idiot by fyodor dostoevsky — what they do not tell you in the supermarket

in the supermarket, between the bread that is also a politics and the bottled water that is technically a tax, i thought about dostoevsky. i was holding a yogurt. the yogurt did not care. neither did the russian. literature, in that aisle, was just one more thing pretending to be lighter than it is.

the search term, for the record, is not the idiot. the search term is idiot by fyodor dostoevsky. four words. a full author credit. that detail is not small. people are typing the man’s whole name into a box because, for a sizable chunk of the planet, the title alone won’t do — it needs the author bolted to the front of it like a brand sticker on a watermelon. that is the post. that is the supermarket.

11:23am. tuesday. carla is upstairs in the all-hands rehearsal on the third floor. i have something like the rest of the morning before she comes back down with that face she does when slides have run long. plenty of time to talk about a russian who has been dead since 1881 and is still, somehow, outselling people who are alive and trying.

i’d like to plant the pillar early so we can move on. anyone landing here from the bookstore is, in some sense, doing what karl pilkington did when he was sent to a temple and asked, on camera, what the point was. you carried a book around. you got nowhere with it. that’s an entire genre. i wrote it up at length under the idiot-abroad essay on karl pilkington and the wonders of the world, which is the longer treatment. this post is the supermarket annex.

what idiot by fyodor dostoevsky refers to, properly

the phrase idiot by fyodor dostoevsky refers to one specific 1869 novel, originally serialized in the russian messenger, written by a man whose first name was fyodor and whose last name carries enough consonants to require a small file. the protagonist is prince lev nikolayevich myshkin. he is kind. he is sincere. he is, by the end of the book, finished. that’s the plot. that is also, in my private theory, the plot of any sincere person who walks into a corporate cafeteria for the first time.

but the phrase, as a search query, is doing additional work. fyodor is the first name. it is not, on its own, recognizable to most casual readers. dostoevsky is the last name. it is, on its own, recognizable, but spelled badly by most people who try. so people type the full name to make sure the algorithm knows they mean that idiot, the one with the russian, not the village one, not the useful one, not me. they want the credentialed idiot. they want the idiot that comes with a hardcover and a cover painting.

this is where the search term reveals itself. nobody types moby-dick by herman melville. nobody types hamlet by william shakespeare. those titles have been licensed to walk around alone. the idiot, however, has not earned that privilege in the english-speaking search bar. it sounds, on its own, like a complaint. it sounds, on its own, like something my mom said once on a sunday call when i told her the supermarket trip was an audit. people add by fyodor dostoevsky the way they’d add a serial number to a printer cartridge. they want the official one.

the supermarket reading attempt, an audit

here is the relevant scene from saturday, which i bring up because it is the reason this post exists. it began, technically, the friday before — at stefan’s wine night, where stefan held the bottle for nineteen minutes, and then said, casually, that he was rereading the idiot. stefan and his wine. stefan and his book. i bought the paperback the next morning out of competitive humility.

i went to the supermarket with a list and a paperback. the paperback was the idiot. the list said: bread, yogurt, the brand of pasta i pretend i don’t have a preference about, two kinds of cheese, one of which i would not eat, and a pack of those small batteries that fit nothing i currently own. the paperback was in the inside pocket of the jacket. the idea was: queue, read, evolve.

i read four lines, in the produce aisle, in front of the apples. i closed the book. i put the book back in the pocket. i looked at the apples for a long time. an old man walked past me and sighed at a pineapple. i don’t think the sigh was about me. i can’t be sure. pineapple on pizza is fine; the sigh was, possibly, about something deeper than fruit. i don’t know. i wasn’t going to ask him.

the audit, then. the apartment has, on a shelf, eleven books i intend to read in the year i call this year, every year, regardless of the calendar. dostoevsky is on that shelf. he has been on that shelf since 2019. the shelf is, technically, a kind of plant. it doesn’t move. it doesn’t ask for anything. it just sits there pretending it isn’t watching me. i’d like to defend that comparison. plants are silent landlords. they don’t say anything. they just charge rent in guilt. the bookshelf is a silent landlord with a wider catalog. dostoevsky is the most expensive tenant in it.

the supermarket reading attempt was, in technical terms, a failure on logistics grounds. the produce aisle does not support russian literature. the lighting is too bright. the music is too cheerful. the trolleys squeak in keys that the prose was not written for. you cannot read myshkin while a man near you is comparing two melons by squeezing them with his palm in a way that should, in a fair society, require a license.

why people search for the author before the title

here is the actual SEO-shaped question, since we’re already in the aisle.

this is also why fyodor, specifically, is doing the heavy lifting in the search bar. fyodor sounds important. fyodor sounds eastern european in a way that the search engine respects. fyodor looks, on the page, like a name you’d see on a hardcover you bought once and never opened. fyodor is the brand name. dostoevsky, by itself, is the family business. together they are the full corporate masthead. that is what the typer of the four-word phrase is reaching for. they are not asking for a story. they are asking for a guarantee.

i find this comforting, in a small way. it means people, even when they are searching for capital-S Serious literature, are doing what they would do with a yogurt. they are reading the label. they are checking the brand. they are not, in the search bar, performing intelligence. they are performing caution. caution, in a bookstore aisle, is a beautiful thing. caution is what i bring to the russian. the russian, in return, has been on my shelf for six years.

