dostojevski idioti — 1 explainer, sort of

dostojevski idioti, slavic and unbothered, is how i was meant to spell it according to a man at the supermarket who saw me holding the wrong edition near the deli counter. a notification on my phone interrupted the lecture. the spelling debate did not survive it.

desk, third coffee, the lecture has migrated indoors. carla is upstairs at the procurement walkthrough. the rest of the morning, in theory, is a research window. let’s see how that holds.

so. dostojevski idioti. that is one of the spellings, plural, that the novel has accumulated as it has been carried across alphabets that do not agree with each other. dostoyevsky in english on a tuesday. dostoevsky in english on a different tuesday, in a different paperback, with a different translator’s name on the cover. dostojevski in finnish, slovenian, croatian. dostojewski in polish. and idioti, the eastern european plural-or-genitive of idiot, depending on the case ending and on which tab you have open. i looked it up. i had forty-seven tabs and one of them already knew.

i’m here to tell you, from a desk on a floor that is not the third floor, that the spelling is fine. all of them. they are all fine. the man at the deli counter who corrected me thought i would be embarrassed. i was not embarrassed. i was holding the wrong edition. that is a different problem. it is, in fact, my favorite kind of problem.

dostojevski idioti, the slavic spelling, briefly

let me handle the spelling first, because the man at the supermarket — let’s call him not stefan, because stefan is in another post — was very firm that i had it wrong. the wrong edition i was holding was a paperback with the english title in big letters and a small line beneath that said fyodor dostoyevsky, a transliteration the man considered baroque. his word, not mine. i looked baroque up later. it tracked.

here is what i can tell you, from a tab that has been open for two days. the russian original is idiot (идиот), 1869, written by a man whose surname in cyrillic is достоевский. when that surname enters english, it becomes some flavor of dostoevsky or dostoyevsky depending on which century the translator was working in. when it enters finnish, it becomes dostojevski. when it enters most south slavic languages, it becomes dostojevski. when it enters polish, it becomes dostojewski with a w that does the work of a v. the title, similarly, becomes idioti or idiotti or idiotot or some variant, depending on the case the language wants and the publisher’s decision about whether to italicize the borrowed word.

which is to say: dostojevski idioti is, if you live in helsinki or zagreb or ljubljana, exactly how you would type the title into your phone to find a copy. it is also, if you live where i live, a string i pasted into a search bar one tuesday because a friend of mine — okay, dave — texted me a photo of a finnish bookstore window and said “you know who this is, right.” i did. i pretended not to. dave laughed for nine straight minutes when i admitted i did. that is on the record. dave keeps the list.

this is, i would argue, my central qualification for writing about the meaning of the word idiot. i am one. i have been called one in approximately five languages. dostojevski idioti is one of those occasions. the prince, in the book, is one in only one language, which is fewer than mine. by that count, i am ahead of him. i am willing to put this in print.

the supermarket book aisle, briefly, where the lecture started

the supermarket is not where i would have chosen to encounter dostojevski idioti, but the supermarket is where i was, because i had gone in for two items and was carrying eight, none of which were the original two. this is consistent with my supermarket history. there is a paperback rack near the deli counter at this particular store, between the prepared salads and the bread that nobody buys. it stocks, on rotation, three categories: thrillers with red covers, cookbooks, and one classic novel that the buyer presumably thinks will class up the rotation. that day the classic was the idiot. the wrong edition. with the baroque spelling. with a stock photo of a man in a hat on the cover that, i’m fairly sure, was not even a russian man.

i picked it up because the title is mine. i feel an ownership over the word. i have written about a whole class of idiot, plural on this site already, which is the closest i will come to a credential. the man at the deli, who was buying ham, looked at the cover and said, in an accent i could not place, “that is not the right one.” i said, “the translation?” he said, “the spelling. dostojevski idioti. that is how it should be.” i nodded. nodding is my main move in conversations with strangers who have opinions. it costs me nothing. it ends the conversation faster.

