comes to thank him and observes that the prince has influence over Nastasya. Then Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin enters, begs forgiveness from the heart, offers to kiss the prince's hand, and the two embrace; Ganya says he does not understand how he took him for an idiot. Varya forgives him and warns him that Nastasya laughed at him, and that this is not worth seventy-five thousand. Ganya stays and opens up to the prince: he is going to marry, now without hesitation. She is vain like a passed-over civil servant, she despises him for accepting a woman kept by money, and she does not realize that another man would deceive her worse, with liberal words; even so, she will marry him, because she thinks he loves her madly and, in his own way, she also loves him:

Analysis

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Chapter XII: On the Way to the Party

Truth and Lies

Chapter summary

In a billiard café on Liteynaya, General Ardalion Alexandrovich Ivolgin awaits the prince with a bottle and the Indépendance Belge. The prince hands him the twenty-five ruble note to change, and the general pockets it; the prince asks him to take him to Nastasya Filippovna's house that evening: he has to be there, he has a matter to settle, although he is not invited. The general becomes excited: it was precisely his idea, a campaign against her, to impose his paternal will at the party. They will leave at nine. But the general orders another bottle, and another, tells endless stories, and only leaves, staggering, late. In the street, in the thaw and the foul wind, he points out the lit windows of old comrades, speaks of the thirteen bullets in his chest and of Pirogov, who would have telegraphed Paris for his sake, and decides to stop first at the house of an old friend, General Sokolovich. At the door another name is written:

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Chapter XIII: The Birthday Party

Truth and LiesBeauty

Chapter summary

Climbing the stairs, the prince does not know what he will do there: he could tell Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova that Ganya does not love her, that he loves money, but that does not seem right to him, and there is another question, a crucial one, which he does not dare to ask and which makes him blush. The apartment is luxurious; the narrator explains that Nastasya accepted the luxury without depending on it, and that in her there was a mixture of tastes that displeased Totsky. In the room are Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky and General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, both anxious for the announcement; Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, gloomy, who recounted the scene of the slap and defended the prince; Ptitsyn, who spent the afternoon helping Rogozhin gather a hundred thousand; Ferdyshchenko; an old professor, a shy young man, a lively forty-year-old actress, Darya Alexeyevna, and a beautiful German woman who does not speak Russian. The general's pearls were received coldly. The prince, uninvited, is announced, and Nastasya is delighted. Ferdyshchenko explains his role in the house:

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Chapter XIV: The Game of Confessions

Money and WealthDeathTruth and Lies

Chapter summary

Ferdyshchenko begins by asking the prince whether it is not true that there are more thieves than non-thieves; the prince blushes and says he is exaggerating. Ferdyshchenko tells his story: three years earlier, at a country house where he was dining, he took three rubles from the sewing table of the owner's daughter, without knowing why, and returned to the table; when they suspected the maid, Darya, he took pleasure in urging her to confess, enjoying the lie with the money in his pocket; that night he drank it all in a bottle of Lafite. The maid was dismissed the next day, and he never felt remorse. Nastasya shows disgust, and he, resentful, hints that whoever shines and has a carriage has done worse things. Ptitsyn refuses to tell his. General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin tells his: as an ensign, he lived with an old widow of eighty, alone in the world, who stole a rooster from him; he moved, and she kept his bowl in exchange for a jug he had broken; he went back to insult her:

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Chapter XV: Rogozhin's Hundred Thousand

Money and WealthCompassion and Charity

Chapter summary

The maid Katya announces about ten drunken men; Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova has them all shown in and asks the guests to stay as witnesses. Everyone understands that it was all calculated. Totsky stays so as not to leave without clarifying matters; the general stays out of gallantry and whispers whether she has not lost her mind, in the medical sense. The gang of Parfen Semyonovich Rogozhin enters, joined by an old former editor who has pawned his gold teeth and a lieutenant who begs in a romantic style; they are intimidated by the luxury, by the statue of Venus, by the presence of the general. Rogozhin, almost sober, spent the afternoon with moneylenders at any interest to gather the hundred thousand; on seeing Nastasya, everything else ceases to exist for him. He places on the table a bundle wrapped in the Stock Exchange Gazette and waits, hands hanging, like one awaiting sentence. She tells everyone how he bargained with her that morning, from eighteen to forty and up to a hundred thousand:

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Chapter XVI: The Inheritance and the Package in the Fire

Money and WealthMadness

Chapter summary

Ptitsyn confirms it: the prince's aunt, whom he never met, the elder sister of his mother and the poor niece of a rich Moscow merchant named Papushin, inherited everything when that uncle died without heirs, after losing his two sons; and before dying of dropsy she left a will in the prince's favor: a million and a half, perhaps more. Everyone congratulates him, calls for champagne, and suddenly understands that he has just asked Nastasya to marry him. They say afterward that it was at that moment she lost her reason. She announces to the maids that she will marry a prince worth a million and a half, and turns to Totsky and the general as a princess, with the idiot thrown in. Rogozhin moans that the prince should give up, that he too takes her, and the prince says he loves her very much. She tests the prince: will he not be ashamed that his wife was kept by Totsky? No, because she was not there of her own will. And he tells her that she wanted to be lost because, proud and unhappy, she judges herself guilty without being so, that she needs care and he will look after her, and that on seeing the portrait he recognized a face, as if she were calling him.

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