4 ideas
The new people argue that every action is motivated by self-interest, but that a correctly calculated self-interest includes the pleasure of acting honestly and making others happy. Because selfishness properly understood produces generous behaviour, virtue needs neither sacrifice nor duty. It only needs the person to see their own interest clearly.
Vera Pavlovna escapes her mother's plan to marry her off by entering a fictitious marriage with the medical student Lopukhov. Later she falls in love with his friend Kirsanov. Lopukhov then fakes his suicide on a bridge and leaves Russia, so that she can remarry without jealousy or scandal, and he reasons that this is simply what serves his own interest best.
Over time they also share housing, meals and education. The book presents gradual collective ownership as a practical path from exploitation to socialism, one that runs on members' self-interest rather than on charity.
Rakhmetov is a 'special person' who trains his body, eats raw meat, sleeps on a bed of nails, and gives up love and pleasure so that he can devote himself entirely to the coming cause. He appears as a type distinct from the ordinary new people: a professional revolutionary who shapes his own character as a tool for historical change.