Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova is the woman everyone fights over in The Idiot: an orphan of twenty-five, raised and later supported by the wealthy Totsky, who considers herself guilty of what was done to her and therefore flees from anyone who treats her as innocent.
Totsky took her in as a girl, had her educated, and installed her in a little country house, where he began to visit her. When he wanted to marry, she went to Petersburg to stop it, and since then he has feared her. Now Totsky wants to marry someone else and, with the support of General Epanchin, wants to see her married to Ganya, offering him seventy-five thousand rubles, and she accepts the money, the narrator says, "as compensation for a crippled destiny." At the birthday party, she hears Rogozhin pay a hundred thousand for her and says: "He valued me at a hundred thousand!" To the prince, who asks her to marry him, she replies: "I was Totsky's concubine."
She throws the hundred thousand into the fireplace to see whether Ganya will pick it up, refuses the prince so as not to ruin him, and leaves with Rogozhin. Later she writes letters to Aglaya asking her to marry the prince and, on the day of her own wedding to him, runs off with Rogozhin, who kills her.
There are two readings of her. One sees her as Totsky's victim and as someone who has fixed her own worth by the contempt she feels for herself; the other sees her as someone who chooses destruction and surrenders to the abyss. The text sustains both, and it is the first that the prince defends: "This unhappy woman is deeply convinced that she is the most fallen, the most depraved being in the whole world."