The Idiot

What It Is

A novel written abroad between 1867 and 1869 — Geneva, Milan, Florence — while Dostoevsky was broke, epileptic, gambling away money he did not have, and grieving the death of his infant daughter. It went out in instalments to a Russian journal as he wrote it, chapter by chapter, to a deadline, without a finished plan.

That is not a criticism. It is the essential fact about the book. He had an idea and a hero and almost nothing else, and he improvised the rest at speed, in a fever, with the printer waiting. The result is the wildest and least controlled of his major novels: reckless, uneven, lurching, and capable of scenes no careful writer would ever have dared.

Its natural habitat is the crowded room. Twenty people, all present, all talking, all performing, and the social temperature climbing until something has to give. Nobody in literature writes public humiliation like Dostoevsky, and this is where he does it most.

Why It Matters

The question is simple and no one has answered it: what happens to goodness when it walks into a real society? Not goodness in the abstract, but an actual person, unarmoured, honest, incapable of the small daily cruelties everyone else runs on, dropped into a world of money, rank, gossip and appetite.

In Russia in the 1860s that was not a devotional question. It was a social one, in a country where new money was arriving, old rank was rotting, and everyone was performing a self they could not afford.

It also gives you Dostoevsky at his most personal. He put his own epilepsy into this novel, and the mock execution he survived in 1849, and the gambler's arithmetic he knew from the inside. No other nineteenth-century novelist wrote from that much firsthand extremity.

Its afterlife is quieter than that of Crime and Punishment but it runs deep: Kurosawa transplanted it to postwar Hokkaido in 1951, and the holy fool who unsettles everyone around him became one of the permanent figures of modern fiction.

Before You Read

Six hundred pages, twenty to twenty-five hours, and harder going than Crime and Punishment despite being no more difficult sentence by sentence. It is less driven. The plot does not pull you; the scenes do.

The second part is where readers most often stall. It is deliberately loose, and the book tightens after it. Push through.

Read the long scenes in one sitting. Dostoevsky is building social pressure in real time, and stopping halfway through a party lets all of it out.

And keep the character list to hand. Russian names again: three apiece, plus the diminutives everyone uses differently depending on how much they respect you.

Which Translation to Read

• Ignat Avsey (Alma Classics, 2010) — recommended. The most readable Idiot in English, and the one with the surest ear. Avsey hears the comedy and the social panic — the wincing, the showing off, the room going quiet — which is where this novel actually lives, and he keeps a consistent tone across six hundred pages that other translators let slip. The cost: he was British as well as Russian, and the odd Britishism turns up in nineteenth-century Petersburg. The Alma volume is also a plain paperback with light notes. View on Amazon →
• Alan Myers (Oxford World's Classics, 1992), with an introduction by W. J. Leatherbarrow. The most faithful of the three and the best supported: strong notes, and an introduction from one of the finest English scholars of Dostoevsky. The scholar's choice. The cost: cooler and more formal than the Russian, which is neither cool nor formal.
• Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage, 2002). Preserves the raggedness and the repetitions, and makes no attempt to smooth a book that was written in a hurry. The cost: it can read as translated rather than written, and the wit goes flat.

Take Avsey to enjoy it, Myers to study it. David McDuff's Penguin version (2004) is a reasonable middle path.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the introduction afterwards. Leatherbarrow's is excellent and discusses the whole novel.

Do not try to tidy it. Dostoevsky was writing it as it was being printed and could not go back, and the untidiness is not a flaw to be excused but the condition under which this particular book became possible.

Watch what money does. Almost every scene has a sum of money in it somewhere, and almost every character is being valued.

The commonest mistake is to come to it expecting Crime and Punishment again and to be disappointed by the lack of drive. Come instead for the thing no other novel has: the sight of a man trying to write actual goodness, in a hurry, without safety, and getting close enough to frighten himself.