the idiot book dostoevsky — a thorough investigation, conducted slowly

the boss is in another meeting, again, which gives me 22 minutes to think about a russian novel. the book is on my shelf. it has been on my shelf since 2019. the shelf is, by now, also a kind of book about books i intend to read on a less monday day.

writing this furtively from inside the q3 review on the third floor, paperback wedged under the meeting deck, screen tilted just so. the boss is on slide nine of forty-one. carla is two seats over and has not noticed yet. i’d estimate i have until slide nineteen.

so. the idiot book dostoevsky. the search query, the bookshelf relic, the russian rebuke. people google it because they own it, or they’re considering owning it, or they once bought a copy and then quietly demoted it to a shelf where it now functions, primarily, as a wedge against a draft. i operate, presently, in all three categories at once. i’d like to make that clear before slide ten.

the idiot book dostoevsky is the 1869 russian novel by fyodor dostoevsky about prince myshkin, a man so honest he becomes, among petersburg society, a problem. people google the phrase because they own a copy, are shopping one, or are at an idiot abroad level of avoidance with their bookshelf, which is, today, my position exactly.

i need that on the wall, mentally, before slide eleven. the rule of the room is, allegedly, that you face the slides. the rule i operate under, today, is that the russian novel sits flat on my thigh and the meeting deck sits angled on the desk like a tent above it. it’s a duplex. the boss has not, in any of my seven known q3 reviews, looked down. the boss looks at slides. it’s the central feature of the boss. it is, today, my structural advantage.

what the idiot book dostoevsky refers to, for the unaware

quick orientation. the idiot book dostoevsky, as a string of words, points at one specific object — the 1869 novel — and at a thousand secondary things people end up reading about when they search for it. like: which translation. like: the elif batuman one, which is a different novel with the same title and a separate set of expectations. like: whether jordan peterson said something about it on a podcast you half-played in the car. like: whether barnes and noble has it for cheaper than amazon, which, by my survey of three browser tabs, depends on the day and the cover.

i own the pevear and volokhonsky paperback. it’s a thick yellow-spined thing with a face on the front. i bought it in 2019, on a slightly elevated tuesday, with the entirely sincere belief that i would read it on the bus. i no longer take that bus. i no longer, mostly, read on buses. but the book persists. the book is, in fact, the only inhabitant of my apartment that has been, for six years running, both unread and respected. the third yoga mat under the couch does not get this treatment. the air fryer does not get this treatment. only the russian gets it.

the boss is in another meeting, the seventh today

i’d like to register, plainly, that this is the seventh meeting the_boss has been in since 1:11pm. i have been counting on the foolscap pad, in pencil, in a column. seven. one of them was, technically, the same meeting twice — they took a break for coffee and resumed under a slightly different title — but i’m counting it as two because the_boss reset the slide deck. fresh slides, in my private accounting, equal a fresh meeting. that’s the rule. stefan, the wine-night colleague three rows over from carla, is also in this room, taking notes nobody asked for in a font he chose deliberately.

during meeting four, i opened the dostoevsky. during meeting five, i closed it again, because carla shifted in her chair and i panicked. during meeting six, i reopened it to the same page, which is page 47, where prince myshkin is being honest in a drawing room, which is the part of the book everyone says is the good part, and which i have, in the cumulative sense, read fourteen times without ever advancing past it. page 47 is, for me, the entire novel. i’m at peace with this.

the boss has moved to slide thirteen. carla is taking notes on the kind of pad that has the company’s logo printed in the corner, embossed, in a way that suggests someone in marketing once won a budget battle. i have a pad too. mine is foolscap. mine has the dostoevsky balanced on top of it. i am taking notes, technically, by holding still.

