1. Prince Myshkin:
Prince Myshkin is Dostoevsky's positive character. He is an idealChristian and lives by the virtue of such ideals. He is compassionate, benevolent, patient and forgiving. He arrives in Russia at the age of twenty six having spent four years in Switzerland treating his epilepsy and mental illness. He refers to himself as an 'idiot' because of this illness. The reasons for his arrival to St. Petersburg is to start a new life with the help of his distant relative Yelizaveta Prokofievna Yepanchin, General Yepanchin's haughty yet sensible wife. At the General's house he is attracted to Aglaya as a new hope. He is, to some extent, a morphopsychologist who can find out a great deal about people looking at their faces, pictures or handwriting. This ability draws him compassionately to Nastasya Fillipnova as he sees great suffering in her and he wants to save her from self-destruction.
On the matters of the real world, as the world that people find it necessary to operate in, the Prince is not able to detect the propotions of things- as he himself puts it. This is because his view of the world is of no deceit or make over. He views all the people as good and debases himself in comparison to them. He has no definite tact to go about his objectives and insists on going to it openly and frankly. His insistence on doing good to all the people crosses the boundary of human limitations and practicability. In the end his actions end up hurting more than doing good. He gets obsessed with trying to save Nastasya. Rogozhin out of his love for Nastasya, and seeing she loves the Prince nearly tries to kill him. In the end, however, he stabs Nastasya to death. Prince Myshkin chooses Nastasya over Aglaya overlooking their engagement and her love towards him. This stains the family reputation of the Yepanchins and devastates Aglaya's true love.
His character is of a good ideal Christian and he does good to the people around him expecting them to be the same as himself. This of course isn't how the world operates and not knowing the boundary line or the proportion of things, his actions end up blowing the hopes of a new life for him to smithereens. In the end the results are devastating to himself and to the people around him. Thus he is an irony and a paradox to the modern society: Is the modern society so twisted that acts of simple goodness is equivalent to acts of idiocy? Is an ideal Christian and his conception of good so basic and simple that in modern world sophistication looks down upon such acts of goodness?
2. Parfyon Rogozhin:
The protagonist Rogozhin is a rich merchant's son who meets the Prince on a train, by which they are both going to Petersburg. Rogozhin is going home from hiding because he squandered his father's money to buy presents for Nastasya. Now that his father had died he is going to claim his inheritance.
Rogozhin is the sort of person who when they want something do not stop at anything and go to any extreme to obtain it. He is a man driven by passion. His fate is intertwined with that of the Prince and Nastasya Fillipnova. Rogozhin is a rich man so he is a indulgent in his passions. His love for Nastasya is a full fervor passion, with both love and hate. She totally possesses him. When she asks him to buy her for one hundred thousand roubles he does without a word of protest. When Nastasya runs away from him to Myshkin he follows her swallowing reproach and humiliation from her. He is totally mastered by this passion and to fulfill it squanders his wealth, time and energy. In the end when he knows for sure that he can never have Nastasya for ever he kills her. He isn't totally bad, as many of his conversations with the Prince reveal, it is only that the passionate love for Nastasya that ruins him.
3. Nastasya Fillipnova:
Nastasya is a strong charactered woman proud and haughty. She lost her family when she was still a small child and General Totsky was kind enough to raise and educate her. Totsky however seduced her and deceived her. This one event, immense in its gravity of course, seems to affect her for the rest of her life. She regards herself as debased and fallen and wants to prove it. She denies Totsky and General Yepanchin's proposal for her to marry Ganya. Instead she runs away with Rogozhin who bids her for one hundred thousand dollars. Rogozhin is a man of passion and living with him fulfills her conviction that she is debased and low. Prince Myshkin's compassionate love wins her heart but she knows that she can never live with him. She is dwindles between two men the Prince and Rogozhin, which is also a reflection of her moral conflict. Throughout the story she struggles with her love for the Prince because submitting to him is total submission, something she cannot do.
The people who know her closely know how strong her character and what kind of a person she is but outside the circle she is branded as a woman of loose character. Yepanchin family practically abhors her. Nastasya in spite of all these feelings towards her sweeps them aside as trifles and carries on. She wants to arrange a marriage between Aglaya and the Prince for his happiness. When she is confronted by Aglaya she orders the Prince to remain with her. The Prince complies and they plan to get married. On the day of the wedding she runs away with Rogozhin. Rogozhin unable to restrain his passion and the thoughts of not having her forever stabs her to death.
