Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin is the merchant who, in The Idiot, inherits two and a half million from his father and pursues Nastasya Filippovna until he kills her: he is Prince Myshkin's rival and, at the same time, the man with whom he exchanges crosses and spends the last night.
He appears on the first page, in the third-class carriage, dark, pale, and feverish, and tells the prince how he bought diamond earrings for Nastasya. That same day he raises his bid for her from eighteen to a hundred thousand rubles and, that evening, puts the money on the table at her birthday party. Six months later, at the house on Gorokhovaya Street, he defines his love as the opposite of his rival's: "There is no pity in me for her at all." The prince answers that his love is indistinguishable from anger.
He trades the prince's tin cross for his own, a gold one, takes him to receive his mother's blessing, and that same night waits for him on the hotel staircase with a knife. Later he tells the prince, without rancor, that he believes every word he says, "still, I don't like you." In the end, he kills Nastasya, calls the prince to keep vigil over the body, and is sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor.
For some readers, Rogozhin and Myshkin are rivals; for others, two poles of a single soul, matter and spirit, and the exchange of crosses, the knife, and the night beside the body would be three scenes of the same bond. The text provides material for both readings.