A faded silk handkerchief holds everything he owns, and that is already a verdict before anyone asks his name. On a thawing November morning the Warsaw train runs into Petersburg through fog so thick the windows show only a few yards. Two poorly dressed young men sit opposite each other, both restless to talk, neither knowing why this seating will matter. The black-haired one has slept in fur. The fair one is blue with cold in a Swiss cloak and answers every question as if rudeness were not in the carriage. He has been four years abroad for a nervous illness. When they ask whether he was cured, he says they did not cure him. They laugh at the wasted money, at the bundle, at the fact that he does not know where he will stay. He laughs when he sees them laughing.
A red-nosed clerk takes up the joke and then hangs a useful surname on it. If this traveller is really related to Mrs. General Epanchin, the faded handkerchief becomes a significant object at once. The prince agrees he is almost wrong to call her a relation. He wrote when Pavlicheff died and got no answer. He expected as much. The clerk treats other people's salaries, marriages, and second cousins as a science, yet he has never heard of Prince Myshkin as a living man. The prince says he is the last of a poor line, his father a sublieutenant, the kinship so thin the unanswered letter did not surprise him.
The black-haired passenger names himself Parfen Rogozhin, just back from fever in Pskoff, treated like a dog, now heir to millions his brother has already started stripping from a coffin. The clerk's tone flips to a bow. What holds the prince is not the fortune so much as the fever in the telling. Rogozhin needs a listener as a safety-valve for the agitation. He pours out Nastasya Filippovna: one glimpse from a shop into a carriage, a sleepless night, his father's loan bonds turned into diamond earrings, a laugh and thanks to "your friend Mr. Rogozhin" while Zaleshoff, dressed for the visit, took the credit. The old man crawled for the stones. She sent them back and said they were ten times dearer now she knew what they had cost Parfen. None of the three has seen her this morning. Lebedeff recites her box at the opera as if that were a fact he owned. Rogozhin seizes his arm when Lebedeff promises her proper earrings with the new money.
At the platform a crowd is already waving, though Rogozhin claimed he left in secret. He cannot say why he has taken a fancy to the prince, only that it is not the meeting itself, since he met Lebedeff too and feels nothing of the kind. He offers a fur coat, a full pocket, and a visit to Nastasya. The prince thanks him for the fancy, likes the dark-clouded face especially in the earring story, and admits he has hardly a copeck. They leave the carriage together and then they part. Rogozhin is pulled toward the Voznesensky with shouting friends and money promised by evening. The prince asks his way through the wet toward the Litaynaya, two miles still to go, the bundle still only a bundle.
Coming Up in Chapter 2
The prince arrives at the grand Epanchin household, where his claim of distant kinship will be tested. His simple honesty is about to collide with the complex social dynamics of St. Petersburg's elite, setting the stage for revelations that will surprise everyone, including himself..
