dostojewski the idiot — 1 fairly sure investigation

dostojewski the idiot, with a w, is the spelling i offered the barista this morning, who blinked. the barista, in my admittedly biased opinion, is the closest thing to a literary critic in a four-block radius. shower length over four minutes, as a sidebar, is theatre.

back at the desk, holding the cup like evidence. carla is across the building at the training session, second slot of the morning. i have until the cup goes cold, which gives me a generous window.

so. dostojewski the idiot. with a w. that is the german spelling, and apparently the polish spelling, and apparently a spelling i now have to defend in public to a person whose entire job is foaming oat milk. i am defending it anyway. that’s where we are.

the book, in any spelling, is the same book — a russian novel from 1869 about a prince who is too kind to function. only the surname keeps mutating across borders, like a name that catches a cold every time it crosses customs. french writes him dostoïevski. spanish writes him dostoyevski. english can’t decide and uses three. the germans, because they are the germans, looked at the cyrillic, looked at their own alphabet, and chose w. and then, because they are the germans, they wrote it down once and never reconsidered.

dostojewski the idiot is the german and polish transliteration of fyodor dostoevsky’s 1869 novel about prince myshkin, a man too gentle for the society he returns to. the spelling uses w where english uses v, because in german a w sounds like the english v. same book, same prince, same disaster. only the consonant moved.

SAME PRINCE. DIFFERENT CONSONANT. SAME DISASTER.

i looked it up at the desk, on a tab that was originally about something else. the something else has been closed. there is a longer write-up of the word idiot i did a while back, which is the closest i have to a manifesto, and the spelling question kept pulling me back to it. you can spell idiot a hundred ways. it still describes me.

dostojewski the idiot, the german variant

the german writes it dostojewski. the j is pronounced like an english y. the w is pronounced like an english v. so a german, reading dostojewski, says something very close to doss-toy-yev-skee, which is, give or take, what the russian sounds like in the first place. the spelling looks foreign to an english eye. the sound, when you hear it out loud, is closer to the original than the english version is.

this is, in itself, a small embarrassment. the english version, dostoevsky, looks comfortable. it reads itself off the page. but the v in the english version is doing a job that the russian does not exactly assign to a v. the russian letter, в, is voiced. it sits between an english v and an english w, depending on whose mouth and whose grandmother. the german w split the difference and committed.

i find this clarifying. the german spelling is, in a quiet way, more honest. it doesn’t pretend the word is english. it doesn’t import it. it transliterates with a straight face and goes to lunch.

why germans spell everything once more

here is something i have observed, mostly from the desk and partly from the few germans who have ever explained anything to me. germans, when they bring in a foreign word, do not adopt it casually. they do not let it sit in the room for a few years and then decide. they look at the consonants. they choose the german consonant that does the same job. they write it down. and then the spelling is fixed, in the german way, forever.

the english do the opposite. the english take a foreign word, write it down four ways across two centuries, argue about which way is correct, settle on the third one because the times newspaper used it once, and then teach it in schools. the german approach saves time. the english approach generates content.

this is why dostojewski with a w looks foreign and feels precise. the germans did the work. they did it once. they did it in 1882 or thereabouts, and the spelling has been stable since. you can pick up a german edition from any decade and find the same w on the cover. there is something restful about that, like a desk that nobody has rearranged.

english by contrast has shipped dostoevsky, dostoievsky, dostoyevsky, and at least two others i’ve forgotten, depending on which translator owned the contract that decade. the slavic spelling with a j and an apostrophe is its own animal, used mostly in italian and croatian editions, and also, somehow, the way my high school edition was printed. nobody told me at the time. i thought the book had a typo. i thought the typo was the point.

the barista at the cafe, who knew, somehow

i went to the cafe before work. i go to the cafe before work because the work coffee tastes like the inside of an old desk drawer, which is, given that the desk is also where i write, an aesthetic conflict. so i go to the cafe. the cafe is across the street. the barista, this morning, was the one who has been there since i started this job. she has, in the time we have known each other, never once asked my name. that’s a feature.

i said the spelling out loud while ordering — dostojewski, with a w — because i had been writing it down at the desk yesterday and the w was on my tongue. she looked up. she said: “german edition?” she said it like she was clarifying which size of cup, only with literature. i said yes. she said her grandmother had one. then she made the coffee and did not bring up dostoevsky again, in any spelling, which is, i think, the highest form of literary engagement: comment, then move on, do not write a thinkpiece.

