The Idiot

“I didn’t have a religion, and I didn’t do team sports, and for a long time orchestra had been the only place where I felt like part of something bigger than I was, where I was able to strive and at the same time to forget myself. The loss of that feeling was extremely painful.” 

This quote explains, to an extent, why Selin often agrees to go along with other people’s suggestions even if she does not agree with them. As an only child growing up in a one-parent household, it is important for her to feel part of something bigger. For many people, such a sense of belonging is achieved through religion or sports. Since Selin has no such outlets at Harvard, the good opinion of others becomes even more important. Additionally, the comparison between team sports and religion adds a humorous undertone to this otherwise philosophical observation. 

“Already I was the impetuous one in our friendship—the one who cared less about tradition and personal safety, who evaluated every situation from scratch, as if it had arisen for the first time—while Svetlana was the one who subscribed to rules and systems, who wrote things in the designated spaces, and saw herself as the inheritor of centuries of human history and responsibilities. Already we were comparing to see whose way of doing things was better. But it wasn’t a competition so much as an experiment, because neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from pity.” 

In this quote, Selin explains how she sees the differences between Svetlana and herself. Since Selin has grown up in the US, she has not learned in detail about European and Turkish history. The long-ago events people from Europe consider important and the cultural stereotypes they allude to seem completely foreign and unintelligible to Selin. Her opinions and thoughts are based on the situation as it is, rather than on preconceived ideas. Svetlana, on the contrary, is a product of the European educational system, which emphasizes nationalism and shared historical events. Furthermore, she actively likes thinking of herself as being part of a long and rich cultural tradition that starts with Ancient Greece and continues to the present moment. As a result, Svetlana has many preconceived ideas and ready opinions. Selin understands that their respective upbringing shapes their current attitudes to the surrounding world and marks them as representatives of two very different traditions, each secretly believing in its own superiority. 

“At first I was excited about Against Nature, because Gary said it was about a man who decided to live according to aesthetic rather than moral principles, and that was something Svetlana had recently said about me: that I lived by aesthetic principles, whereas she, who had been raised on Western philosophy, was doomed to live boringly by ethical principles. It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic.” 

This paragraph is humorous because of Selin’s appropriation and re-interpretation of other people’s words. The novel under discussion is about the last scion of a French noble family who leads a decadent life, but eventually becomes disillusioned and disgusted by the coarseness of Parisian society. He retreats to the countryside and seeks a spiritual escape from the drudgery of life through immersion in what he considers beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, but which leads to death and destruction. The novel appealed to the Decadent generation at the time (Oscar Wilde among them). Selin compares herself indirectly to the novel’s character, which is humorous, considering he is a jaded, disillusioned and privileged white man who has led a very debauched life. Selin is the opposite of the novel’s protagonist. The last line, however, is very philosophical. Selin echoes the Romantics, particularly John Keats, who equate truth with beauty.  

“In my heart, I knew that Whorf was right. I knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -miş, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth.” 

One of the reasons why Selin is so preoccupied with how language works and the true meaning of things is because of her bilingualism. She understands, first hand, the different cultural patterns engendered by different languages. Here she enters into conversation with various linguistics theories that have been popular throughout the twentieth century. Originally, the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic relativity postulates that language determines thinking, which, in turn, impacts customs and behavior. This theory, however, was refuted, most notably, by Noam Chomsky who believes in the universality of language as an inborn, rather than learned, skill. Since the 1970s, linguistic relativity has been undergoing re-evaluation, so it’s possible that Selin supports the “weak” Whorfian hypothesis, which considers language to influence, rather than determine, ways of thinking. 

“It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too. It was just like Chekhov said, in ‘The Darling’ […].” 

Selin has a habit of misreading classical literature and making inaccurate comparisons between herself and famous literary protagonists. The short story Selin refers to is about a woman whose life’s meaning is focused entirely on the men in her life. Without a man to tell her what to think she is unable to form opinions or take a stand. However, despite being intellectually and emotionally dependent on others, the protagonist’s life is described as relatively peaceful and happy. Selin’s comparison in this case is exaggerated. In fact, she is very independent and proactive as attested by her volunteering at the ESL program and at the Hungarian village. Additionally, she does voice opinions throughout the story, but they tend to be much more empathetic than Svetlana’s. 

