fyodor dostoyevsky the idiot — a complete defense of pineapple on pizza

pineapple on pizza is fine, dostoyevsky would have approved, and i can defend that with no reading list and zero credentials. the russian novel called the idiot features a kind man misunderstood by everyone. pineapple is a kind topping misunderstood by everyone. the symmetry, frankly, is rude.

at the desk, screen tilted away, mug containing the second coffee of a tuesday i did not consent to. carla is upstairs in the q3 review, third floor, allegedly forty-five minutes, realistically more.

so. fyodor dostoyevsky the idiot. the search term, i mean. people land on that string from two different doorways. doorway one — they want the man, the russian, the beard, the gambling problem, the exile, the deadlines. doorway two — they want the title, just the words, in any order. i’m here for both. i’m also here, less obviously, to defend a pizza topping. that’s the post. you’ve been warned. let me borrow a useful framing from a karl pilkington investigation i ran earlier, because the same principle applies: a thing maligned for being foreign turns out, under the lights, to be perfectly reasonable.

PINEAPPLE. ON. PIZZA. IS. FINE.

i need that on the wall before the rest unfolds. let me say it differently, in case the all-caps version drove anyone off. pineapple on pizza is fine. that’s the position. fyodor, in the cold and inkstained cabin where he wrote against the next deadline, would have understood. fyodor was, in his own way, defending a kind topping nobody else wanted. mine has cheese on it. his had a name day party. the principle is identical.

what fyodor dostoyevsky the idiot refers to, again

quick orientation. the phrase points at one man and one book, and the man wrote the book under conditions that would make most of us file for an extension we cannot afford. fyodor mikhailovich dostoyevsky — i refuse to learn the patronymic past the first time — was a russian writer in the second half of the 1800s, working a serialized publishing model, which is the polite way of saying he wrote chapters one at a time for magazines, in real time, while editors waited and creditors waited harder. he had been exiled, earlier, on political grounds, to siberia. that’s a biographical fact, mentioned and moving on. the relevant detail is that he came back from that and chose to keep writing, against money he owed, against deadlines he kept, against a roulette wheel he could not, in any documented case, leave alone.

the idiot, the novel, came out of that pressure. it’s the one with prince myshkin, who arrives in petersburg from a sanatorium with a small bag and a kind face and a habit of telling the truth. everyone he meets concludes, within a chapter, that he is an idiot. the book argues, slowly, across many pages, that he is, in fact, the only sane person in the room. the dragging timeline is part of the argument. you can’t make that case in three paragraphs. you have to wear the reader down.

i wear people down too. mine is on cheaper subject matter. observe.

the pineapple defense, opening statements

let me say something clearly, and you can take notes.

that’s the opening. notice i did not raise my voice. notice i did not bang the table. fyodor would have been proud — he made the same case for myshkin in roughly two hundred thousand words, and he, too, did not bang the table, he just kept writing chapters until the magazine readers came around. i have approximately the rest of the morning and one mug of coffee. the proportions are different. the method is the same.

why dostoyevsky would side with me (allegedly)

i am about to make a claim that is, by every academic standard, unsupportable. i’m fairly sure there is a scholar somewhere who would disagree, possibly in a serious magazine. i don’t care. fyodor would have sided with me on pineapple. and you know why. because his entire career was built on defending things other people found absurd.

he defended a kind man in a society that read kindness as weakness. he defended a serialized publishing model that critics, at the time, considered beneath the form. he defended his own gambling, less convincingly, in letters to his second wife. he defended characters with epilepsy, with debt, with embarrassing dignities, and he defended them by giving them more pages than anyone thought they deserved. that’s the entire fyodor template. take the maligned thing, give it more pages, watch the reader come around.

that’s what i am doing here, with pineapple. more paragraphs than anyone thought it deserved. by paragraph nine, you are already softening. by paragraph fifteen, you’ll be ordering it on the next office lunch and calling it a personal renaissance. that is the fyodor effect. i am not the first to weaponize it. i’m just the first, possibly, to weaponize it for fruit.

there is a 1958 american film of the brothers karamazov on the movie database where strangers rate things, with yul brynner doing a great deal of brooding. i bring it up only to say: even the adaptation took the maligned material seriously. nobody on that set rolled their eyes at fyodor’s premise. they sat down, they read the script, they brooded. that is the level of respect i would like, eventually, for pineapple. brynner-tier respect.

examples of toppings that survived 1869

here is a thought experiment. fyodor finishes the idiot in 1869. he sets down the pen. he eats something. what does he eat. i did some unscientific reading on this — a lot of tabs open at once, the count was high, you don’t need a number — and the result is that 1869 russia had access to a perfectly reasonable list of toppings, none of which were called toppings yet, but which would all make a fine pizza if you’d asked him.

• cured fish. respected then. respected now. nobody complains about cured fish on a flatbread when the flatbread is in a different language.
• onions, in many forms. raw, pickled, fried, sad. fyodor would have eaten onions. fyodor would not have written a sneering pamphlet about onions on dough.
• cabbage, in some preparation. i’m not certain. but i suspect cabbage. cabbage was everywhere. cabbage is, in a quiet way, the pineapple of the cold months. sweet under the right conditions. wrong only in company.
• mushrooms. pickled, fried, stewed. the russian relationship to mushrooms is so total that any pizza built in 1869 russia would have, by default, included three kinds. nobody at that table would have raised an eyebrow at a fourth ingredient that disagreed gently with the others.

so the survival list, in 1869, accommodated unusual flavor pairings as a matter of course. the moral universe of fyodor dostoyevsky the idiot — the man, his book, the philosophy that drove both — was a moral universe in which a soft sweet thing could sit on a salty thing without anyone calling a meeting. that is the world i would like to bring back. one topping at a time, if necessary.

a stefan-type colleague three rows over just walked past with a glass of red wine he should not be drinking before noon. neither of us said anything. the office is, today, on its honor.

verdict, i rest my case

one last note, while we’re here. a colleague — not at this office, an older one, a man we used to call a kind of in-house fool, in the affectionate sense, the way the russian word for fool is also affectionate — once said, during a long lunch, that pineapple on pizza was the test case for whether someone could hold two ideas at once. the man was a fool by self-description and a wise person by accident. fool, in his usage, was a compliment. i have kept that lesson. fyodor, again, would have nodded.

i would also like to point you, while i have your attention, to an earlier dostoevsky investigation i ran on the novel itself, with the 47 tabs at 6am, which has bearing here, and to a longer piece on the karl pilkington film canon and what staying home actually solves, which has less bearing but more sentences. the third yoga mat, plainly, is still under the couch, unrelated, but worth mentioning, because the pile down there has now become a kind of subscription i cannot cancel.