On a damp morning at the end of November, Prince Myshkin arrives by train in Petersburg after more than four years in a sanatorium in Switzerland and, until the beginning of July of the following year, passes through the lives of two women whom everyone pursues, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya Epanchina, and of a man who wants the first for himself alone, Rogozhin. The story is driven by one question (what a goodness without calculation does in a world where everything has a price) and by a triangle: the prince asks both women in marriage, cannot choose, and the choice is made by Nastasya, who runs off with Rogozhin on the day of the wedding and is killed by him. The arc runs from the train and from Nastasya's birthday party, passes through Holbein's Dead Christ, through Hippolyte's Explanation and through the speech about the broken vase, and ends in the night beside the body and in the prince's return to the sanatorium.
Part One: The arrival
On a train from Warsaw arriving in St. Petersburg, Prince Myshkin, in a sleeveless Swiss cape and carrying a small bundle, returns to Russia penniless and ill, looking for the wife of General Epanchin, a relative, because he knows no one else; in the carriage, the merchant Rogozhin, who has just inherited from his father, tells him of his passion for Nastasya Filippovna and of the flight she provoked, and calls him a holy fool on learning that he has never known a woman (ch. I). In the general's antechamber, the servant, not knowing whether the visitor is a beggar or a fool, hears from him that the worst pain of the man condemned to the guillotine is the certainty of the hour, and is moved; the prince tells this to a servant because the image has occupied him for a month, and when the secretary Ganya enters, he notes that Ganya, alone, must look at things in a very different way (ch. II). The general receives him with suspicion and changes his tone on seeing that the prince only wants to get to know them; he promises him a post as copyist after a handwriting test and speaks, in front of Ganya, of the marriage that Nastasya will announce that evening. Before her portrait, the prince says the face belongs to a woman who has suffered and that, if she is good, everything would be saved, and Ganya says that Rogozhin would marry her and cut her throat a week later (ch. III). The narrator tells who Nastasya is: an orphan taken in by Totsky, who raised her to be his mistress and came to fear her when she appeared in Petersburg to stop his marriage. Now Totsky, who wants to marry someone else, offers seventy-five thousand rubles to see her married to Ganya, with the general's support, which she accepts as compensation for a destroyed destiny and not as payment, and promises to answer on the night of her birthday (ch. IV). At the Epanchins' lunch, the general's wife, who heard him called an idiot, puts him to the test. The prince tells of the donkey of Basel, of the condemned man who waited for the firing squad without knowing he would be pardoned, and of the last day of a man condemned to the guillotine, and the description answers Aglaya's accusation that he draws the same lesson from an execution as from a little finger (ch. V). He then tells the young women about life in Switzerland: he lived among the village children and comforted Marie, a seduced and abandoned girl whom everyone despised, whom he kissed out of pity and not out of love; the children, hearing the truth, began to look after her, and Marie died almost happy. He confesses that he knows they take him for an idiot and that he considers himself intelligent, and says what he sees in the faces of three of the women in the house (ch. VI). When he comes to Aglaya's face, he refuses to judge it, because beauty is an enigma. The general's wife sends for Nastasya's portrait, which he kisses in secret, and Aglaya writes in the album that she does not enter into bargaining, in reply to a note from Ganya, which she returns through the prince himself. On the street, Ganya insults him for having read the note and for Aglaya trusting him, and hears that he was nearly an idiot and was cured (ch. VII). At the Ivolgins' house, Ganya's mother and sister rent out rooms to live, and the prince takes one of them. The father, a retired general, tells him the story of the soldier Kolpakov, and the discussion about the marriage heats up when Nastasya arrives unannounced, takes the prince who opened the door for a footman, and throws her fur coat to him (ch. VIII). On her first visit to the family of her fiancé, she humiliates Ganya before his mother and sister and is charmed by General Ivolgin, who tells her the story of the little dog thrown out of a train window. She contradicts him, laughing, because she read the same story in the newspaper, and the bell rings loudly (ch. IX). Rogozhin comes in with his gang, puts eighteen thousand rubles before Nastasya, and raises the bid to a hundred thousand, which he promises to gather by evening. Ganya, beside himself, raises his hand against his sister Varya; the prince catches him, Ganya