dostoevsky fyodor the idiot — what they do not tell you in the elevator

in the elevator i once thought about how rearranging the words of a title does not actually rearrange the book. dostoevsky, fyodor, the idiot. fyodor, the idiot, dostoevsky. all the same novel. all the same panic on page 312. the elevator is, anyway, a small room with worse decisions.

so. dostoevsky fyodor the idiot. surname first. given name comma trailing. title at the end like a quiet afterthought the librarian already typed before lunch. that ordering is not how you talk about a book. that ordering is how a catalog talks about a book to itself, in a drawer, on an index card, with a pencil that has not been sharpened since the previous administration.

i’d like, briefly, to file this distinction in writing, while carla is up on the third floor at a training session that nobody volunteered for and the boss is, as always, somewhere not here. the elevator is between floors. the post is between meetings. my pillar on the broader category of idiots who report from places they were sent to covers the wider beat. this one is narrower. this one is just the spine, flipped backwards, in serif font, by someone with a card catalog.

tuesday. the desk. carla is up at a training on the third floor — annual something. roughly fifty minutes if the slides behave. the spreadsheet is open behind the russian-novel tab, which has been open, on this machine, since february.

SURNAME. FIRST. COMMA. AFTER.

what dostoevsky fyodor the idiot refers to, technically

technically, dostoevsky fyodor the idiot is a string of catalog metadata. it is the order a card-cataloger of the older school would have written on a four-by-six index card: surname, comma, given name, comma, title. that is the way you sort a shelf alphabetically when the shelf has fifteen thousand authors and one summer intern. the comma is doing the work. the comma is the load-bearing piece of punctuation in the entire system of human knowledge organization, and almost nobody thinks about it.

the novel itself, regardless of how the spine has been twisted by some librarian’s grammar, is the same one. prince myshkin returns to russia from a swiss sanatorium. he is good. he is read as simple. he is called an idiot in the salons of petersburg by people who would not survive a single afternoon of his sincerity. the book is six hundred and sixty-seven pages, give or take a translator, and on page three hundred and twelve there is a scene that, every time i reach it on a tuesday morning, makes me close the laptop and look at the elevator door directly across the corridor for about ninety seconds before i open it again.

the english-language convention has, for two centuries, gone back and forth on the spelling of the surname. five active variants. the bibliographic version on the catalog card uses the -e- form, because that is what the academic transliteration prefers, and because the librarian is, by training, conservative. a 1958 french film adaptation, indexed in the global film database as “the idiot”, lists itself title-first, because the screen wants the title up top where you can see it. the screen is impatient. the index card is patient. the index card has all afternoon.

the elevator, where i now read

the elevator in this building has a specific quality i would like, while i can, to describe. it is small. it has a mirror on the back wall, smudged at about chest height by what i believe to be the corner of a clipboard. the floor numbers light up with a delay. between three and two there is, sometimes, a hesitation that feels editorial. between two and one the hesitation gets worse. between one and the lobby it stops being a hesitation and starts being, in my private taxonomy, a pause for thought.

i have started reading in the elevator. i did not plan this. it began, possibly, on the morning the third yoga mat — still under the couch in my apartment from 2023, possibly evolving — finally lost the war for the floor of the living room and i decided i would do my reading vertically, in transit, from now on. so i carry, in a tote, my paperback copy of the russian novel. between the third floor and the lobby i can manage about a third of a page. between the lobby and the third floor on the way back, slightly less, because going up the elevator stops at two for someone with a cart.

this is, on paper, a stupid system. i am aware. i would defend it anyway. the elevator is, in some technical sense, the only room in the building where nobody can ask me anything. carla cannot reach me. the boss, who is forever in another meeting on a different floor, cannot reach me. the man with the cart, who has stopped me twice and asked about the printer, can technically reach me but does not, because his hands are full. so the elevator is, against the design intent of the architect, my reading room.

page three hundred and twelve has, this week, been read four times. each time the doors opened, i closed the book on a thumb. each time the doors closed again, i opened it on the same paragraph. that is the russian novel. that is the elevator. that is the working theory.

why a spoon is a smaller bowl, applied

i’d like to invoke a take i’ve been carrying around since i was, conservatively, twenty-six. the spoon is a smaller bowl. redundant. i have defended this take in various places, with various people, in various states of beverage. i’d like to apply it, here, in a serious room, to the elevator.

this is the kind of argument my friend dave would, if i ran it past him at the corner of the bar, listen to with his head tilted, then laugh for nine straight minutes. dave laughs at everything. dave is on his third bourbon by then. dave is also a friend who has, over the years, asked me exactly twice about a small unspecified sum he says i owe him, and on both occasions changed the subject before i could answer. dave is a generous man with a poor sense of follow-through. dave would, on this question, agree with me on the elevator. he would also, separately, point out that i should leave the bar earlier.

examples of word orders that confused me

a brief survey, while the training upstairs continues to not end. each of these has been, at some point, a search string i typed into a search bar and then squinted at, because the order of the words rearranged my expectations of what i was about to find.