except this conversation did not end. he started telling me, ham forgotten, about how english speakers had ruined the spelling of every russian author, that pushkin should be pushkin with a different vowel somewhere, that tolstoy was tolstoj, that chekhov was čehov, that the entire romanization scheme used by penguin was — and here he made a face — a concession. i was, by then, holding the paperback like a hostage. i wanted to put it back. i could not put it back without breaking the spell of the lecture. i had committed, by silence, to listening. this is, i’m fairly sure, in some serious magazine somewhere, a documented social trap.

the notification that interrupted my checkout, gratefully

then my phone buzzed. the notification, blessedly, was from nobody important. it was an alert about an app i had downloaded in 2023 to track my screen time, an app whose primary function had become reminding me how much screen time i had used by sending me notifications, which themselves added to the screen time. the notification said i had used the app, that day, for one minute. the notification took longer than that to read. this is the joke. this is the entire technology stack.

i looked at the phone. i used the phone as a polite social exit, which is what phones are for. i said, “sorry, i have to take this.” i did not have to take it. there was nothing to take. i said it anyway. the deli man, mid-sentence about chekhov, nodded gravely. he understood. we both understood that the buzz was the universal language for this conversation is over now. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a magazine you’d find at a dentist’s, about phones as social escape hatches. i did not look it up. i didn’t need to. i lived it.

i bought the paperback. i bought it because i had been holding it long enough that putting it back would have been awkward. i bought it because the deli man had, in the end, given me approximately seven minutes of his life, and the least i could do was buy the wrong edition he had warned me against. i bought it because dostojevski idioti, in any spelling, is a description of myself i feel ownership over. i checked out behind a woman with eleven items in a ten-item lane. she was unrepentant. i admired her.

DOSTOJEVSKI. IDIOTI. CHECKOUT. COMPLETE.

why books on tape are still cheating, briefly

now. some of you, reading this, will be thinking: you bought the book. when are you going to read the book. a fair question. an aggressive question. i have an answer prepared.

i am, currently, “reading” the audiobook. by which i mean: i have it queued. it is on my phone. the cover image, in the app, shows a different man in a different hat, also presumably not russian. the audiobook is twenty-six hours long. i have, to date, listened to seventeen minutes of it, distributed across four sessions, three of which were while i was making coffee and one of which was while i was looking at the third yoga mat under the couch and thinking about whether to do yoga, which i did not do, because i was busy listening to a russian novel about a prince i was already failing.

which brings me to the take, which i am citing because it is on the record and i am not going to pretend i don’t have it.

the third yoga mat under my arm, somehow

here is something that happened that i will report without comment. as i was leaving the supermarket, paperback in one hand, eight items in a tote in the other, i realized i was also, for reasons i could not reconstruct, carrying my third yoga mat. it had been in the car. i had taken it out, presumably to bring inside, weeks ago, and it had migrated into my arms again at some point during the deli lecture. i do not remember picking it up. it was there. yoga mat, paperback, eight grocery items i did not need, and a phone with a screen-time notification still glowing.

this is, i think, the modern condition. you go in for two things. you come out with eight things, plus a russian novel, plus a yoga mat you forgot you owned, plus a stranger’s opinion on transliteration, plus a notification you didn’t ask for. you set them all down at home. you look at them. they are, collectively, your tuesday. dostojevski idioti is the title, but the spread on the kitchen counter is the prose.

the case for buying the wrong edition

i would like to make, briefly, the affirmative case for buying the wrong edition of a book. it is a case i have practiced, at length, on the internet, but i have not yet put it down here. i want it on the record.

the wrong edition is the edition you actually buy. the right edition is the one you research, in tabs, and then never order, because the research itself takes the place of the action. i have a tab open right now, and have had since 2024, comparing two penguin classics editions of the brothers karamazov. the tab is the closest i will come to owning either edition. the tab is, in itself, a kind of ownership. the 2003 edition of the idiot, with its specific cover, is one i looked at for sixteen minutes one night before falling asleep with the laptop on my chest. i did not buy it. i did not need it. the looking was enough.