“The meanest girls, the ones who started secret clubs to ostracize the poorly dressed, delighted to see Cinderella triumph over her stepsisters. They rejoiced when the prince kissed her. Evidently, they not only saw themselves as noble and good, but also wanted to love and be loved. Maybe not by anyone and everyone, the way I wanted to be loved. But, for the right person, they were prepared to form a relation based on mutual kindness. This meant that the Disney portrayal of bullies wasn’t accurate, because the Disney bullies realized they were evil, prided themselves on it, and loved nobody.” 

This is an important quote that brings to the forefront one of the novel’s underlying themes: subjectivity. Selin is keenly aware of how subjective and contextual everything is, while longing to discover some objective, larger-than-life truth. Villains, in her experience, are just like everyone else. They look like the heroes and desire the same things and do not even realize they are behaving badly. In other words, there are no white-or-black people in real life. This makes it difficult to judge someone and treat them as wholly evil. 

“Why did every story have to end with marriage? You expected that from Bleak House, or even from Crime and Punishment. But ‘Nina in Siberia’ had seemed different. Of everything I had read that semester, it alone had seemed to speak to me directly, to promise to reveal something about the relationship between language and the world. For the mystery to be tied up so glibly, for everyone to be paired off and extinguished that way, felt like a terrible betrayal.” 

This paragraph echoes Selin’s frequent dissatisfaction with societal expectations that everyone must be coupled up. Even though Selin is in love with Ivan, she can never picture herself dating him. In fact, she cannot imagine being in a relationship with anyone, which makes her keenly aware that she does not conform to the expectation of coupledom. Selin’s feeling of betrayal is also an expression of her own unhappiness. If she had been happily dating Ivan, she probably would not have had a negative reaction to the story’s ending. 

“‘Do you think the name Sonya is bad luck?’ I blurted.

‘How do you mean?”

‘In Uncle Vanya, and in Crime and Punishment. Even in War and Peace, she’s pathetic, she’s…’ I hesitated, not wanting to say the phrase Tolstoy had used, which was ‘sterile flower.’

‘She doesn’t get the man,’ said Varvara.” 

The diminutive Russian name Sonya is derived from Sophia, which, in turn, comes from the Greek and means “wisdom.” In Orthodox Christianity, the concept of Holly Wisdom or Hagia Sophia is understood, usually, to refer to Jesus Christ. Consequently, for Orthodox writers, such as Dostoevsky, Sonya carries a deeply symbolic meaning. Usually, someone named Sonya rejects the physical in favor of the spiritual. In Crime and Punishment, Sonya embodies the ultimate sacrifice as she becomes a prostitute to feed her family, but retains her spiritual purity. In Uncle Vanya, Sonya is a gentle young woman who has dedicated her life to taking care of the estate. In War and Peace, Sonya gives up her love for the greater good and ends up as a spinster aunt.

“In the morning when I saw Ivan’s name in the in-box I almost started to cry. It reminded me of a kind of torture I had read about where afterward the captors returned your senses to you one by one, and you felt so grateful that you told them everything.” 

This quote suggests that Selin’s relationship with Ivan might not be entirely healthy. Even after her confession, Ivan continues to treat her as a friend, disregarding her feelings. He likes Selin and how she challenges him, but does not seem able to empathize with her. For the most part, Selin’s interactions with Ivan seem to be bitter sweet or outright unhappy. However, as she repeatedly states, Ivan is more present and real than anyone else and, by association, it seems that Selin also feels more alive when they communicate. She even compares the feeling his letter engenders to her senses returning after a period of numbness. 

“The fourth time I read the email, I stopped at the sentence about his girlfriend. Was it possible that that was the most important sentence? But to me, the idea of the girlfriend didn’t carry that same feeling of direness as the feeling that he didn’t actually want to know me, or know anything, he just wanted to guess and wonder and disappear.” 

This quote reveals important information about Selin’s feelings for Ivan. Even though she believes she is in love with him, her feelings seem to remain platonic for most of the book. Her attraction to Ivan is emotional and intellectual, rather than passionate; otherwise, she would probably have felt jealous of Ivan’s girlfriend. This would also explain the feeling of rejection Selin experiences at the thought that Ivan does not want to get to know her in person. 

“Most people, the minute they met you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people—people they could get rid of. That was how Hannah was—she wanted to make an alliance with me against Angela. ‘Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I’m not going to get knocked off the boat, they are. They’re always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people.’

‘Do you see yourself as one of the dispensable people?’

‘The point is I don’t want to get involved in that question, and it’s all most people want to talk about. The number of people who want to understand what you’re like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat—it’s really limited.’” 

