dostoyevsky idiot — 3 things i told dave at 11:03

dostoyevsky with a y is, allegedly, the russian-er spelling. dostoevsky without is the easier one. i have used both in the same paragraph and nobody has corrected me, which means either i was right twice or nobody is reading. both options improve my evening.

so. someone, somewhere, has typed dostoyevsky idiot with a y into a search bar this morning, and the search bar suggested a tote bag, a paperback, and a 700-word blog from 2014. it did not, on this question, suggest me. that ends today, on a thursday, between a vendor onboarding upstairs and the moment somebody on the third floor remembers my name.

11:03am. half the floor is in a vendor onboarding two flights up. carla took her notebook in there at 10:30 wearing the navy cardigan that means she is the one taking notes. i have, by my count, the rest of the morning before the elevator returns its survivors and the spreadsheet remembers it has my name on it.

dostoyevsky idiot with a y is one of three accepted english spellings of dostoyevsky’s 1869 novel the idiot, about prince myshkin, a kind man destroyed politely by russian high society. the y-spelling tilts british, the e-spelling tilts american, and dostoievski is the spanish version, which is honest about vowels.

SAME BOOK. THREE SPELLINGS. ZERO PAGES READ.

i am not qualified to write this. that is the qualification.

what dostoyevsky idiot refers to, in this transliteration

the dostoyevsky idiot, in the y-spelling, is fyodor dostoyevsky’s 1869 novel rendered the way british publishers historically preferred — penguin classics on certain decades, oxford world’s classics on others, the secondhand paperback at the bookshop on the corner that closed during the pandemic and reopened as a vape store. it is the same book as dostoevsky-without-the-y. it is the same book as dostoievski. all of them, on page one, introduce a man named myshkin, who is too good for any room he walks into, including this one.

i learned this from looking at three book spines at a bookshop in 2019, which is, in my house, a research method. i held the y-version for forty seconds, then put it back. the y is, structurally, a piece of british politeness — it says: we have softened the russian for your eyes. the e-spelling is americans saying: get to the point. dostoievski respects all the vowels and has, on the four-way comparison, the moral high ground. the broader case for nodding along to russian literature instead of opening it sits inside the karl pilkington pillar argument for staying home and pretending you went, which is the same argument with passport stamps.

the dave call, who also has not read it

dave called me about this. dave calls me about most things. dave is in insurance, which is a job that produces unscheduled phone time, and dave uses it to test theories he would not test on a colleague. dave’s theory was that the y in dostoyevsky is “for legal reasons”, which is what dave says about every spelling decision he does not understand. dave thinks the t in tsunami is silent for legal reasons. dave is, to my knowledge, the only person who has said “legal reasons” enough times in one year to qualify as a verbal tic.

i told dave the dostoyevsky idiot is british in this spelling, american with an e, and otherwise russian in letters his keyboard does not respect. dave said “have you read it.” i said no. dave said “i have not read it either.” then dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it. by minute four the office blinds dropped half an inch. by minute seven the seventh microwave in the kitchenette beeped at nothing. by minute nine dave said “the form on the table needs your address by friday” and hung up. dave owes me three hundred dollars. that is unrelated. that is also relevant.

why beach vacations are punishment with sand, since you asked

that is, by my count, the only hot take that holds up under fluorescent lighting on a thursday.

three more book titles i misspell, and one i invented

since dostoyevsky-with-a-y is, on inspection, a spelling problem more than a literature problem, here is a small inventory of other titles i have, at various dinner parties, misspelled out loud.

• tolstoy / tolstoi. the y and the i have been fighting since 1880. i have lost both fights. when in doubt i say “the russian one with the long sentences” and let the listener pick a side.
• chekhov / tchekhov / tjechow. three publishers, three spellings, one writer. i have, at a wedding, called him “tchekhov” with the t pronounced because i thought it was vodka.
• nietzsche. not russian, but worth listing. i have spelled this nietsche, neitzsche, and once, in an email i would like back, “n.”.

the invented one: brothers karamazov is, in my head, “the brothers k”, because i nodded along at a dinner where a man explained karl pilkington’s silence as a karamazov-style refusal, and “the brothers k” was easier to repeat without choking.

three things i told dave, in order

since this is, technically, a hot take collection by way of a spelling argument, here are the things i defended on that nine-minute call.

1. plants are silent landlords. they sit in pots. they take light, water, and floor space. they pay nothing. brenda, my dead plant, is on her third winter as a vacancy.
2. credit cards are a personality trait. you can tell a man’s worldview by which one he hands the waiter. i have one card. it is a personality. i am not proud of it.
3. beach vacations are punishment with sand. defended above, in the pulpit, with the conviction of a man who owns one tie and would not take it to a beach if you paid him.

dave laughed at one. dave argued with the other two. a hypothetical movie of dave’s nine-minute laugh, if anyone ever made it, would be ninety minutes of one sound. i would watch it. i would not pay theatrical prices.

verdict, dave laughed for nine straight minutes

here is what i landed on, between the vendor onboarding upstairs and the moment dave hung up to deal with a form. the dostoyevsky idiot spelling fight is fake. the y-version, the e-version, the spanish version, the actual russian — they all point at the same novel about a man too kind to be allowed in society. that man’s whole arc is “people kept being themselves at him until he broke”, which is, structurally, also a description of what gaslighting feels like to the person being gaslit, told slowly: the world adjusts itself around your decency until your decency is the broken thing in the room. the dostoyevsky idiot is, on this reading, a 600-page novel about gaslighting with samovars.

i have not read the novel. i will not read the novel. it sits on the shelf in the bookshop that is now a vape store, which is also, structurally, what happens to most of our 19th-century intentions. and yet here we are, with three spellings and a hot take and dave still on the line in some technical sense, and a tie i own on the back of the chair, neither attending a wedding nor not attending one.

i wore that tie, once, to a dinner with a man named stefan who poured wine i could not afford and asked me, casually, what i made of the dostoyevsky idiot’s epilepsy. i said “tragic”. stefan said “interesting” the way an accountant says it when a number does not balance. the tie was crooked the whole evening. i did not fix it. fixing it would have been admitting it.

the elevator is back. somebody just walked past my desk holding two coffees, which is the universal corporate signal that the meeting upstairs has another twenty minutes in it.

for the wider thesis — that travel and reading are both optional inputs to a confident opinion — see the karl pilkington case for refusing to be filmed coming home changed. same shape. different excuses.

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