why toilet paper goes under, applied to bookshelves

let me say this clearly, while the boss is on a slide about pipeline conversion. “the toilet paper roll goes UNDER. over is for monsters.” i hold this view. i hold it firmly. i have held it since approximately the age of nineteen and i have lost zero arguments about it because i no longer have arguments about it. the matter is settled. the only people who say “over” are people who have not lived alone long enough to encounter the consequences of “over”. those consequences include, but are not limited to: cats, drafts, the gentle catastrophe of a roll that unspools on its own at 3am in an apartment where you live solo and the unspooling has, briefly, the texture of a presence.

here’s where i get to the books. the rule i derived for toilet paper applies, quietly, to bookshelves. the spine of a serious book should face under. this is not a real rule that anyone holds. i hold it. the dostoevsky on my shelf at home is currently spine-out, like a normal book, because i have not yet had the courage to flip it spine-in, but the impulse is there. the impulse is: a serious book should not advertise itself. it should be a brick. it should be, quietly, doing brick things. the moment a book on your shelf starts performing for guests, the book is, technically, a decoration. a decoration is a different category of object. a decoration is, philosophically, “over”.

so i argue, against an audience of nobody on slide fifteen, that the russian novels go spine-in. the airport thrillers go spine-out. the cookbook from the boss’s wedding, which i was given and have never opened, goes in a drawer. the drawer is a deeper category of “under”. the drawer is the bookshelf for books you respect by not displaying. “the toilet paper roll goes UNDER. over is for monsters.” the same logic. the same temperature. the same firm and possibly indefensible position.

examples of books arranged morally, a partial list

a quick survey, since the boss has now reached the section of the deck with appendices, which means we have, conservatively, eleven minutes left.

my shelves at the apartment, arranged by my private moral system:

• shelf one, eye-level, spine-out: books i intend to be seen having. one karl pilkington, one airport thriller from 2014, one cookbook (closed, untouched, the binding still creaks). this is the shelf for visitors, of which there are none. mike has been once, in 2022, and looked at the shelf for eight seconds. mike approved. mike was tipsy.
• shelf two, lower, spine-out: books i actually read. these are smaller, older, dog-eared. the spines are cracked because the books worked.
• shelf three, top, spine-in (aspirational): the dostoevsky lives here. or rather, the dostoevsky lives spine-out here for now, while i build the courage. surrounding it: a tolstoy i bought in the same online cart, a chekhov i once started, and a notes from underground i have legitimately read because it’s short, and i’d like to point at it, at the 1995 notes from underground film with henry czerny, and say: i read the source. i watched the adaptation. i did the work on at least one. the rest is, technically, a stalled project.
• the drawer of certified letters: not a book shelf. mentioned for completeness. some envelopes have, at this point, the heft of a chapter. one of them has serif font on the outside.

that’s the system. the system is internally consistent. the system would not pass a muster from a person with a degree in library science. that person is not, today, in my apartment. that person is, statistically, in another meeting.

verdict, the tie i own approves

so here’s where we land. the boss is on the closing slide. carla is, visibly, packing up her pen. i have approximately three minutes to slide the russian novel back into the messenger bag without making a sound.

verdict on the idiot book dostoevsky: i recommend owning it. i recommend not finishing it. i recommend reading page 47 and sitting with it for several years. i recommend keeping it spine-in if you can manage the social cost. i recommend reading the elif batuman one separately, with a different posture, on a different couch. i recommend not letting jordan peterson interpret the russian for you on a podcast in your kia, which is a sentence i never expected to write but here we are, on slide forty-one.

the tie i own — navy, slightly too short, in the closet at home since 2021 — would, if asked, agree with this verdict. the tie is also a kind of book. the tie is a book about a function i once had and don’t currently perform. the tie has, on its back side, the same “spine-in” energy as a russian novel. the tie is, in its way, on the top shelf. i am not stupid. i am, in fact, the opposite. i am shelved correctly.

the meeting is wrapping. the boss is thanking us. carla just looked over and her eye landed on the foolscap. the foolscap was on top of the dostoevsky. the dostoevsky is, technically, invisible. small mercies. i’ll finish this from the desk in eight minutes once everyone has filed out.