The article literally opens with the following lines:

>The first and only time I visited Ukraine was in 2019. My book “The Possessed”—a memoir I had published in 2010, about studying Russian literature—had recently been translated into Russian, along with “The Idiot,” an autobiographical novel, and I was headed to Russia as a cultural emissary, through an initiative of pen America and the U.S. Department of State.

The author of the article did write an autobiographical novel called "The Idiot" and yes it is a reference to Dostoevsky's novel of the same name, as alluded to in the following paragraph.