slaps him, and the prince answers that Ganya will be ashamed (ch. X). Ganya asks the prince's forgiveness and opens up to him: he is going to marry Nastasya for a purpose, to start a life on the dowry, and money, he says, is vile because it even gives talent. The prince tells him he is not a spoiled man, only an ordinary one, and Ganya, who expected to hear the opposite, hears in this the greatest insult of the day (ch. XI). The prince meets General Ivolgin in a café and asks him to take him to Nastasya's party, to which he was not invited. The general gets drunk, looks for a friend who no longer lives there, and ends up at the house of a widowed captain, where Kolya, who keeps company with the sick Hippolyte, takes the prince to Nastasya's apartment (ch. XII). At the birthday party, the prince is received by her at the door. Nastasya, feverish, says that everyone's presence is necessary and accepts the game proposed by Ferdyshchenko, in which each one tells the worst act of his life (ch. XIII). Ferdyshchenko, General Epanchin and Totsky tell theirs. Nastasya, tired of the game, asks the prince whether she should marry Ganya; he says no. She returns the seventy-five thousand to Totsky and the pearls to the general, and announces that she will leave the apartment (ch. XIV). Rogozhin comes in, almost sober, and places the hundred thousand, wrapped up, on the table. Nastasya tells everyone how he haggled over her and asks who would take her without anything. The prince says he would accept her honorably and not as Rogozhin's wife, and adds that perhaps they are not poor, because he received a letter about an inheritance (ch. XV). The inheritance is confirmed, a million and a half, left by an aunt he did not know. Nastasya understands that the prince has just asked her to marry him and, instead of accepting, says it is better this way, because he would despise her afterward. She throws the hundred thousand into the fireplace and orders Ganya to take them out with bare hands. He does not go and faints; she removes the packet with the tongs, leaves it for Ganya, and leaves with Rogozhin in troikas, with the prince running behind (ch. XVI).
Part Two: The painting
The prince leaves for Moscow to receive the inheritance, and for six months Petersburg knows him only through rumors: he pays the creditors of the dead merchant, even those without documents, and Nastasya runs away from Rogozhin again, almost from the altar. At the Ivolgins' house, Ganya falls ill, Varya marries Ptitsyn, Adelaida becomes engaged to Prince Sch., and Kolya hands Aglaya, at Easter, a note from the prince, which she keeps in a copy of Don Quixote (ch. I). At the beginning of June, the prince returns to Petersburg with the impression of two burning eyes at the station, and goes to the house of the clerk Lebedev, who confirms to him in the garden that Nastasya fled from Rogozhin, lives with his sister-in-law, and is afraid of the prince (ch. II). At Rogozhin's house, on Gorokhovaya Street, the prince says he has not come to disrupt the marriage and that he loves Nastasya with pity, not with love. Rogozhin replies that he has no pity at all. Distracted, the prince twice picks up a new knife from the table, and Rogozhin takes it from his hand (ch. III). On leaving, the prince sees on a door a copy of Holbein's Dead Christ and says the painting can make someone lose his faith. Rogozhin asks whether he believes in God, and he answers on the staircase by recounting four encounters of the week. Afterward, Rogozhin asks for a soldier's tin cross and offers him his own, a gold one, and the two become brothers in the cross (ch. IV). Disturbed, the prince spends the day adrift and admits that the eyes that follow him are Rogozhin's, and that the knife he saw in a shop window, with a deerhorn handle, is of the same kind as the one he saw on his table. On the hotel staircase, Rogozhin raises his hand with something that gleams; the prince cries out that he does not believe it and falls with an epileptic fit, which saves him (ch. V). At Lebedev's dacha in Pavlovsk, the Epanchins appear. General Ivolgin tells Aglaya that he carried her in his arms, and this time it is true, and he weeps. Kolya praises the poor knight, and Aglaya, offended by the family's laughter, explains that the poem is serious and goes to recite it (ch. VI). She recites the ballad looking only at the prince and swaps the letters on the shield for Nastasya's initials, which he notices. Radomsky arrives and, shortly after, Burdovsky's group, Doktorenko, Keller and Hippolyte, who had been waiting for the prince for two hours (ch. VII). The group comes to demand from Myshkin the money of Pavlishchev, in the name of his son Burdovsky, after a newspaper had ridiculed the prince. The prince, having heard the article, tells the story and offers ten thousand rubles to Burdovsky, which he calculates is what Pavlishchev spent on him, and soon regrets having done so in public (ch. VIII). Ganya, to whom the prince had entrusted the matter, proves that Burdovsky is not Pavlishchev's son, and that Pavlishchev had loved