FYODOR. IS. THE. SEAL.

examples of books i carried but never opened

a small inventory, since i’m in the audit anyway. i’d like to be honest. i bring books places. the books do not get opened in those places. the places remain unread, in book terms.

• the idiot, dostoevsky, paperback edition. carried to: the supermarket (saturday), the doctor’s office (twice, last november), the corner of the bar where mike sits (once, at which point mike asked if i was reading it or holding it; i did not have an answer; mike, who has not filed his taxes since 2019, was not in a position to push). pages read across all carryings: somewhere in the low single digits.
• a serious philosophy book whose title i don’t want to name because the supermarket cashier saw it last year and looked at me with what i can only describe as pity. carried to: the supermarket. read: zero pages. returned to shelf: the same evening, beside dostoevsky, in what i think of as the silent landlord row.
• a paperback i bought because of an instagram screenshot showing a woman with a coffee in a window seat, looking thoughtful. carried to: my own apartment, between the kitchen and the couch, multiple times. read: the back cover, in full, three times. the front cover, twice. the inside flap, once. the actual contents, never.
• elif batuman’s the idiot — the other one, the campus one, the email one, the one that came out almost a hundred and fifty years after the russian and uses the same title on purpose. carried to: nowhere. bought in a fit of completionism. sits on the same shelf as the dostoevsky. they look at each other across the room. neither has been opened in this calendar year. that is two idiots, on a shelf, ignoring each other. i find that funny. i’m aware no one else does.

a quiet pattern emerges. the books i carry are, almost without exception, books i want to be seen carrying. that is not the same as wanting to read them. there is, in the back of my head, a hank-from-1B kind of presence with these books — they exist in the apartment the way the dog from 1B exists, which is to say off-page, mostly imagined, occasionally barking at me when i pretend not to hear them. dostoevsky is the loudest of these silent dogs. he barks every time i walk past the shelf. i’m right here. you bought me. you put me down. you said this year. it is still this year.

the seventh microwave, by the way, is fine. i mention it because someone always asks. the microwave is on the counter. the microwave does not judge. only the bookshelf judges. that is the real difference between appliances and literature. the microwave gives. the bookshelf takes.

verdict, the receipt was longer than chapter one

here’s where i land.

the four-word search phrase idiot by fyodor dostoevsky is, in my reading, a perfect specimen of how modern adults shop for serious things. they include the manufacturer. they read the label. they want the brand. they pay the premium for the original because the off-brand idiot looks too much like a search-engine joke at their expense, and they have, frankly, already absorbed enough jokes today. they are not failing at literature. they are succeeding at supermarket logic.

i will, for the record, finish the book one day. probably not this year. probably not next year either. the russian is patient. the russian has, by my count, waited longer for less attentive readers. i’m not flattering myself. i’m just saying — he has time.

and if you came here looking for a quick answer, the quick answer is: it’s a 1869 novel about a kind man who is destroyed by being kind, and people add the author’s full name to the search because the title alone reads, in english, like an insult they’re not sure they want to be associated with. that’s the term. that’s the audit. you can keep the receipt. the receipt was, in my saturday cart, longer than chapter one. i checked.

my own supermarket reading project, by the way, has a sister project — the cinema reading project, in which i carry the same paperback to a movie theater and don’t open it there either. that one shows up in the long-form piece about whether an idiot abroad film actually exists or not, which is a different aisle entirely. same shelf, though. same plant.

one more aisle note before i close the laptop. there is, in english, an even simpler version of this whole question — it lives at the etymology of the noun itself. people sometimes wander into the longer piece on the word idiot, what it means, where it came from, how it got from athens to my desk, which is the cross-cluster cousin of this post. that piece is about the word. this piece is about the russian. the word is older than the russian. the russian, however, sells better at a checkout counter, and that is what we are dealing with today. the word idiot, walking around alone, doesn’t move units. fyodor moves units. that’s the supermarket talking again.

also, since we’re invoking the russians: akira kurosawa’s 1951 adaptation, listed under hakuchi on the database film people use when checking these things, exists, runs long, and has, in my view, the same structural problem as my saturday cart. it is large. it does not fit in a normal bag. people buy it anyway because the brand on the box is good. that is, again, the post.

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