After 4 years out of Russia, Prince Myshkin is back in Saint-Petersburg and must immediately re-acquaint himself with the ways of a modern and civilized Russia. After managing to completely take aback the servant of the General Epanchin with his naivety and frankness, he wins access to the General Epanchin , who is frankly astonished by the apparition of this “relation” (which reminded me of the painting of Ilya Repin which comes here with this paragraph) and also quite suspicious … Is he a kind of beggar, a parasite, who will leverage his family connection to his wife to gain supper, money and lodging? The scene is almost comical in effect - like a vaudeville scene in a theater. However, there is also a mystery, because Prince Myshkin keeps referring to a certain affair on which he requires advice:

In fact, I have a certain question upon which I much need advice, and do not know whom to go to for it. I thought of your family when I was passing through Berlin.

A bit later on, when Prince Myshkin is telling about his story in Switzerland, the author also adds that:

because of a certain matter which came to the ears of the latter, Schneider had despatched the young man to Russia.

However, we will never know what is this “matter” about because by the end of the chapter, the General Epanchin will cut the conversation short before Myshkin can really talk about it:

The general left the room, and the prince never succeeded in broaching the business which he had on hand, though he had endeavoured to do so four times.

I think that Dostoyevsky is doing that on purpose, and plays with the audience. There is a mystery there, or a simple trick to keep the audience curious and attentive. And it works!

However, even if Myshkin can’t explain himself, he has made his honesty and his goodness so obvious that the General Epanchin is obviously conquered and eventually agrees to help him, on the pretext of his calligraphic skills, by providing him with a job AND a lodging:

I shall find you a place in one of the State departments, an easy place—but you will require to be accurate. Now, as to your plans—in the house, or rather in the family of Gania here—my young friend, whom I hope you will know better—his mother and sister have prepared two or three rooms for lodgers, and let them to highly recommended young fellows, with board and attendance. I am sure Nina Alexandrovna will take you in on my recommendation.

However, Dostoyevsky makes sure to let us know that the General’s generosity is not totally uninterested - which makes this whole scene looks like in my mind a kind of chapter from Balzac, with people of the XIXth century French society trying to get advantages and favours from one anothers:

Taking so much interest in you as you may perceive I do, I am not without my object, and you shall know it in good time.

If the prospect of having to share lodgings with the Prince embarasses Gabriel’s secrety, this one shows absolutely nothing about it who even goes as far as sharing a cigarette with the Prince and asking him how he finds Nastasia, the woman he may soon marry. Something shows that this woman will be at the center of a love triangle between “Gania”, Myshkin and Rogojine - the dark brooding figure met in the train, and the evidence is that - before Dostoyevsky shows the encounter between the two last members of the Myshkin family - he takes upon him to tell us a long digression about that mysterious Nastasia.

It seems that Nastasia was a poor country girl, who was taken care of by a rich landowner, brought to town, and who had a total “control” over her protector, but not of the sexual kind:

He was afraid, he did not know why, but he was simply afraid of Nastasia Philipovna. For the first two years or so he had suspected that she wished to marry him herself, and that only her vanity prevented her telling him so. He thought that she wanted him to approach her with a humble proposal from his own side. But to his great, and not entirely pleasurable amazement, he discovered that this was by no means the case, and that were he to offer himself he would be refused. He could not understand such a state of things, and was obliged to conclude that it was pride, the pride of an injured and imaginative woman, which had gone to such lengths that it preferred to sit and nurse its contempt and hatred in solitude rather than mount to heights of hitherto unattainable splendour. To make matters worse, she was quite impervious to mercenary considerations, and could not be bribed in any way.

Maybe because of my lack of understanding of this situation, I’m unable to really understand what’s going on there between Nastasia and her “protector” but I guess we will learn more as soon as Dostoyevsky will want.

Eventually, the reason this story is introduced is because it fell to the General Epanchin to broker some kind of deal between Nastasia and her protector: and the General had no better idea than to suggest a wedding between Nastasia and his secretary “Gania”.
Just when Prince Myshkin appears at the door of the Epantchine’s, all the threads of that wedding are weighing in the balance, between Nastasia has not yet made her mind. Will she? will she not? How is Myshkin going to influence that decision?

We are left with that question pending just when Myshkin is thrown to her relation the Generale Epanchin, born Myshkin, and her 3 daughters who are having supper. He is thoroughly cross-examined by these four women, which does not seem to bother him: he tells the things about his time in Switzerland and his illness as candidly as possible - making him an easy target for the young women:

“I have seen a donkey though, mamma!” said Aglaya. “And I’ve heard one!” said Adelaida. All three of the girls laughed out loud, and the prince laughed with them.

If the Prince laughs at the joke, the mother is embarrassed and her last doubts about the Prince, who she thought was a lunatic madman, disappear. She is on his side from now on and intently listens to his story.

From an idiot, or a donkey, the Prince eventually becomes a kind of philosopher, when he tackles (again) the subject of death and death penalty. There is a long description of the execution scene which was depicted in the chapter II, and once again the Prince clearly states that this scene had a huge impact on his mind and vision of the world.

He is so convincing that, at the end of the chapter 5, the three Epanchin daughters are completely won over by the Prince and want to know more. They even suspect that there is a love story behind all of that… And they are kind of right: but Dostoyevsky cuts short at that moment and will tackle that subject in the following chapter.

At the end of chapter III, when Gania asks Myshkin something about Rogojine and Nastasia, Myshkin says:

Certainly he would, I should think. He would marry her tomorrow!—marry her tomorrow and murder her in a week!”

And to think that he says that about a man he just met in a train and about a woman he just heard about is quite astonishing. Does it mean he has some kind of vision of the future, or an innate sense of human nature? There is a violence behind those words which strikes a strange figure with the calm and peaceful and loving figure of the Prince.

To conclude, so far, we are still in the process of introducing the characters and their backgrounds. Myshking is almost clear since the beginning of the novel: a child, a philosopher, a victim, a pure heart… Who has to navigate his way into the cynical circles of XIXth Russia where everybody is motivated by either money or reputation. He is clearly like a fish out of the water but… somehow… his purity and his goodness shine through and illuminate all the people around him, unaccustomed to such a pure mind and candid ways. There is still one character that we have not “met” in person but that everyone is talking about: Nastasia. The way Dostoyevsky keeps talking about her from other characters remind me of the way he slowly speaks about Stavroguine in The Devils: something which makes me think that she will be the real “antagonist” of Myshkin in some perverted kind of way.