him out of generosity. Burdovsky refuses the ten thousand and returns an envelope in which a hundred and fifty rubles are missing. The general's wife explodes against the young men, and Hippolyte, who coughs blood, asks to stay for one last conversation (ch. IX). Hippolyte invites everyone to his funeral and weeps in the general's wife's lap. Then, ashamed of having wept, he attacks the prince and accuses him of having led him to that. Aglaya whispers to him that she will hate him all her life if he does not give up those people. On the road a carriage passes, from which one of the ladies, whose voice he recognizes as Nastasya's, shouts to Radomsky that Rogozhin has bought his promissory notes (ch. X). The prince blames himself for trusting too much and for distrusting too much. In the following days, Keller and Lebedev come to tell him about their lives, and both confess that the confession was also a calculation to extract money from him. He does not condemn them, because it is hard to fight double thoughts, and Lebedev admits having warned Nastasya, through his son, about the meeting in the carriage (ch. XI). Lizaveta Prokofievna comes alone to the prince's terrace, makes him swear that he has not married Nastasya, and kisses him. Aglaya had sent him a note that morning warning that, if he appeared at their dacha, he would not find her among those rejoicing, and the general's wife drags him into the house (ch. XII).
Part Three: The explanation
The general's wife sits the prince at the family table to pry Aglaya's secrets out of him, and Radomsky maintains that the Russian liberal hates Russia itself. The prince replies that the distortion of ideas that leads a young man to kill six people in the name of poverty is widespread, and he distinguishes between the condemned who know they have erred and those who think they had a right (ch. I). Before everyone, the prince apologizes for what he did three days earlier and says that in society it is too much. Aglaya, beside herself, defends him and announces that she will never marry him. The family goes to the vauxhall, where Nastasya appears with a gang, accuses Radomsky of knowing about the suicide of his uncle, who left a deficit of three hundred and fifty thousand rubles, and cuts with a cane the face of an officer who insults her, until Rogozhin takes her away (ch. II). At home, Aglaya asks the prince what he would do in the face of a duel and teaches him to load a pistol. At parting, she hands him a note arranging a meeting on the green bench at seven in the morning. At midnight, in the park, Rogozhin sits down beside him, brings a message from Nastasya, and answers without rancor that he believes him, but does not like him (ch. III). On the prince's birthday, the dacha fills with people drinking champagne. Radomsky declares he wants the prince's friendship, Hippolyte asks about the star Wormwood, and Lebedev, drunk, preaches that it is the railway network and that the century has rotted for having lost the idea that united men (ch. IV). Hippolyte wakes from a nap and provokes the prince with the phrase that beauty will save the world. He takes from his pocket the text he wrote, My Necessary Explanation, and decides by the toss of a coin to read it aloud. He begins the reading, with the dream of the beast and the question about happiness (ch. V). The Explanation continues: Hippolyte recounts how an alms he gave to a poor family planted in him the first seed of the conviction to kill himself, and describes the dead Christ he saw in Rogozhin's house, in which he sees a mute nature that ground up an inestimable being. That night, Rogozhin appears in his room, silent, in tailcoat and white tie (ch. VI). Hippolyte concludes that he does not wish to praise the order that devours him, announces he will kill himself at sunrise, and pulls the trigger of a pistol with no cap. Everyone laughs, and he, dishonored, faints. Radomsky calls him a homemade Lacenaire, and the prince, sleepless, goes to the green bench, recalls the fly from the Explanation, falls asleep, and is woken by Aglaya's laughter (ch. VII). On the green bench, Aglaya says she wants to run away from home and proposes that the prince be her friend and guide her. She invents that she loves Ganya, to measure what he feels, asks whether he came to Petersburg because of Nastasya, and shows him three letters from Nastasya in which she asks that he marry. He says he only feels pity for Nastasya and no longer loves her, and Aglaya, furious, threatens to send her rival to a house of correction (ch. VIII). The general's wife questions the prince and backs off. Lebedev says he lost four hundred rubles on the night of the party, that the suspects are General Ivolgin, Keller and Ferdyshchenko, and the prince asks him to act in silence (ch. IX). The prince reads the three letters from Nastasya to Aglaya, in which she says she believes in her rival's perfection and that Rogozhin will kill her. At night, in the park, Nastasya kneels before him and asks if he is happy. Rogozhin takes her away, and the prince answers: no, no, no (ch. X).