• dostoevsky, fyodor — the idiot. the catalog card version. surname comma. clinical. the version that lives in a drawer in a library where the lights are on a timer. this is the version we are filing today.
• fyodor dostoevsky’s the idiot. the possessive form, used by a syllabus that wants to remind you whose book you are reading. the apostrophe-s carries an entire seminar on its small back. you can almost hear the professor inhale before “the idiot” comes out.
• the idiot, by dostoevsky. the bookstore-shelf version. title first. the bookseller’s version. you can imagine a hand turning the spine outward. you can imagine a small printed sticker with a price.
• the idiot — fyodor dostoevsky. the cover-of-the-paperback version. title in the middle of the cover, surname at the bottom in smaller type, a moody illustration of a man in a gray coat between them. the version i actually own.
• dostoevsky’s idiot. the lazy version. the version a man at the corner of the bar uses when he is trying to sound like he has read the book in the original. mike does not say this. mike has not, on the historical record, opened a russian novel since approximately 1998. mike has, however, not filed his taxes since 2019. mike has his own categories.

each of those word orders is the same book. each of them has, for me, generated a slightly different mood while i typed it. the word order is, in some quiet way, the room you bring to the book. that’s the catalog, that’s the spine, that’s the desk drawer in the second floor reading room — they are not the same room. but they are reading the same novel.

at the office, three rows over, sits a stefan-type colleague who, allegedly, reads the russian novel in the original. i nod at stefan in the kitchen. he nods back. i have not, to date, asked him which word order he prefers. that question would, in some way i can sense without articulating, be a doorway i’m not yet ready to walk through. stefan would have a position. stefan would defend it. stefan would, on the way back to his desk, leave me with reading to do that i am not, on this floor, equipped for.

verdict from floor 3, going up

so here’s where i land. dostoevsky fyodor the idiot is the surname-first cataloging order. it is the order a librarian, with a comma in one hand and a sharp pencil in the other, would have inscribed on an index card sometime around 1962 and filed in a wooden drawer that is, today, very probably either in a basement or on a private collector’s shelf. it is the order that makes a shelf alphabetize properly. it is not the order that makes a sentence about the book sound human. that’s two different jobs. the comma after the surname is doing the first job. the rest of us are stuck doing the second.

i, for my part, will continue reading the novel in the elevator. carla will continue, on the third floor, doing the trainings i have, on personality grounds, declined to attend. the boss will continue to be, by his own preference, in another meeting somewhere i can’t see. the tie i own — the navy one, slightly too short, on a hook on the back of my office chair where it has hung since approximately last march — has not been worn between any of these floors and will continue, until further notice, to commute purely vertically, between the chair and the floor and back, when a sleeve catches it.

and the seventh microwave is, at home, plugged in but not used since wednesday. i don’t trust the new ones. they don’t spin the same. that is, at minimum, the third paragraph in this post that has departed from the topic of the russian novel and into the topic of my own apartment. the paragraphs do this. the paragraphs are, in their own way, also a small room — like an elevator, like a spoon, like a catalog drawer — and the topic, sometimes, gets out at a different floor than the one i pressed.

training must be ending — i can hear two heels coming down the corridor and a cough that is, possibly, the boss’s. the russian-novel tab is going invisible. the spreadsheet, mercifully, has not asked for anything since tuesday.

somewhere in this building, a small dog called hank — owned by the woman in apartment 1B who travels too much and once, in a note slid under my door, asked if i could take him out on a tuesday — would, if he were here in this elevator with me, be unimpressed by the entire bibliographic argument and would, instead, be sniffing the corner where the carpet meets the metal kick plate. hank has, in this sense, the right idea. hank is not on the catalog card. hank, as a category, is unfiled. the village idiot, in another investigation, gets a similar treatment — the village does not, in any catalog i have access to, file him by surname either. the village calls him by what he does, not what he is named. dostoevsky would, on this point, recognize a system.

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