Selin’s view of social interactions and friendships overall is quite negative. She sees them as a competition because of her own feeling of not belonging or not connecting with others. This quote reveals Selin’s self-awareness of her perceived difference as she seeks intellectual and spiritual closeness that transcends social expectations or norms. From her description of other people’s behavior (Hannah’s, for example) it appears that she senses some kind of fakeness or desperation in their interactions with others. This preoccupation with sincerity and intimacy echoes Selin’s fears that Ivan does not want to get to know her as a real person. 

“I had always looked down on alcohol, because my parents liked to drink at dinner and it always made them more annoying. I had known that alcohol was supposed to be a big part of college life and that some people would really care about it, but I hadn’t realized it would be basically everyone, except the most humorless or childish people, and also some people who were religious. There didn’t seem to be any way of not drinking without it being a statement.”

This quote touches on Selin’s need to conform in certain ways. She questions a number of things taken for granted, such as her professors’ opinions or the perceived need to be placed in a prestigious seminar to succeed academically at Harvard. Even winning a literary award makes her feel bad, rather than making her proud. However, her disregard for these social expectations is internal. Her refusal to drink alcohol would make her stand out publicly, which is what seems to be her greatest fear. 

I thought about what a special, unusual person Ivan was—how much more present and alive than other people, how he said and thought things that nobody else said or thought, and how ready he was to walk around with me for hours. All I had to do was write him an email, and then he walked around with me all day long. Who else in the world would do that?”

This quote reveals more information about the reasons behind Selin’s obsession with Ivan. She is attracted to him because of his uniqueness, which resonates with her own feeling of not fitting in. Additionally, she is attracted, and probably flattered, by the signs that such a special person finds her interesting and unusual, in his turn. 

“I felt so unhappy. I just didn’t understand why we couldn’t skip the part where I drank two more pints of beer. ‘Well, I don’t want to push you,’ Ivan said, somehow ironically, as if alluding to the scenario known to us both in which boys pushed girls, and which was so obviously not what was going on. I was embarrassed, because I felt that, by refusing to drink—by being afraid to drink—I was implying that I thought that was what was going on, and that he was going to ‘take advantage of me,’ a phrase it was impossible to imagine without quotation marks.” 

Selin does not seem too interested in the physical and most of the time her observations could have been made by a male or gender-neutral narrator. This is one of the few scenes which brings forth gender-specific issues, such as the idea that an older guy can easily take advantage of a younger, inexperienced, and inebriated woman. However, since Selin does not see herself as a typical female character who gets jealous or fears for her virtue, the idea that Ivan could be a typical male character who is only interested in sex also seems improbable. Nevertheless, even if Selin and Ivan do not fit into these typical stereotypes, the fact that she feels pressured into drinking while Ivan jokes that he is not someone who would take advantage, makes this precisely a scene of coercion.  

“I was overcome by the sudden sense of Ivan’s freedom. I realized for the first time that if you were a guy, if you were some tall guy who looked like Ivan, you could pretty much stop to look at anything you wanted, whenever you felt like it. And because I was walking with him now, for just this moment, I had a special dispensation, I could look at whatever he was looking at, too.” 

This scene takes places shortly after the one in the bar where Selin feels the need to drink. Walking with Ivan highlights the difference in their gender. A woman would be afraid to be alone in this area at night. For the most part, it does not seem that the world Selin inhabits is gendered, but in this instance, it becomes clear that there are things that are not easily accessible to her as a woman and, what is more, Selin becomes aware of these limitations. 

“Growing up in America, I had been taught to despise memorization, which was known as ‘rote memorization,’ or sometimes as ‘regurgitating facts.’ The teachers said that what they wanted was to teach us to think. They didn’t want us to turn out like robots, like the Soviet and Japanese schoolchildren. That was the only reason Soviet and Japanese children did better than us on tests. It was because they didn’t know how to think.” 

Here, Selin reveals her sense of humor by poking fun at the American Cold War rhetoric that shaped her childhood. She repeats the propaganda that her teachers would have kept repeating in school, but by re-contextualizing the idea that Soviet and Japanese children are robots because they have to memorize information, she reveals the inherent absurdity of such statements. If American schoolchildren are better than others, then they should do better on tests. Since they don’t, it looks as if tests are meant for “robots,” in which case it becomes unclear why American children should take them. 

“Dance songs turned out to consist of one sentence repeated over and over. For example: “I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain.” Why would a desert miss rain? Why wasn’t it okay for a desert to be a desert, why couldn’t anything just be what it was, why did it always have to be missing something?” 