Part Four: The denouement
A week after the green bench, the narrator introduces ordinary people, those who think themselves original without hesitation and those who distrust their own mediocrity and suffer, among whom he places Ganya, Varya and Ptitsyn. Varya brings the news that the prince is engaged to Aglaya, and at the Ivolgins' house the father's crisis explodes; the general, according to Ganya, stole Lebedev's four hundred rubles (ch. I). Hippolyte, taken in at Ptitsyn's house, says in front of the general that perhaps Captain Ieropegov never existed. Ganya confirms it, and the general collapses, curses the house and leaves with his travel bag. Ganya shows his sister a note from Aglaya arranging a meeting for him on the green bench, and leaps for joy (ch. II). The narrator explains the general's crisis, and the prince, to whom the general asked for a talk that he calls the hour of destiny, discovers with Lebedev that the wallet has reappeared in the flap of Lebedev's own coat, and asks that the old man realize only that there is nothing more in the flap (ch. III). On the appointed day, the general tells the prince that he was a page to Napoleon at ten years old, and that he broke with Lebedev, who answered that story by saying he had buried the leg he lost in 1812. Afterward, in the street, shouting at Kolya, the general falls into a fit (ch. IV). At the Epanchins' house no one knows whether the prince is engaged. The hedgehog that Aglaya sends him in a basket is the reconciliation after having expelled him, and in the evening she asks him, in front of everyone, whether he is asking for her hand. He says yes and that he loves her. Aglaya examines him as in a negotiation, the sisters laugh, she runs off in peals of laughter and comes back afterward to ask his forgiveness (ch. V). The Epanchins set a gathering for the following evening to present the groom to the old princess Belokonskaya. Aglaya asks the prince not to speak of the beauty that will save the world and to break her mother's Chinese vase. On the day of the gathering, Lebedev confesses to being the author of the anonymous letters against Nastasya, the general has a fit, and the prince spends the day with the Ivolgin family. In the evening he enters the Epanchins' drawing room and wins everyone over (ch. VI). Hearing from an old dignitary that his benefactor Pavlishchev had converted to Catholicism, the prince grows excited in a speech in which Catholicism is a non-Christian faith and socialism its son. In the rapture he knocks over the Chinese vase, preaches to the room that to be first one must serve, and ends with a fit before the guests. Belokonskaya calls him sick, and the general's wife swears he will not marry Aglaya (ch. VII). The prince wakes with the foreboding that something definitive is going to happen, and hears from Hippolyte that Nastasya will arrive from Petersburg to receive Aglaya. Aglaya takes him to Darya Alexeyevna's house, where the two rivals face each other and Nastasya tells the prince to choose. He, faced with her desperate face, tells Aglaya that she is mad, Aglaya runs off, and he stays with Nastasya (ch. VIII). Two weeks later the wedding is set, and Pavlovsk tells the anecdote of the prince who renounced his bride for a fallen woman. Aglaya, who according to rumors tested Ganya with a candle, returned to her family and moved with her parents to Kolmino. Radomsky visits the prince and concludes, after hearing him say he is marrying because the other woman would die, that he never loved either of the two (ch. IX). General Ivolgin dies, and Kolya buries him. Nastasya delights in her dress and fears Rogozhin, who says he is hiding in the garden. On the wedding day, at the door of Darya Alexeyevna's house, she shouts to Rogozhin to save her and runs off with him. The prince receives the news in the church and says it is in the order of things, given her state, and at home he invites to tea the strangers who had wanted to force their way in (ch. X). The next day the prince searches for Rogozhin and Nastasya through the city. Rogozhin finds him in the street, fifty paces from the hotel, and silently takes him to the house on Gorokhovaya Street, where he shows him Nastasya dead under an oilcloth. The two spend the night beside the body, the prince stroking Rogozhin's head while he raves, until they break down the door (ch. XI). The Conclusion tells what remained: Rogozhin, after two months of brain fever, is sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor; Hippolyte dies two weeks after Nastasya; Aglaya marries a false Polish count; and the prince returns to Schneider's sanatorium, where Radomsky visits him and the general's wife weeps for him, and he does not recognize her (ch. XII).