dostoevsky novel the idiot — i looked into it, with 47 tabs

47 tabs. i had 47 tabs open at one point this morning. one of them claimed to be a summary of a russian novel from the 1860s. the other 46 were small reasons not to scroll the summary. a long book, when you really sit with the geometry of it, is a stack of paper tabs you cannot close, bound on the left side, with thread.

at the desk. carla is upstairs at the q3 review on the third floor — she’ll be there until at least 11:18, possibly later if the deck has slides about variance. the rest of the morning, conservatively, is mine.

so, the dostoevsky novel the idiot. i’d like to investigate it, briefly, in the time before the meeting concludes and the floor refills with people who walked past my screen. i have not read it. i would like that in honesty before we proceed. i have, however, opened a great many summaries of it, and that is, in my private accounting system, a form of literacy adjacent to reading.

dostoevsky novel the idiot is a russian novel from 1869 about a young prince named myshkin who returns to st. petersburg from a swiss sanatorium and proceeds to be, by every social measure, far too sincere to function. the title is not an insult. it is a position the protagonist holds.

A NOVEL IS. 47 TABS. ON PAPER.

the prince in question is lev nikolayevich myshkin. he comes back to russia with two suits, no money, a vague illness that earlier writers would have called epilepsy and earlier earlier writers would have just called the prince’s thing, and an honest face. people in the salons receive the honest face the way most workplaces receive a colleague who answers all questions truthfully on the first try. with great suspicion. i am the same age, more or less, as the prince was when the book started. i would like to stake out a small position in the broader idiot-abroad lineage, of which the prince is, by date alone, a senior member. he came back to a city he didn’t recognize. i go upstairs to the q3 review and don’t recognize my own slides.

what dostoevsky novel the idiot refers to, in plain terms

the dostoevsky novel the idiot, in its narrowest reading, refers to a printed object. roughly seven hundred pages, depending on the translation and the typesetter and how generous either of them is feeling. it was serialized in a magazine called the russian messenger between 1868 and 1869, then bound. it has been bound, in different fonts, on different shelves, in several hundred editions since. all of them are, in their physical form, around 47 paper tabs you cannot close. that is the joke i would like to make once and then move on from.

in its broader reading, the dostoevsky novel the idiot refers to the experiment dostoevsky said, in letters of his that i’m fairly sure exist somewhere on a page i did not bookmark, he was attempting: to depict a positively beautiful man. he wrote that phrase. that’s the brief. take a man who is wholly good, drop him into a society that is not, and see what the society does to him. spoiler, in case you also have 47 tabs and no plans to commit: the society does what societies do.

i’ve read enough overviews of this book to recognize the shape of the argument. the shape is: sincerity has costs. the costs are, in the prince’s case, social, financial, romantic, and at one point spiritual. the costs are, in my case, smaller, but i can extrapolate. extrapolation is, technically, a form of empathy with worse reception.

the 47 tabs audit, again

here is the inventory of what i had open this morning, before i closed any of them:

• three plot summaries of varying length, two of them by people who did not appear to like the book, one by a person who appeared to love it more than was reasonable.
• five articles about prince myshkin’s epileptic fits as a literary device, all of which used the word luminous at least twice.
• two listings for the novel on retail sites — the idiot via barnes and noble in one tab, the idiot via amazon in another — both at prices i was not going to pay this morning.
• one tab for elif batuman’s novel the idiot, which is a different idiot, from 2017, set largely on a college campus, which i opened by accident and have not closed because it has, in some private way, started to look at me.
• one jordan peterson lecture excerpt about the dostoevsky novel the idiot, which i opened, briefly, panicked, and minimized.
• nine tabs of forum threads in which strangers debated whether the prince is an actual saint or just exhausted.
• twenty-six tabs whose origin i cannot reconstruct. one of them was a recipe for a kind of soup. one of them was the seventh microwave’s warranty page, which is, by my last count, irrelevant. one of them was just an empty tab. an empty tab is, in my view, a small protest.

that’s the audit. that’s the morning. that’s what reading looks like, in 2026, if you don’t actually read.

why tipping should be flat 12%, briefly, since we’re here

this is a tangent. i’d like to declare it as one before carla returns. but it’s relevant.

now, do i think dostoevsky would have wanted this. probably not. he wrote the thing in a hurry, in a city he was hiding from creditors in, in a font that was, at the time, expensive. but the man also wrote, repeatedly, about characters who developed elaborate private accounting systems to justify their lives. so in a way, this is an homage. a 12% homage. the most honest kind.

examples of novels i nodded about

i would like to admit, gently, that this is not the first long book i have not read while appearing to have read it. there’s a small canon. it includes, in chronological order of the books, not of my non-reading: crime and punishment, also dostoevsky, also long, which i can describe to you accurately enough at a dinner party that no one has ever pressed for more. there’s the 1935 film adaptation of crime and punishment i have, in fact, watched twenty minutes of, on a sick day, in 2019, before i fell asleep. the book is now, by association, a book i feel i’ve engaged with. that is how reading by adjacency works.

the dostoevsky novel the idiot, by the same accounting, has been adapted several times. the existence of the adaptations counts, in my private library, as partial credit toward the original. there is a russian television series from 2003 that runs, by reports, ten episodes. the existence of those ten episodes is, in some way, a comfort. i don’t have to watch them. i have to know that they exist. that’s a different kind of literacy. it’s the literacy of the office break room, where the stefan-type colleague nods at me about the idiot and i nod back and we both move on, having communicated, in the wordless language of busy adults, that we have heard of the book.

the prince, in the novel, attends a name day party. he says the wrong thing in a sincere voice and the room turns. a name day party is, in its bones, the q3 review with vodka. carla would understand the name day party. i would not be invited. i was not invited to the q3 review either. there is, again, a parallel. the parallel is unflattering to several of us.

verdict from the desk, a tab closed

so here is the position i have arrived at, in the time it has taken me to write this from a desk that is not, technically, mine, in a building that is not, technically, paid for, on a morning that is not, technically, on the calendar.

i did, before closing this tab, decide which retail listing to close first. i closed the elif batuman one, with a small apology to the cover. then i closed the jordan peterson lecture, with no apology. then the soup recipe. then the warranty page. then thirty more, in a sequence i did not document. the broader an idiot abroad investigation remains the closest thing i have to a full reading of any cultural artifact, and it’s a tv series, which says something about the modern reader. that reader is me. i am that reader. i am still here.

the q3 review must be on the variance section now — i can hear the elevator delivering nobody. i have, conservatively, eleven minutes before someone walks past. the third yoga mat, under the couch back at the apartment, has not been consulted on this post. it will, on review, agree.