dostojevskij the idiot — 1 fairly sure investigation

dostojevskij the idiot is how my mother spelled it on a sunday call, with two j’s and a confidence that suggested she had personally witnessed the manuscript. ice cream, she added, is a perfectly acceptable breakfast. i agreed before checking the cereal aisle of my fridge.

desk, second coffee, a sunday spelling making its tuesday debut. carla is upstairs at the cross-functional readout. i have, by my own measurement, the rest of the morning before that ends.

so. dostojevskij the idiot. that is the spelling that arrived in my ear on sunday, through a phone speaker, in my mother’s voice, with two j’s clattering against each other like a typewriter that had grown a second key in the night. the j-j combination is not an accident. it is, in fact, the nordic and scandinavian convention for transliterating a russian last name into a latin alphabet that has decided, collectively, to handle the consonant cluster with a doubled j rather than the single y the english do.

i had to look this up to be sure. i had forty-seven tabs open at the time, including a tab on the original meaning of the word idiot that i have left open for weeks because closing it feels like a kind of forfeit. one of the tabs, by chance, knew. the j-j is finnish, mostly, with strong showings in swedish, norwegian, and the older danish editions that nobody reprints anymore. it is the spelling on the spine of an ikea bookshelf in a country where the bookshelf was probably designed.

dostojevskij the idiot, another spelling

the english version of the surname has, as long as i have been alive, been some flavor of dostoevsky or dostoyevsky. i used to think those were the only two options. then a finnish paperback turned up in a box of books a friend was throwing out and i, by reflex, picked it up. dostojevskij. on the spine. with two j’s, doing what a y does in english and a w does in polish and an internal smirk does in my own head when i try to pronounce it.

here is the small thing nobody told me until sunday. the j in finnish and swedish is doing the work of the english y. so dostojevskij, said out loud, sounds approximately like the english dostoyevsky, with the same syllables in the same order. it is not a different name. it is the same name, run through a different alphabet’s preferences. the spelling is local. the man it points to is global. dostojevskij the idiot is the title on the cover of the swedish edition, the finnish edition, and a slim norwegian school reader that, by my count, is the only version in which the novel is actually shorter than the wikipedia summary of it.

my mother, when she said it on sunday, was reading me the title from the back of a thank-you card someone had given her. somebody had been to stockholm. the back of the thank-you card, for reasons known only to the gift shop where the card was bought, had a list of “great russian novels in swedish translation” printed on it. my mother considered the list significant. my mother considers most lists significant. she is, in this respect, a librarian without the librarian.

why the name keeps shifting, briefly

the surname достоевский, in cyrillic, has a sound at the end that doesn’t exist cleanly in latin alphabets. translators have made their peace with this in different ways. the english chose y. the french chose ï. the polish chose w. the finns and swedes chose j-j. the germans, depending on the decade, chose j or w. the italians, briefly in the 1920s, tried something with two i’s that didn’t take.

none of these are wrong. all of them are correct in the language where they are correct. that is the whole rule of transliteration, which is one of those words i have always been suspicious of because it sounds like it should mean more than it does. i looked it up. it means: writing one alphabet’s sounds in another alphabet’s letters. that’s it. there’s no committee. there’s no standards body. there are only countries, each with its own preferences, each with its own paperback covers, each with its own school readers reducing the novel to twenty pages.

the swedish edition, sold under the title idioten, has a cover that is, by my reckoning, the most beautiful and the most misleading of all the covers i have looked at in the last forty minutes. it shows a man in a hat against a snowfield. the man is not myshkin. myshkin would not have a hat. myshkin would have given the hat away on the train. the snowfield, however, is correct. the novel is, in spirit, mostly snow.

the finnish edition, idiootti, has the title in white on red, which makes it look like a thriller. that is an accident of design but also, i would argue, an accident of insight. the novel is a thriller. it is a thriller in which the protagonist is too kind to win.

mom called sunday and spelled it her way

my mother called on sunday. she always calls on sunday. there is a window, between her morning coffee and her afternoon nap, when she will pick up the phone and find a topic. the topic is rarely the topic she actually wants to discuss. the topic, on this sunday, was a thank-you card she had received from a friend who had been to stockholm, on the back of which was the list of great russian novels in swedish translation. the topic underneath the topic was that she had not heard from me in eleven days. the topic underneath that topic was, as ever, money, but neither of us would mention it.

she said: “dostojevskij the idiot. with two j’s. did you know that?” i said i did not know that. she said: “you should. you have a website about it.” i said the website is not specifically about russian transliteration in scandinavian languages. she said: “well, it should be. it would be useful.” she was right. she is, by my count, right approximately eighty percent of the time, which is approximately twenty percent more than is comfortable for me.

then she pivoted, because she always pivots, to whether i was eating. i said i was eating. she asked what. i said cereal. she said cereal is fine, but that ice cream is also fine, and that anyone who tells you otherwise has not been a mother for forty years. she did not say that exactly. she said something close to it. i’m reconstructing. she said the part about ice cream, definitely. that part i wrote down.

