fyodor the idiot — 1 explainer, sort of

fyodor the idiot, said the man at the bar like he was naming a cousin, before launching into a sixteen-minute summary i did not request. mountain people, he added between paragraphs, are the only ones who understand cheese. the schrodinger fridge at home agreed by humming.

i wrote that line down on a coaster and brought the coaster to work the next morning. it is now taped to the inside of a drawer where the cheap pens live. it is, by my reckoning, the cleanest opening line anyone has ever spoken to me about a russian novelist whose first name i was not sure i could pronounce until tuesday.

so. fyodor the idiot. that’s our topic. it is, more accurately, half a topic — a first name and a noun yoked together with a hyphen made of vibes. but the search bar gets what it gets. people type it. i’m here to do the explainer they thought they were getting.

writing this from the desk. carla is on the third floor at the q3 review, two folders deep. i have, with luck and a slow elevator, the rest of the morning before she rounds the corner with notes.

fyodor the idiot, the author’s first name

let’s get the basic mechanics down. fyodor is a russian first name. it is the russian version of theodore. it means, roughly, gift of god, which is the kind of meaning a name has when the person who named you was not paying attention to outcomes. the man who carried this first name most famously, for our purposes, was a novelist whose nineteenth-century book gave us the word idiot in a way that is hard to shake, and who in 1869 published a novel called the idiot about a prince called myshkin.

so the phrase fyodor the idiot is what you get when somebody says the author’s first name and the title of the book in the same breath, drops the patronymic, drops the surname, drops the article, drops the punctuation, and arrives at a four-syllable lump that sounds, on first hearing, like a nickname. fyodor the idiot. it sounds like one of dave’s coworkers. it sounds like a guy at the bar with a story.

i looked into how often people search for it like that, and the answer is: more than you would think and less than they search for the surname. the surname has the prestige. the first name has the warmth. the surname tells you the writer matters. the first name tells you the writer was, on tuesdays, just a man named fyodor.

why we drop the surname sometimes

here is the thing nobody talks about. surnames in english are exhausting when they are russian. i mean this as a compliment. the surname has too many letters, too many y’s, and a stress mark that hides behind the second syllable like a man behind a curtain. when you are trying to recommend a book to a friend over text, you don’t type the surname. you type “you should read fyodor’s idiot”. your friend understands. the surname is, in this scenario, decorative.

i have, on at least four occasions in my adult life, called the man fyodor as if he and i had a personal arrangement. i have never read his book end-to-end. i have read passages. i have read summaries. i have nodded at the cover like a man who knows what he’s nodding at. that is, by my count, three steps closer to friendship than i have with most of the people in my own building.

so when somebody types fyodor the idiot into a search bar, they are doing one of two things. one: they want to know about the russian author and his most famous novel and have collapsed both into shorthand. two: they have a story about a guy at a bar, and the guy at the bar said fyodor the idiot, and now they’re trying to retro-fit a wikipedia paragraph onto a memory. either is fine. we have hosted both kinds of reader on this site already, and we will host more.

mom called sunday and asked who fyodor was

mom called sunday. mom always calls sunday. it is one of three reliable things in my life, the other two being the seventh microwave (still running, against medical advice) and the fact that the bank app, when opened, makes a small chime that i find personally insulting.

mom called and said: “i was at the library. they had a display. who is fyodor.” she did not say fyodor who. she said who is fyodor, like a person who had encountered a name in the wild and was checking with me, her in-house etymologist, before committing to opinions about him.

i told her. i told her about the russian, the 1869 novel, the prince, the duel, the seizures, the coffin-shaped death. i told her dostoevsky was the surname and fyodor was the first name and the idiot was the book and the idiot in the book was a good man, technically, who was so good he made everyone around him uncomfortable. i told her this took about ninety seconds, because mom does not have the patience for the version of the explanation that ends with and so really, when you think about it.

she said: “so the idiot is the good one.” i said yes. she said: “that tracks.” she knew. mothers know. it is their power. it cannot be defeated.

the stefan-type at the bar who explained everything, allegedly

now i would like to introduce you to the man who said fyodor the idiot like he was naming a cousin. he is a stefan. by which i mean: he is not literally named stefan, but he has every other property a stefan can have. the slim glasses. the wine that is “interesting, not great”. the slightly rolled sleeves. the firm opinions about cheese, which he will share at any provocation, including the provocation of you not asking.

