Summary of the part
The Third Part is made up of requests that the prince declare himself. Evgeny Pavlovich wants to know whether the distortion of ideas is a particular or a general case; Aglaya demands that he not humble himself before people who are not worth her little finger; Hippolyte asks, before everyone, whether it is true that he said beauty will save the world; on the green bench, Aglaya asks him to be her friend and accomplice in an escape; in the street, on his knees, Nastasya Filippovna asks whether he is happy. The clearest answer that Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin gives everywhere is the one that separates pity from love: of Nastasya he has only pity, and no longer loves her. At the center of everything is the night of the Explanation, in which a young man of eighteen, consumptive and with a few weeks to live, reads the guests the reasons why he has decided to kill himself at sunrise, and places among them the dead Christ of the painting from Rogozhin's house: a corpse that nature has ground like a machine, and before which he asks how the disciples could have believed in the resurrection. The most serious objection the novel raises against faith is stated in full, and the part does not answer it with argument: it answers with the pistol without a cap, with the laughter of the guests, and with the prince's memory that the fly in the sunbeam, from which Hippolyte feels excluded, he himself had mourned in the mountains of Switzerland.
Chapter I: The Russian Liberal
Chapter summary
The narrator opens with a digression on the lack of practical people in Russia, where shyness and the lack of initiative pass for virtues, and uses it to place the Epanchins: a respected family that keeps running off the rails without meaning to. Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina blames her own temper, fears her daughters will turn into nihilists, weeps at night over the eldest, Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina, twenty-five years old and still unmarried, and finds in Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina both her torment and her idol. The engagement of Adelaida Ivanovna Epanchina to Prince Sch. had given her a month of peace, until the prince arrived and, with him, an anonymous letter suggesting that Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova and Aglaya were corresponding. Yelizaveta Prokofyevna drags Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin to the dacha and seats him at the round table, where the whole family is gathered, because she wants to pry her daughter's secrets out of him without asking directly; on the way there she already accuses herself of madness for doing it.
Analysis
Yelizaveta Prokofyevna acts out of fear that the family will look ridiculous, and the fear makes her act ridiculously: she rushes to the prince's house like a crazed cat and is ashamed of it the same instant. The anonymous letter hits her because it touches what she already suspected, that Aglaya keeps secrets that concern him.
At the table, Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky, excited and half-mocking, maintains that the Russian liberal is not Russian, because he came out of only two castes, that of the former landowners and that of the seminarians, and sets out what he calls his discovery:
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Chapter II: The Scandal at the Vauxhall
Chapter summary
Before they leave, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin grabs the hand of Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky and tells him, in a strange state, that he considers him the noblest of men; then, turning to everyone, he apologizes for what he did three days before, says he was ill until the age of twenty-four, that in society he is too much, that he lacks grace and measure, that his words do not match his ideas and therefore humiliate them, and that he has no right to speak of lofty ideas, because he would make everyone laugh. Everyone is embarrassed by the outburst, which has no apparent cause. Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina interrupts, beside herself:
Analysis
Chapter III: The Pistol and the Note
Chapter summary
The family goes home almost at a run. For Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina and the elder daughters, the scandal proved that Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky has ties with Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova. Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, who arrives from Petersburg, talks in secret with Prince Sch., and everyone goes up to their mother's rooms, leaving Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin alone on the terrace. It is there that Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina finds him, feigns surprise, offers tea and, without transition, asks what he would do if he were challenged to a duel. He says he would be very afraid, but that the coward is the one who is afraid and runs away, not the one who is afraid and stays. She speaks of Pushkin, killed in a duel, of soldiers who aim at half a man, and shows how a pistol is loaded:
Analysis
Chapter IV: The Star Wormwood
Chapter summary
The terrace of Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is full of people drinking champagne: the acquaintances have gathered by chance, and Keller, on arriving, announced the birthday and demanded wine. Present are Hippolyte Terentyev, who arrived first and feels better than ever; Burdovsky, who accompanies him and mumbles that he regrets the letter; Lukyan Timofeyevich Lebedev with his family; General Ardalion Alexandrovich Ivolgin, as chairman of the debate; Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin and Ptitsyn; Keller; Ferdyshchenko; Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin; and, to the prince's astonishment, Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky. Vera Lukyanovna wishes the prince a happy life from that day on. Evgeny Pavlovich pulls him aside: he has settled things with the officer, leaves for Petersburg in the morning because of his uncle's death, and wants a frank talk first; he says he came to seek the prince's friendship, because he does not lie, and laughingly confesses that perhaps he has also come to pry something out of him. Hippolyte, feverish, asks how many hours remain before the sun rises, drinks his third glass, and wants to know whether the prince has heard of the star Wormwood.
