Prince Myshkin
A nobleman who starts off as merely offbeat and unconventional, and is underestimated by the men who question his intelligence and overindulged by the women who find his goodness in a pool of cess irresistible. Epileptic, Myshkin gradually begins to unravel as he becomes more and more compassionate on his way toward becoming a figure of unparalleled goodness. The darkness that is the corrupt world around him places his within a web of betrayal, murder and revenge so that he ultimately become a martyr to innocence.
Natasya Filiponovna
Beautiful and seductive, she falls victim to a man’s unquenchable lust; in the process, she becomes a victim of degradation that leads to perhaps something even worse: the awareness this degradation gives her of her own powers of seduction. She will eventually fall victim to another deadly sin as the profoundly envious Rogozhin brings her to her ultimate appointment with destiny.
Madame Lizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchin
Honest, sensitive and simple, Madame Epanchin can best be described as a good woman. This goodness is sometimes veiled to a point of being hard to see behind melodramatic performances of emotion that often produce outrageous insults towards other. These insults ultimately prove to be the result of a good woman trying as best she can to deal her own sensitive nature regarding how others treat her.
Parfen Rogozhin
Coarse but passionate, insolent and dangerous, Rogozhin becomes inextricably entangled in the life of Prince Myshkin. He takes a terrible ride on the emotional rollercoaster that leads from becoming the tragic murderer of Nastaya into a contrite penitent barely able to put together two distinct words through his sorrowful blubbering. A victim as much as victimizer, Rogozhin veers closer toward becoming a tragic figure as the result of being a murderer than one might suspect.
Afanassy Ivanovich Totsky
An older man who takes Nastasya as his mistress when she is just sixteen, but who rejects her by deciding to marry a woman of greater respect when the time comes. She spitefully moves in with him in order to obstruct this which moves Totsky to offer a significant monetary reward to another man to marry her and thus remove obstacle. Ultimately, Totsky must give up his dream of marrying for respect, but still manages to retain his firm belief that his actions toward Nastasya were possessed of no evil intent