This poignant moment brings home how out of place Selin feels—both in this particular situation, as she does not enjoy night clubs, and in general, in a society that seems obsessed with romantic and sexual relationships. There is no place in a club for someone who does not enjoy loud music and alcohol; similarly, social expectations demand people to pair off. Being single or not particularly interested in the physical aspects of a relationship are treated as abnormal.

“I wrote terrible things—the worst things I could think of. I called him a movie director. At the end, I copy-pasted the lines he had written to me before, the lines that had moved me so much, and which he had now recanted so mystifyingly, and then I hit Ctrl-S. It was over.” 

At first glance, it seems strange that the worst thing Selin could call Ivan is a “movie director.” However, to Selin, it is very offensive because a movie director is someone who stays hidden behind the camera and does not participate in what is going on in the film. In a way, a film director is the ultimate manipulator who can retract and cut out lines and scenes from the film. Additionally, many directors are preoccupied with profit, so their films tend to follow mainstream narratives and idea. Ivan’s last letter seems to do exactly that – he retracts his words from the winter and implies that he wants Selin to behave like everyone else. She feels rejected and betrayed by his message. 

“‘It’s like you said: math is a language that started out so abstract, more abstract than words, and then suddenly it turned out to be the most real, the most physical thing there was. With math they built the atomic bomb. Suddenly this abstract language is leaving third-degree burns on your skin. Now there’s this special language that can control everything, and manipulate everything, and if you’re the elite who speaks it—you can control everything.’” 

This pronouncement belongs to Svetlana who is criticizing Ivan and his behavior towards Selin. She believes that Ivan is manipulating the young woman and has no real feelings for her. She reaches this conclusion based on Ivan’s interest in mathematics, a type of abstract language, which makes possible the creation of destructive things, such as the atomic bomb. Svetlana’s opinion alludes to Selin’s own thoughts on the different linguistics theories. Like Selin, Svetlana believes that language can manipulate behavior and the physical world. However, her character is also quite cynical and sometimes prejudiced, so her view of Ivan can easily be the result of her own fears of intimacy. 

“The haircut had taken almost two hours, which she had spent explaining in French to her aunt’s stylist that external appearances are meaningless. The stylist had disagreed, maintaining that truth was beauty and beauty truth.” 

This is another allusion to the philosophical debate about the relationship between ethics and esthetics. Svetlana believes these concepts are separate and, sometimes, in conflict. Selin, in an earlier quote, states that she believes the two to be the same. Such lofty debates are deflated and made humorous by inserting a prosaic element – the hairdresser. In such a way, the purely theoretical argument takes on a very practical and physical manifestation. 

“‘I’m not saying I would kill anyone. I just have violent thoughts on the tram, and it helps me relate to Dostoevsky. You never have such thoughts?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Definitely there are times when I’m tired and don’t want to give up my seat on the bus to an old person. But I get depressed, not angry—like about how I’ll be an old woman someday, and even more tired than I am now. I never think I deserve the seat more because I’m reading a book.’”

This exchange between Selin and Ivan allows the reader a glimpse of their respective personalities as they discuss Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment. Based on their respective reactions to the novel, it becomes clear that Selin is much more empathetic than Ivan as she can see herself reflected in those around her. Ivan, in contrast, is a much more self-absorbed person who perceives the world around him strictly in relation to his own needs and wants, not unlike Raskolnikov. Such an outlook can easily lead to a sense of superiority and disregard of others. 

“I didn’t want to read the book, not in Budapest and not in a village, but I didn’t want to seem snotty so I said okay and paid for half of it. It wasn’t expensive. It was, however, big, and Owen didn’t have a bag, so I ended up carrying it all day.” 

This is one more example of Selin’s preoccupation with how others see her. She does not seem overly attentive to outer appearance, as she wears clothes that do not fit her very well, but she wants to be liked, nevertheless. She is willing to do things she does not want to in order to keep the peace and maintain a positive image. 

“I noticed that the whole issue was about winter barley. It seemed to me that Ivan would understand this allusion to our correspondence about cereal crops—about grains that slept in the ground and were awoken. I put the journal in my backpack.” 

Selin’s gift demonstrates how unusual her friendship with Ivan is as it is based on their shared ideas, rather than on shared experiences. The barley is a reference to Ivan’s drinking, which seems excessive to Selin. The grains also allude to Dostoevsky, whose works are heavily influenced by Christian imagery and narratives. Grains or seeds play an important role in the New Testament, especially John, as they symbolize spiritual rebirth. Grains, or the physical, must fall into the ground and die in order to give birth to new, spiritual life.