The Idiot: Newly Translated and Annotated (Alma Classics Evergreens)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

what is a novelist to do with ordinary people, people who are completely featureless, and how to make them the least bit interesting to readers? One cannot possibly avoid them altogether in a story, because ordinary people form an essential and vital link in the chain of life’s events; were we to miss them out, this would be at the expense of verisimilitude. To pack novels with types alone or even simply for interest’s sake with strange and unusual people, would be to violate reality, and, come to that, would be uninteresting. To our mind, one ought to identify interesting and instructive types even amongst colourless people. However, when for instance the very essence of some ordinary people is contained in their very constant and immutable ordinariness, or, what is even better, when despite the extraordinary effort of these personages to break out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, they nevertheless end up being inevitably and necessarily the archetypes of routine, such people then even acquire some kind of typicality, exemplifying an ordinariness, which under no circumstances wishes to remain what it is, and, come what may, strives to become original and independent without having the least grounds for this.