Analysis
Chapter V: The Necessary Explanation
Chapter summary
It is the dawn on which Hippolyte Terentyev is to read the guests the manuscript he wrote the night before, My Necessary Explanation. He leaves the decision to read to a coin, because he needs even the reading to seem imposed from outside, and he opens it by confessing that he lied about the time the doctors gave him, recounting the dream of the venomous creature, and arguing that happiness lies in discovering life, not in the discovery. Before that, he wakes up startled from a seven-minute nap, as if he had missed the hour of something on which his fate depends. Relieved to learn that the sun has not yet risen, he says he has just dreamed of Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin and provokes Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin in front of everyone:
Analysis
Chapter VI: The Painting at Rogozhin's House
Chapter summary
The Explanation goes on. Hippolyte Terentyev says that he has locked himself in his room for five months, that his mother trembles before his orders, that he tormented Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin, Kolya, and the neighbor Surikov, to whom he proved that poverty was his own fault, and that in March he laughed at the corpse of the baby that Surikov had let die of cold; Surikov, without anger, pointed him to the door, and since then takes off his hat whenever he sees him. One March night, Hippolyte picks up the wallet a passerby dropped in the street, runs after him up a dark staircase to the fifth floor, and enters a miserable room: a provincial doctor who lost his post through intrigue, his wife just after giving birth, a baby, and a little girl sleeping under a frock coat. The doctor receives him shouting, until he sees the wallet with all his documents. Hippolyte, who coughs without stopping, listens to the story, takes notes on everything, and looks for an old school friend, Bakhmutov, whom he always regarded as an enemy, and whose uncle can settle the matter. Bakhmutov settles it; the doctor gets a post in another province. At parting, on the bridge, Hippolyte makes a speech on individual almsgiving and on the old general with a German name who used to visit the convoys of deportees bound for Siberia:
Analysis
Chapter VII: The Shot That Misfires
Chapter summary
Hippolyte Terentyev reads the ending: he has a small pocket pistol, bought as a boy, and has decided to die in the park at sunrise so as not to bother anyone; he leaves a copy of the Explanation to Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin and another to Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina, and bequeaths his skeleton to the Academy of Medicine. He recognizes no judges above him: he says that if he killed ten people, the court would be powerless against a condemned man with two weeks left, and he is astonished that the idea does not occur to others in the same situation, even as a joke. But he knows he will be judged, and wants to speak his mind freely:
Analysis
Chapter VIII: The Green Bench
Chapter summary
On the green bench, Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina proposes that the prince be her friend and accomplice in a flight from home; she pretends to love Ganya in order to gauge what he feels, learns from his own mouth that he only pities Nastasya Filippovna and no longer loves her, and ends by throwing in his face the jealousy she feels over her rival's letters, before announcing to her mother that she will marry Ganya. She starts out laughing and indignant at finding Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin asleep on the bench where they had agreed to meet. He tells her about Hippolyte Terentyev's shot, and she wants to know everything, above all what Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky said; she thinks the pistol really had to misfire, since that suits Hippolyte better, and she wants a copy of the confession. The prince says Hippolyte wanted everyone to surround him and beg him to live, and that perhaps he was thinking of her; Aglaya confesses that at thirteen she wanted to poison herself some thirty times, imagining the family weeping beside the coffin, and then scolds him for the cruelty of judging Hippolyte's soul that way:
Analysis
Chapter IX: The Four Hundred Rubles
Chapter summary
Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina takes Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin home and, exhausted, regrets having started the interrogation: she herself does not know why Aglaya could not meet him in the park. The prince explains calmly that they met at seven by a note from her and talked for an hour about matters that concern only Aglaya. Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina, entering, thanks him for not having judged her capable of lying there, and the mother takes her leave respectfully. At home, Vera Lukyanovna asks him not to expel Hippolyte Terentyev or laugh at him, and says he has happy eyes. Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin, Kolya, who sat up with the sick man, is delighted by the courage of the Explanation, reveals that Hippolyte lied when he said the two of them had packed the trunk together, and tells how his father, General Ardalion Alexandrovich Ivolgin, woke him at six in the morning, still drunk, to warn him that in front of Ferdyshchenko one must be careful what one says.
Analysis
Chapter X: The Letters
Chapter summary
That night, after the green bench, the prince reads the three letters in which Nastasya Filippovna places Aglaya on an altar, describes a Christ alone with a child, and announces the marriage that will take her to Rogozhin. Leaving the park without his watch, he meets Nastasya Filippovna herself, who kneels in the street, asks whether he is happy, and runs off before he can answer. Rogozhin takes her away, and minutes later the prince gives him the answer he refused her. Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin understands why he put off reading the three letters until night: he had dreamed again of the woman with the face of a criminal, tears on her lashes, calling to him. Reading them is like recalling an absurd dream in which reason accepted everything, and he almost believes in the possibility, and even the justification, of that dream:
Analysis
Reading of the part
Analysis