The Idiot

Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is a young Russian aristocrat who has fallen on hard times. He has spent the past four years in a medical facility in Switzerland, receiving treatment for his epilepsy, which he occasionally refers to as his "strange nervous illness" (19). The treatment was funded by Nikolai Andreevich Pavlishchev, Myshkin's now deceased benefactor. He is now returning to Saint Petersburg to meet with his distant relatives, the Epanchin family. Myshkin rides the train from Warsaw to Saint Petersburg on a foggy November morning. On the train, he talks to a fellow passenger named Parfyon Rogozhin, who is traveling to Saint Petersburg to collect a large inheritance after the death of his father, though he is currently "all but bootless" (21). Rogozhin's last conversation with his father was an "angry" (22) discussion about Rogozhin's plan to marry a young woman named Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov, "a sort of princess" (23) whose reputation is sullied by rumors of her affair with a disgraced aristocrat named Totsky. Rogozhin stole money from his father to buy diamond earrings for Nastasya, who thanked him for his "kind attention" (24). Also taking part in the conversation is Lebedev, a poorly dressed civil servant with an extensive knowledge of Russian high society.