The Idiot is about a good and guileless prince, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, who returns from Switzerland to St. Petersburg and, in a world where everything has a price, tries to save a woman who believes herself guilty. The book asks what unscheming goodness can achieve where everyone calculates, and answers through what happens to each person he touches.
In a single day, Myshkin enters three houses, and in every one of them he is called an idiot. In every one he also finds a bargain: the wealthy Totsky wants to buy the freedom to marry for seventy-five thousand rubles, Ganya accepts a bride he despises in exchange for her dowry, and Rogozhin raises his bid for Nastasya Filippovna from eighteen to a hundred thousand. The prince is the only one who puts no price on anything. Nastasya, the woman everyone bargains over, is the one who suffers most from it, because she considers herself guilty of what was done to her and flees from anyone who treats her as innocent: "He valued me at a hundred thousand!" she says at the party.
From late November to early July of the following year, between Petersburg and the summer resort of Pavlovsk, the prince disarms almost everyone who comes near him, but saves none of them. Nastasya is killed by Rogozhin; Aglaya, the young woman he goes so far as to propose to in front of her family, is lost to a false count; and he returns to the sanatorium without recognizing anyone. Along the way, the book puts beauty, faith, and compassion to the test, with Holbein's Dead Christ, the reading of Hippolyte's Explanation, and the prince's speech in a salon. There are two readings of the ending: that goodness is defeated by the social machinery without being refuted, and that it sees everything and chooses no one.