he was at the corner. mike was behind the bar, looking like a man who has not filed taxes in years and would like to keep it that way. mike said, of stefan, “that one’s been working up to a speech all night”. mike was correct. mike is always correct about who is about to speechify in his bar. it is, frankly, a gift.

stefan started with: “fyodor the idiot. you have to start there.” he then talked for sixteen minutes. i timed it. i did not time it because i found him interesting. i timed it because i had nothing else to do and the fries were taking forever. stefan covered: the novel, the year of publication, the prince’s epilepsy, the prince’s romantic disasters, the prince’s wedding-that-was-not-a-wedding, the prince’s terminal nineteen-something-year-old behavior. he covered the original russian title and how badly it translates. he covered the brothers karamazov as a kind of “by the way”. he covered, briefly, why mountain people are wrong about everything except cheese.

i nodded a great deal. nodding is, in these situations, the only sustainable response. i did not say that we have already mapped this same word across an entirely different language and found it survives the trip mostly intact, because stefan would have wanted to take that on next, and the fries had finally arrived.

the schrodinger fridge during the call

back to mom. while she was on the phone explaining what shelf the library display was on (the third one, near the new releases, if you want to picture it), i was standing in the kitchen in front of the schrodinger fridge. i call it that because the fridge is, at any given moment, both full and empty depending on whether i open it. (i am aware of how that sounds.)

i did not open it during the call. i never open it during the call. opening the fridge during a call with mom is, in this house, considered rude. i learned this the hard way in 2021, when i opened it to look for cheese, and mom, on the other end, said “i can hear you opening the fridge”, and i said “i’m not”, and she said “ok”, in the tone she uses when she wants the call to be over. that is, by my count, the only time mom and i have lied to each other on a sunday call. i’m trying not to do it again.

so i stood in front of the fridge with my hand on the handle, listening to mom describe the library display, while she described what the librarian said about fyodor (“he was sad, but in a useful way”), and i thought: this is the kitchen. this is sunday. mom is on the phone. fyodor is in 1869. fyodor is also, in some way i cannot put a finger on, in the kitchen with us. the seventh microwave hummed in agreement. so did the fridge, which is its main personality trait.

mountain people are wrong about everything except cheese, briefly

i would like to take a brief detour, because stefan opened a door and i am, against my better judgment, walking through it.

FYODOR. IS. A. FIRST. NAME.

that is what i mean by mountain people, and that is what stefan meant. stefan, for the record, lives nowhere near a mountain. stefan lives in a fourth-floor walkup with a balcony where one tomato plant has been dying in slow motion since april. stefan’s claim to mountain authority is that he has been to a mountain, briefly, in 2018, and bought cheese there. that’s the entire pedigree. it is, by my count, more pedigree than i have on most subjects.

verdict, fyodor is fine, also a russian first name

so where does that leave us. it leaves us here. fyodor the idiot is, technically, two things stuck together: the first name of a russian novelist, and the title of his most famous book. it is a phrase that exists almost entirely because surnames are hard and people are tired. it is also a phrase that, on certain mornings, sounds like a nickname someone might give you if you were the kind of person who killed seven microwaves and named the fridge.

fyodor is fine. there is also a karl pilkington case for the idiot abroad as a parallel kind of investigation, where a guy who would prefer to be home is sent away to be confused on camera; the principle is the same; the russian version is just longer and has more snow. the idiot abroad is short trips. fyodor’s idiot is one long trip with seizures. elif batuman wrote a third idiot in 2017, which we have covered separately, and which will, at some indeterminate point, get read by me. for now, the title is enough.

the seventh microwave, in the kitchen, is on its second life and counting. the schrodinger fridge has a yogurt in it that i cannot, without committing, confirm exists. mom knows the librarian’s first name now. dave does not know who fyodor is and would, if asked, guess “the guy from the bar”, which is, philosophically, also correct. for context, the 1958 soviet film adaptation of the soviet idiot film starring yuri yakovlev is, in my opinion, the most beautiful screen version of fyodor’s book — slow, cold, full of furniture.

carla just rounded the floor with two folders and a mug. i closed the tab. she gave a half-nod and kept moving. could be approval. could be a reminder. either way, the morning held.

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