From the stories about the prince, in the first part, we learn that he is "a naked, a descendant of an ancient branch"; he was married to the daughter of a rich merchant farmer, whom he tortured, abandoned his son and served abroad, "at one of the most important embassies". Returning to Petfburg, he learns that his son is going to marry Ikhmenev's daughter, and upsets this marriage. In the second part, the prince decides to marry Alyosha to the millionaire Katya.

In the third part, from the revelations of the detective Masloboev, it turns out that the prince deceived and robbed Smith's daughter and that Nelly is his legitimate daughter.

The prince is a typical villain of melodrama, a necessary accessory of an adventurous novel-feuilleton. On his conscience is the death of his two wives, his daughter, the old man Smith, the ruin and disgrace of the Ikhmenev family, the broken life of Natasha. And at the end of the novel, he triumphs, prospers and is going to marry a rich fourteen-year-old girl.

The prince is the center of the action. It is the key to all mysteries. As the father of Nelly and Alyosha, he combines both plots. The composition of "The Humiliated and the Insulted" is parallel to the construction of "Stepanchikov's Village". The villain, under the guise of virtue, charms a good and weak person, insidiously takes possession of his will. There are Opiskin and Rostanev; Prince Volkovsky and Alyosha are here. "The good" enter into a struggle with the evil. There is Rostanev's fiancée, Nastenka, and his friend, the narrator, — here are Alyosha fiancée, Natasha, and another narrator, Ivan Petrovich. In both cases, the attack of the evil and the counter-attack of the good end in the imaginary shame of the villain. Opiskin is kicked out, Volkovsky gets slapped in the face. But in both novels, the matter ends with his complete triumph.

"The humiliated and insulted" stand on the eve of Romanov tragedies. Studying their composition, we penetrate into the very process of creating a new form. A new genre is being formed before our eyes, a new narrative style is being developed. "The tragedy novel" is not of high origin; It is based on "tabloid literature": a novel of adventures and a criminal novel. Dostoevsky begins his ascent from the lowlands, but he elevates vulgar and second-rate literary forms to the pinnacle of high art. The templates of E. Xu and F. Soulier are filled with ingenious psychological and ideological content. The writer's "spiritual realism" is in the depiction of the life of ideas. The adventurous novel helped him to translate ideas into concrete form. He taught him the drama of action and the dynamics of construction. Thus, "criminality" turned into "Crime and Punishment" and into "The Brothers Karamazov".

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The elevation of the novel-feuilleton to the level of a psychological novel begins already in "The Humiliated and Insulted". Within the framework of two melodramas, sentimental and romantic, there is a deep ideological idea. The spiritual experience of penal servitude is translated into the language of artistic images. It can be called: the collapse of idealism. Before penal servitude, Dostoevsky was an idealist, a utopian, a socialist, a humanist. All these "isms" were based on Rousseau's axiom: "man is naturally good." After penal servitude, faith in the "natural good" was lost. All the heroes of "The Humiliated and Insulted", except one, are kind and virtuous, and this one easily defeats them. If the "natural good" is powerless, is it good? Perhaps what seemed good in his dreamy youth is not good at all? Then you need to expose his lies, tear off his mask. It is not the "good" who judge the "evil", but the "evil" judges and condemns the "good".

Of these, the first is the son of Prince Volkovsky, Alyosha. "The sweetest boy, handsome, weak and nervous like a woman, but at the same time cheerful and simple-minded, with an open soul and capable of the noblest sensations, with a loving, truthful and grateful heart." But "he has no character" and "a complete absence of will." He will probably do a bad deed, but it will probably be impossible to blame him for this bad deed, but only to feel sorry for it." He was naïve beyond his years and understood almost nothing about real life. However, even at the age of forty, it seems that I would not have recognized anything in her. Such people are, as it were, condemned to eternal minority." Alyosha takes Natasha away from her relatives, wants to get married, but does not imagine how and on what he will live with her. He is going to write a novel, a novel based on the plot of Scribe's comedy, and immediately laughs: "What a writer I will be! " Then he promises to give music lessons, sell his trinkets... He rents an elegant apartment for Natasha, but soon his money comes to an end. Natasha moves into a worse apartment and starts working. Alyosha shouts, 4to despises himself, but continues to do nothing; he cheats on his fiancée with Josephine and Minna, returns to her with a guilty look, and, having calmed down, tells her all the details of his adventures. He falls in love with Katya, but also loves Natasha. "We will all three love each other," he dreams. Breaking Natasha's heart, the "sweetest boy" remains innocent. And when, the narrator remarks, how could this innocent man become guilty? ". Alyosha is Rousseau's homme de la nature, innocent before the Fall, a naturally kind heart, outside of moral will and moral law.

