Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova (pre-reform and post-reform ) is the principal heroine of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1869 novel The Idiot. Though of aristocratic origin, beautiful and intelligent, Nastasya Filippovna is regarded by society as a 'fallen' woman, owing to her having spent four years as the concubine of the aristocrat Totsky, a position into which she was forced at the age of sixteen. Much of the drama of Nastasya Filippovna's character comes from the contradiction between her essential innocence, which is clearly recognized by the novel's central character Prince Myshkin, and the attitude of society that implies an irredeemable moral corruption, a view that she herself has inwardly embraced. Significance of the character to the novel Nastasya Filippovna occupies a vital position in two overlapping dramas in the novel, both of which could be described as love triangles. The first involves the characters of Prince Myshkin, Nastasya Filippovna and Parfyon Rogozhin, and the second involves Myshkin, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya Epanchin. Nastasya Filippovna, Myshkin and Rogozhin In the first triangle, the two male protagonists represent an appeal to one or other of the contradictory voices in the inner dialogue of Nastasya Filippovna's soul. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, "Nastasya Filippovna's voice is divided between the voice that pronounces her a guilty 'fallen woman' and the voice that vindicates and accepts her." Myshkin, himself a pure-hearted man, represents for her this second voice, and he unreservedly affirms her innocence even when she is fully immersed in her destructive role as the corrupted and condemned woman. She herself recognizes Myshkin as the possible realization of her innocence, but convinced also of her own corruption, she is equally driven by self-destructive and vengeful urges, and she refuses to cast herself in the role of a corrupter of children like Totsky. Thus she chooses to give herself to Rogozhin, for whom she can wholly become the 'fallen' woman. This is not because Rogozhin himself in any way morally condemns her, but because his mad and violent obsession with her resonates with her self-destructive urge, or the voice that identifies her as guilty. All the essentials of this drama are established in Part 1 of the novel, particularly in two crucial scenes. The first is at the Ivolgins' apartment, where Nastasya Filippovna is visiting the household of her potential fiancé, Ganya. Here she meets Myshkin, who is renting a room from the Ivolgins, for the first time. Totsky