this is a barista. a barista at a cafe knew the german spelling because her grandmother had one. that is, by my count, more cultural infrastructure than my entire office produces in a fiscal year. i wrote it on the cup sleeve. the cup sleeve is now on my desk. it will be on my desk until carla moves it, which she will, eventually, with a small frown.

the kitchen where i recovered

i mention the kitchen because the kitchen is where, last night, i tried to read about the german edition while making something hot. the something hot was a leftover thing in the seventh microwave. this is the seventh i have killed. the previous six are, depending on dave’s filing system, either in a notebook or on a napkin in his glove compartment. dave keeps the list. dave is the only person who has consistently asked, with sincerity, “what number are we on”, which is the kind of question a friend asks and an accountant invoices.

the kitchen, last night, did not light up the way kitchens are supposed to light up at dinner time. one bulb is out. the third yoga mat is still under the couch in the next room — i could see the corner of it from where i was standing — and so the kitchen had a slightly dim, slightly defeated quality, which made reading about a 19th century russian novel feel exactly correct, atmospherically. some posts plan their lighting. mine just happens.

i had the german edition on a tab. the tab was open in a browser i don’t fully trust. i was making the food in the seventh microwave. the microwave hummed. the prince of the novel, in any spelling, would have approved of the kitchen. it was honest. it was a little sad. it had a microwave that hums.

showers over 4 minutes are theatre, briefly

this is the sidebar i promised the barista. showers over 4 minutes are theatre. i have held this position for years. the position is not popular. the position has cost me at least one second date, which is a price i continue to consider acceptable. four minutes is the upper bound of necessary hygiene. anything beyond that is a small one-person play, performed for an audience of tile.

i mention it because, in the german edition i was looking at last night, the prince — myshkin, in any spelling — has the same approach to luxury. he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. he turns up clean, gets confused by the silverware, and then ruins everything by being honest. that’s the book. that’s, also, my morning routine, minus the silverware.

which is to say myshkin is, in any consonant set, an idiot whose passport never quite matches his face. abroad — in petersburg, in geneva, in any room where the silverware is sorted — the idiot remains the same idiot. the spelling is geography. the trouble is travel.

the case for accepting all spellings

i would like to make, briefly, the affirmative argument. the argument is: let the spellings live. all of them. dostoevsky. dostoyevski. dostojewski with the german w. dostojevski with the slavic j. dostoïevski with the french diaeresis. let them stand. let bookstores carry shelves where the same novel appears under three transliterations. let the search bar keep all five.

this is not an argument english likes. english wants one spelling and a footnote about the others. but the man’s name, in his own alphabet, is достоевский, which is six letters and one soft sign and a problem for anyone who isn’t russian. every transliteration is a compromise. every transliteration is, in essence, a translator standing in a doorway saying “this is the one i’m going with, please don’t make me explain”. the german stood in that doorway with a w. the english stood in it with a v. neither is wrong. both are working. elif batuman’s novel called the idiot sidesteps the whole problem by being, instead, about a freshman at harvard, but the title is borrowed from the russian, so even she had to pick a spelling at some point. she picked one. she moved on. that’s the model.

i’m not saying we need a committee. i’m saying: if you saw dostojewski with a w on a cover and assumed it was a typo, it wasn’t a typo. it was a german. the german has been doing this since 1882. the german is fine.

verdict, the prince is multilingual

so this is where we land. dostojewski the idiot is the same book as dostoevsky the idiot. the prince is the same prince. the breakdown is the same breakdown. the social disaster, when it comes, comes in any language. only the surname puts on a different jacket at the border.

the german version, with the w, is — and i mean this — phonetically more accurate to the russian than the english version is. that’s a sentence i did not expect to write at this desk. i wrote it anyway. the barista, somehow, knew already. her grandmother knew. somewhere in a kitchen, in a country i have not visited, a copy of dostojewski with a w sits on a shelf, possibly above a microwave that has not been killed yet, and the prince inside it is doing his work.

i’d also note, in passing, that the same essential premise — a sweet and out-of-place protagonist trying to navigate a world that wasn’t built for them — has shown up on television in shapes that would surprise dostoevsky. the karl pilkington travel show, an idiot abroad on the british series page, sends a reluctant englishman into other people’s countries, where he, like myshkin, says the wrong thing earnestly. an idiot, in any spelling, in any decade, abroad or at home, is a stable literary technology. the consonants change. the function does not.

carla just walked past. she didn’t stop. the cup sleeve with dostojewski on it is still on the desk. she may circle back. if she does, i will say the word out loud, with the w, and see if her training session covered it.

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