"The author concretizes the idea of Alyosha by introducing his simple-minded hero into the circle of idealists, utopians, reminiscent of Petrashevsky's circle. In Alyosha naïve chatter there is an evil parody of people of the magpie years. He meets two relatives of the "enthusiastic girl" Katya, Levinka and Borenka. One is a student, the other is just a young man. They have a circle: students, officers, artists, one writer; meet on Wednesdays. "These are all fresh young people," says Alyosha. All of them with ardent love for all mankind. We all talk about our present, about our future, about the sciences, about literature, and we talk so well, so directly and simply... And they also call us utopians... In general, we talk about everything that leads to progress, to humanity, to love, all this is said about modern issues. We are talking about glasnost, about the beginning of reforms, about love for humanity, about modern figures... And so all of us, under the leadership of Bezmygin, promised ourselves to act honestly and directly all our lives. I admire high ideas. They may be erroneous, but their foundation is holy."

A. Bem pointed out that Levinka and Borenka got into Dostoevsky's novel from "Woe from Wit" (Levon and Borenka). They were transferred from the English club to Petrashevsky's circle. Alyosha plays the role of Repetilov.

The "kind" boy is helplessly torn between two lovers. He ends up leaving with Katya for the village, assuring Natasha that he will die without her. He torments and suffers, sins and repents, weeps and begins again.

The image of Alyosha is complex. Socially, he is a groundless aristocrat, a victim of bad heredity and a depraved environment. Hence his eternal minority, childishness, detachment from reality. Psychologically, he is an idealist-utopian in the spirit of Petrashevsky, an admirer of everything "high and beautiful". In the moral sense, it is the embodiment of the impotence of natural good, a man without character, without will, and without personality. "A kind heart" does not keep Alyosha from embezzlement, betrayal, deception, even betrayal; For all his sensitiveness, he is the most violent egoist.

In the person of Alyosha, Dostoevsky executes his "innocent" beauty of the forties. After the experience of penal servitude, it appears to him to be sheer frivolity, Khlestakovism and repetilovism.

Even more parodic is the portrayal of the romantic heroine, Nelly's mother. The story of the misfortunes of the girl insulted and abandoned by the prince is put into the mouth of the volunteer detective Masloboev. The prince took Smith's daughter to Paris, robbed her and abandoned her. She had a German fiancé who remained faithful to her in misfortune. Masloboev says of him: "This beauty had an ideal man in love with her, Schiller's brother, a poet, at the same time a merchant, a young dreamer, in a word, quite a German, some kind of Feferkuchen." For the idealist German, the most comical names are chosen: from Feferkuchen he turns into Frauenmilch, then into Feuerbach, and finally into Brudershaft. "Frauenmilch also dragged herself to Paris ... She kept crying, and Feferkuchen whimpered, and many years passed in this way... She had in her hands a written undertaking from the prince, but she was such a "lofty" creature that instead of "the practical application of the law" she confined herself to "lofty and noble contempt" for the seducer. Brudershaft also encouraged her and did not reason: Schiller had been read. Finally, Brudershaft turned sour for some reason and died." Masloboev mockingly characterizes the romantic heroine: "Smithikha was in herself the craziest and craziest woman in the world... After all, this is romanticism, all this is superstellar nonsense on the wildest and craziest scale. Take one thing: from the very beginning she dreamed only of something like heaven on earth and of anguedas, she fell in love wholeheartedly, she believed infinitely, and I am sure that she went mad afterwards, not because she was deceived in him, that he was capable of deceiving her and abandoning her; but because her angel turned into dirt, spat on and humiliated her. Her romantic and crazy soul could not bear such a transformation."