E-reader open on The Idiot beside a phone showing ChatGPT answering a question about the passage

A few pages into The Idiot, I kept hitting a particular kind of snag. Not a hard word or a lost plot thread, but an ambiguity. Early on, General Epanchin’s daughters are described as having read too much, and the room treats this as self-evidently a bit worrying. Worrying how? Anti-intellectualism, gentle mockery of the daughters, gentle mockery of the parents, or a translation artefact. The text offers no help, because it’s written as if no help could possibly be needed.

A few pages later it happens again. Rogozhin mentions that his father would never let him go to the theatre. Again there is no explanation, no gloss, presented as the most natural fact in the world. Natural to whom?

The standard move here is to hold the branches open. You keep three or four candidate readings alive, loop back over them so they don’t evaporate, and carry them forward while the next chapter adds new ones. This, I’ve realised, is most of what the felt difficulty of a “hard book” actually is. It’s not that any single point defeats you. It’s the working-memory cost of all the open loops. It’s exhausting, and we’ve been taught to treat the exhaustion as part of the experience, the tax you pay for reading something profound.

Or I take a screenshot of the e-reader, drop it into a language model, and ask. The daughters question turns out to have a precise answer. Visible bookishness and opinions were a liability in girls being positioned on the marriage market. Daughters of a general were dynastic assets, and “reads too much” decoded, instantly, for an 1868 reader, as “may prove difficult to place.” The theatre ban was similar: a conservative merchant patriarch versus the modern, mingling, faintly dissolute urban night out. It was not mysterious in the original setting. It was obvious to the people it was written for.

That’s the useful bit. Dostoevsky’s first readers did no work at these points. The judgments arrive unexplained because, at the time, there was nothing to explain, the same way you don’t explain to a colleague why “great, another all-hands” isn’t enthusiasm. The difficulty I was experiencing wasn’t in the book. It materialised afterwards, accumulating over a century and a half as the surrounding culture drifted away and took its assumptions with it.

I keep wanting to call this lossy transmission, but strictly it’s the opposite. The transmission was flawless. The words arrived verbatim, better preserved than almost anything else from the 1860s. What rotted was the codec. The book was compressed against a dictionary of shared context that never shipped with the file, and it opens fine on a modern reader; it just renders wrong in places. I’ve written before about books as compressed prompts. This is the failure mode: payload intact, dictionary gone.

The language models work as the recovered codec because they have, in effect, read the entire surrounding culture: the letters, the journalism, the other novels, the social history. Point one at a passage and it collapses the branches on the spot. And what’s left after the collapse is instructive, because plenty of difficulty remains. Dostoevsky engineered some of his ambiguity; the narrator’s evasions are load-bearing, and a reader in 1868 was meant to feel that wobble too. That residue, the part that stays hard even with the codec restored, is the actual book. The rest was never a crux the author built. He didn’t intend for me to have those problems. Nobody did.

The old conflation is starting to come apart. “Hard books are hard” always bundled two different things: depth, which was difficult even for contemporaries and is why the books survived, and decay, which is just distance wearing a profound expression. For as long as I’ve been alive there was no practical way for an ordinary reader to tell them apart, so the whole bundle got attributed to genius, and struggling through it unaided got treated as the point. It turns out a decent fraction of the fog was never the profundity. It was packet loss, and now there’s a decoder on my phone.