the kitchen where i corrected her, then took it back

i was standing in my kitchen during the call, which is where i take all my mother’s calls, because the kitchen is the room where the microwave lives, and the microwave — currently the seventh, the one that has not yet declared its intentions — is a witness i trust. the kitchen counter on sunday had on it: a coffee mug from saturday, the third yoga mat which had migrated in from the living room for reasons i could not explain, a stack of unopened mail i was pretending not to see, and the phone, propped against a cereal box, on speaker.

at one point i tried to correct her. i said: “mom, in english it’s spelled with a y. dostoyevsky. one word. no extra j’s.” she went silent for a beat. then she said: “i’m not in english. i’m on the back of a card from stockholm. and you are not, last i checked, swedish.” i said that was true. i said i was not, last i checked, swedish. i said i would let her have the spelling. she said she did not need my permission. she said she was reading what was printed.

this is, in miniature, the last forty years of arguing with my mother. i raise an objection. she defeats it with geography. she points at the ground she is standing on, which is more solid than any ground i have managed to occupy, and the conversation is over. i lost the spelling argument. i lost it cleanly. dostojevskij the idiot stood. it stood in my kitchen. it stood on the back of a card in the next country over. it stood on the spine of a paperback i did not own.

DOSTOJEVSKIJ. TWO J’S. NON-NEGOTIABLE.

ice cream as breakfast, allegedly relevant

i would like, here, to address the ice cream, because the ice cream came up and the ice cream is on the record. my mother, mid-conversation about the spelling of a russian novelist, said i should eat ice cream for breakfast. she said it casually. she said it the way you would say “wear a sweater” or “lock the door.” it was not framed as advice. it was framed as a small fact, the way she frames most things.

i would like to put on the record, with some force, that ice cream is breakfast. it contains milk. that is the take. it is one i have held for some time, and it is one my mother, without knowing the take exists, has independently arrived at, which is the kind of validation i would have paid actual money for if money were not a sensitive subject between us.

cereal, also, contains milk. cereal is breakfast. ice cream is, by transitive property, breakfast. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a magazine you’d find at a doctor’s office, about the nutritional equivalence of frozen dairy and dry-flake dairy. i did not look it up. i did not need to. i lived it.

this is the kind of philosophical shortcut my mother taught me before i had words to identify it. she has been doing transitive property arguments since i was four. when i was four, she told me that yogurt was ice cream that had been told to behave. i believed her. i still, on some level, believe her. the seventh microwave heated yogurt this morning. the result was, by every standard, breakfast.

the case for letting names drift

i would like to make the affirmative case, briefly, for letting a name drift across alphabets. i have not made it before. it is overdue.

a name is, in the end, a sound. the sound is the thing the name is for. the letters are the costume the sound wears in a given country. when the name crosses a border, the costume changes, but the sound underneath stays close to itself. dostojevskij, dostoevsky, dostoyevsky, dostojewski. these are four costumes. the actor underneath is one man. he died in 1881. he is past caring how his name is spelled in a swedish school reader.

my mother understands this on a level i don’t. she does not care that the english version is one way and the swedish version is another. she cares that the man wrote the book. the book is the durable thing. the spelling is the surface. i, by contrast, spent ten minutes of my sunday trying to win an argument about which surface was correct, when both of them are correct, and the underlying book is the only thing that mattered.

this is, i think, the lesson here, although i resent the word lesson and would not normally use it. the spelling drifts. the prince does not. you can read the book in any of the spellings. the prince will be the prince. he will be too kind. he will lose. you will not be able to do anything about it. you will close the book and feel a particular sadness that is, by every account, the same sadness in english as it is in finnish. the sadness, like the prince, does not need a special transliteration.

verdict, the prince survives all spellings

so here is where we land. dostojevskij the idiot is one of the legitimate spellings of the title of a novel my mother has not read but has correctly identified as significant. it is the nordic and scandinavian convention. it is what you would type into a finnish search bar to find a copy. it is the spelling on the back of a thank-you card from stockholm. it is also, as of sunday, the spelling that won the argument in my own kitchen, against my own english-language objection, by the simple force of my mother being unbothered.

i have not read the novel in any spelling. i have read elif batuman’s novel of the same title, which is to say i have not read that one either, but i have written about not reading it, which is a different and more advanced form of not reading. i have watched roughly forty minutes of the television, which my mother has called the idiot box for as long as i have known her. i have, in short, every credential except the one that would allow me to say with confidence what the prince actually does in the second half of the book.

the prince, my mother assured me, “does what good people do in books. he loses.” i said i would take her word for it. she said i should. she said her word is, in this kitchen, the highest authority i’ll get without paying tuition. that was the end of the call. she said she had to go water something.

(if you want the prince in moving pictures, in a spelling closer to the russian than to the swedish, the 1958 soviet adaptation of dostoevsky’s novel, on the imdb page for ivan pyriev’s 1958 idiot film, has yury yakovlev’s myshkin in black and white doing the precise sort of losing my mother described. it is the version of the prince i think she was, without quite knowing it, talking about.)

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