4. Aglaya Yepanchina:
Aglaya is the youngest daughter of General Yepanchin. She falls in love with the Prince for his compassionate, good character and intelligence. She herself is proud and vain. Throughout the story she despises the Prince for being meek and submitting to people even when they are making fun of him or using him. She taunts the Prince so that he may realize what she despises in him, but to no avail.
Ganya loves her but she shows no such feelings towards him except to raise jealousy in the Prince. Prince Myshkin however is undaunted by such efforts. Her vanity and jealousy leads her to confront Nastasya who clearly stands between Aglaya and her true love the Prince. She is devastated when, unable to bear Nastasya's insults, she runs from the house and the Prince stays back with her enemy. This event destroys whatever dreams she had regarding Prince Myshkin and herself, and she lives the rest of her life involved with shady unoriginal people.
5. The Yepanchin Family :
The Yepanchin family is an upper middle class family in Moscow. General Yepanchin heads the family. He is a man of fifty five who knows his position in the society and demands respect for that. He is very sympathetic to the Prince. His wife Mrs. Yepanchin is one of the last remaining Myshkins and a distant relation to Prince Myshkin. She is a strong willed woman when it comes to preserving her family and its reputation. She is bent on maintaining her class and wants to climb the social ladder to the high class of the aristocrats. She hates the European ideology penetrating the Russian soil and criticizes it and the young people influenced by it.
They have two other daughters Alexandra and Adelaida. Both cherish similar hopes of social ascent as their mothers. Both are unmarried but Adelaida has a suitorß Prince Sh.
6. Ganya Ivolgin:
Dostoevsky describes Ganya as one of the ordinary people who believes that he is original. In fact Ganya really is very unoriginal. He agrees to marry Nastasya agreeing to Totsky and General Yepanchin, for money. He is humiliated by Nastasya when she throws the money in the fire and tells him to get it, His pride saves him from total debasement.
He loves Aglaya but suffers without the mutual consent from her part. He is spiteful towards his family. He looks at them as burdensome, more than anything in the process to further his goals and plans.
7. Lebedev :
Lebedev is a civil servant who is willing to do anything for money. He whimpers and deceives just to get more money. He defends a money lender prosecuted by an old woman just because he can get more money. When Nastasya throws Rogozhin's one hundred thousand roubles in the fire and Ganya doesn't pick it off the fire, he begs on his knees for permission to pick it himself. In money matters he is totally unscrupulous but his intellectual standing is of a true Russian who despises the penetration of modern European ideas into Russia. In his speech at Prince Myshkin's birthday party he makes it clear that the age of scientific rationality is the age of the horsemen with the scale in the Apocalypse and that it is the end of humane world.
8. Ippolit :
Ippolit is a modern intellectual and belongs to that subclass of young people who are bent on explaining the world rationally and jump into the new ideas headlong. After the doctors ascertain that he is going to die soon with t.b. he spends a lot of time engrossed in spite towards the world. He becomes better with his friendship with the Prince.
He also gives a speech at the Prince's birthday party. In that he establishes himself as an existentialist and maintains that there is nothing greater anywhere than the fact that you live. He rejects God and religion demonstrating that if there was God, He wouldn't have played a cruel joke on him by terminating his life when its just starting to begin. He tries to commit suicide after reading his letter but fails to his humiliation because he forgets to install the firing caps. He is also one of the persons deeply influenced by Hans Holbein's painting of the Christ. He visualizes Rogozhin as the symbol of evil.
9. Radomsky:
Radomsky is a skeptic. He has a touch cynicism and skepticism in his speech and behavior. He becomes a family friend to the Yepanchin's after he is introduced to them. His proposal to marry Aglaya is denied. By the end of the story he emerges as one of the Prince's very good friends. In the end Radomsky helps the Prince think over the sequence of events that followed after the Prince decides to remain with Nastasya.
Radomsky knows what it is to be Russian. He criticizes the Russian liberalism movement strongly maintaining that any such movement goes directly in contrary to what Russia and Russians are all about. He is not a conservative since it is apparent that he is a modern man and sees the need for reforms. He is a progressive thinker.
10. General Ardalion Aleksandrovich Ivolgin:
General Ivolgin, father of Ganya, Kolya and Varya is about fifty five. He has a habit of borrowing money from other people and squandering all his money on drinks. Both his familial and financial situation is no very good. He spends his days glorifying his past telling wild, made-up anecdotes. One of such anecdotes involves Napoleon appointing him as a page boy.
He steals Lebedev's money to give it to his mistress but replaces it back to where he found it hounded by moral convictions. Lebedev knows this but doesn't acknowledge it. This creates a rift between the two friends and he quarrels with Lebedev regarding a story about a certain war. Disillusioned with his life and the situations around him, he has a series of strokes and dies from them.