but the wrong edition — the one with the baroque spelling and the man in the hat who is not russian — is a real object. it is now on my kitchen counter. it has weight. it interrupts the visual field. it is, in itself, a small commitment. it says: i am going to read you, dostojevski idioti, eventually, possibly in 2027, possibly never, but the option exists now, where it did not before.

this is, i would argue, the entire point of physical books. the option. the weight. the thing on the counter. the man at the deli was wrong about the spelling but right about the principle: you should buy the book. even the wrong one. especially the wrong one. the right one will never arrive. the wrong one is here.

verdict, the spelling is fine, also the prince

so here is where we land.

dostojevski idioti is a spelling. it is one of many spellings. it is the slavic spelling, broadly speaking, and it is correct in the languages where it is correct, which is most of them. the english spelling is also correct, in the language where it is correct, which is the one i’m typing in. the man at the deli was right about the spelling but wrong about the implied moral failing of using a different one. there is no moral failing. there is, at most, a different alphabet.

the prince in the book — myshkin — is, by every account i have, an idiot in the most generous sense of the word. he is too earnest. he tells the truth in rooms where the truth is not invited. he loses everything in part because he is incapable of the small dishonesties most of us run on. he is, in this regard, not me. i run on small dishonesties. i told the deli man i had to take a call. i was lying. that is one small dishonesty per day, which is, frankly, on the low end. myshkin would have answered the phone honestly. myshkin would have said “i was, in fact, looking for an exit from this conversation.” that is why myshkin is the protagonist and i am writing a blog post about a paperback i have not opened.

i’m reading elif batuman’s novel of the same title next. that is to say: i am not reading it. i am keeping it on a bedside table. i am letting it accumulate the same dust as the dostoevsky. the title travels. the title is shared. the title is a category. it is, in the linguistic sense, plural. dostojevski idioti, plural, is the right way to think about it. there are many of us. there has, in fact, never been just one.

some of you will find this a stupid hill to die on. you are not wrong. the entire concept of stupid, as i have argued before, is a linguistic conspiracy designed to make people who think slowly feel bad about thinking carefully. the deli man and i were both being a little stupid, in different directions, and the conversation was the better for it. dostojevski idioti, in the slavic plural, covers both of us. it is, frankly, the most accurate noun phrase i have read this year, and i still have not opened the book.

some of you will object that i’m building a verdict on a book i have not read, on a transliteration i learned twenty minutes before writing this, on the authority of a man buying ham. fair. those are my sources. those are, to be honest, most of my sources, most weeks. i’m fairly sure dostoevsky himself would have approved. he wrote drunk and broke and on deadline, which is, by my reckoning, the same conditions i’m working in, minus the talent.

(if you want the title idiot in another medium, the 1958 soviet adaptation of dostoevsky’s novel, on the imdb page for ivan pyriev’s 1958 idiot film, is, by my count, the most beautiful sad black-and-white assemblage of faces ever filmed. yury yakovlev as myshkin is the closest cinema has come to the prince as written. four minutes on it is a better afternoon than most.)

i remain, as ever, an enthusiast of the youtube genre of people being idiots at work, which is — i would argue — a continuation of the dostojevski tradition by other means. the prince at his desk. the prince on a forklift. the prince reaching for a fork in a microwave. the seventh microwave i killed, by the way, was killed during a session in which i was, of course, listening to a podcast about the idiot. the irony was not lost on me. the irony, in fact, is most of my afternoon.

the word travels. the word translates. the word, in indian languages such as odia, becomes its own local thing. the word in finnish, where it picked up the i ending we are discussing, becomes idioti. the word in english became idiot. it is the same word everywhere it lands. it lands, most days, on me. it lands today on a man in a deli with strong opinions about romanization. it lands, in 1869, on a prince in saint petersburg. there is a continuity.

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