Nastasya Filippovna

Principle heroine in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot (novel). She is the daughter of an aristocrat with no money and, when still a young child, falls under the "protection" of a rich rogue named Totski. Realizing that Nastasya would be a great beauty, Totski decides that she should have a suitable education and he provides her with a sort of one-on-one finishing school.

As she grows older, Totski visits her only occasionally on the estate where he has left her. Nastasya grows tired of this humiliating life, and when she learns that Totski is to be married, she goes to Saint Petersburg to confront him. Totski by now just wants to be rid of Nastasya, and he hopes to satisfy her by giving her an apartment in Saint Petersburg.

There she meets Prince Myshkin. The Prince is deeply moved by the combination of pride and suffering that he sees in her face. "Such a beauty is a terrible force," he said, "Is she good?... if only she were good, than all could be saved!" Totski has a less charitable opinion of her: "Nastasya Filippovna is unbridled and pitiless in her desires and she will stop at nothing to satisfy them because she cares about nothing--least of all herself."

Nastasya also has an immediate effect on the principle antagonist in the story, Rogozhin, who develops an almost insane passion for her. In order to buy Nastasya a pair of diamond ear-rings, Rogozhin steals ten thousand roubles from his father. The act finishes off his dying father and Rogozhin comes into a large inheritance. This he determines to use in order to win over Nastasya. One evening, in the presence of the Prince, Rogozhin throws a package containing one hundred thousand roubles on the table and asks Nastasya to marry him.

Nastasya takes the package and throws it in the fire. At which point the Prince says, "I will take you as you are, pure."

"Me, pure!?" Nastasya laughs.

The Prince believes that Nastasya loves him, but that she feels she would ruin him by accepting to marry him, and so she runs off with Rogozhin after all, with whom she seeks more humiliation and a sort of perverted bliss that she herself suspects will end in death.

(reference source: Le Dictionnaire des personnages, Laffont-Bompiani, 1960)