Read The Idiot by email.
A wholly good man arrives in Petersburg, and the city gets to work on him.
Nine o’clock on a thawing November morning, a train coming into Petersburg, two young men facing each other in third class: one about to come into a fortune, one holding everything he owns in a handkerchief. Dostoevsky’s attempt at writing a genuinely good man.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Fourteen months from now, you will have read Dostoevsky.
439 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1869
- Translation
- Eva M. Martin
- Installments
- 439
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 241,993
- Reading time
- 16 hours 48 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 6.5 months
- At 10 minutes a day
- 3.5 months
- At 20 minutes a day
- 7 weeks
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read The Idiot?
Nothing in The Idiot is decided quietly. The plot moves from one crowded room to the next, and the crowd is the same twenty people saying the unsayable in front of each other, so almost every installment ends with someone having gone too far. Part One closes with a hundred thousand roubles going into a fireplace in front of witnesses — that is four months of mornings, and it is the first of four parts.
We serialize Eva M. Martin’s translation in the Standard Ebooks edition, cut at paragraph boundaries inside Dostoevsky’s chapters. Each subject line gives the part, the chapter, and which installment of that chapter you are on, which earns its keep here because the chapters are long: the first runs over four thousand words, a full week of mornings. Installment 1 opens on the train — no preface, no framing — and every installment after it carries a one-line recap of the one before.
439 mornings is about fourteen and a half months, shorter than Anna Karenina or the Karamazovs and still longer than most books anyone finishes. What it feels like is a season: Prince Muishkin turning up in your inbox every morning being decent to people who cannot afford to believe him, and a slow accumulation of dread you did not sign up for. The dread is the point, and it needs the fourteen months to build.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read The Idiot?
About seventeen hours straight through (241,993 words). By email, it’s 439 daily installments of 2–3 minutes each — about fourteen and a half months, or seven months at a premium pace of two installments a day.
Is The Idiot a good first Dostoevsky?
Not the first — Notes from Underground is shorter and Crime and Punishment is tighter. This is the one to read third, when you already trust him enough to sit through four hundred pages of a party going wrong. Critics have called it his most uneven novel, and the people who love it love it for exactly that.
Why is he called an idiot?
Prince Muishkin is epileptic and has spent years in Switzerland under a doctor’s care, and he arrives in Petersburg with no money, no guile and no instinct for what people want him to say. Society settles on “idiot” quickly. Dostoevsky was trying to write a positively good and beautiful man and then find out what a room full of ambitious people would do with one.
Which translation is this?
Eva M. Martin’s public-domain translation, in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition. It is British English and it uses the older transliterations, so the prince is Muishkin rather than Myshkin, and you will meet Rogojin, Nastasia Philipovna and Lebedeff — worth knowing if you go looking for criticism, which spells all four differently.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Pause or unsubscribe from any installment.
Eva M. Martin translation, Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.