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The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman
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One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year
THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED―ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!―TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS
No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature.
Batuman's subsequent pieces―for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books― have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.
Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence―including her own.
- Sales Rank: #101943 in Books
- Published on: 2010-02-16
- Released on: 2010-02-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.22" h x .82" w x 5.50" l, .59 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
148 of 168 people found the following review helpful.
Young Turk
By Jeffrey Teich
Please be patient. I will get to the book in a moment, but first I want to explain why this very good book matters.
My Polish grandmother was an austere, white-haired woman perpetually irked by her descent into the middle class. She believed that a lady rightfully avoided certain things such as work and cooking. She was, however, a great reader and had at one time aspired to be a poet. A sheaf of her poems written in a florid Slavic hand lies packed away in my basement. When I was thirteen, my mother pointed me in my grandmother's direction and instructed me to ask Grandma what to read. "You must begin", the old lady said firmly, "with Tolstoy. Resurrection and The Kreutzer Sonata." At the time I couldn't understand either and settled on "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" Since then I have had a recurring love affair with Russian lit. From Gogol and Pushkin I journeyed on through Dostoevsky and got as far as Master and Margarita. Nearly every step of the way some Russian emigre -the very people who insisted I read these books- wagged a cautionary finger at me: "You will never truly understand a word of this. The translation is terrible. And the Russian soul is... beyond you.""
Now I have discovered The Possessed. This book with its comic-inspired cover lay in the Our Staff Recommends section of the bookstore, in a rack nine deep and quite undisturbed. So, hopeful that I would at last grasp the essence of the Russian soul or at least learn something, I bought it. Once I began to read, I couldn't put it down. Nor could I stop laughing. Elif Batuman has written a comic detective story in which the characters real and imaginary intermix and the revelation lies in the journey itself. Yet she knows so much more than Russian lit. She glides effortlessly across the artistic landscape from Babel to King Kong, from Tolstoy to Sammarkand. She is a keen tracer of lost personae. But there's more. Ms. Batuman has the delicate antennae needed to detect the nuances of academic silliness. She comes armed with a red-blooded aversion to the cult of pomp and obfuscation which dominates so much of modern scholarship. Better than that she comes armed with a facility for writing English which pleases the American soul.
But she is also a teacher. In her deft way she touches on the central themes of Russian literature which has thrived despite the successive ogreships of the tsars, the communists, and now the Putinists. What are the central themes? According to her (and others) the Russian must lead at least two lives and perhaps three or more. At minimum there coexist the public persona, the private one, and the inner one that carries on a dialogue only with itself. But don't we all have these? Here's the difference: Many a Russian author reveals this multiple existence through his/her work and thereby risks the brutal perils of self-incrimination. Add to that a rich broth of mysticism and magic, and you nearly have it. Neither Raskolnikov nor Rasputin came about entirely by accident.
This book is not without its occasional flaws. So what. The stories are fun anyway.
I am not quite all the way through The Possessed. A handful of pages to go. I will finish it tonight or tomorrow; and when I do, I will have to fight off the chagrin of ending. Like Pimen in Boris Godunov I will say: Yet one more tale.
55 of 68 people found the following review helpful.
I once spent a dreary month in Moscow. But I don't feel the need to torture others with the details.
By David M. Giltinan
There are flashes of charm in this book, counterbalanced by some very tedious patches indeed. Elif Batuman is apparently well-connected enough to have Roz Chast do the artwork for the book cover. She also seems to have a remarkable talent for self-promotion. This book has generated a considerable amount of buzz, and some near-hagiographic reviews.
I don't quite understand why. If one wanted to view things uncharitably, Ms Batuman spent seven somewhat aimless years as a graduate student in comparative literature at Stanford without ever really figuring out why she was there. She did prove quite adept at ferreting out travel grant money, which she used to make various trips to Russia and other former Soviet republics. This book is essentially a travel memoir - the record of those trips. Like most travel memoirs, it is interesting only in spots. Two of the book's seven chapters are quite well-written and manage to sustain the reader's interest (the author's attendance at a conference about Tolstoy held at the Tolstoy estate, a trip to Saint Petersburg to visit a reconstruction of an ice palace first built in the reign of Catherine the great).
But that's as good as it gets. Ms Batuman once spent a dismal summer visiting Samarkand. Inexplicably, she insists on telling us all about it. In excruciating detail, spread over three chapters. It takes up almost half of the book and is indescribably tedious. As a general rule, other people's travel memoirs are most interesting when things go wrong, but Ms Batuman's account of her summer in Samarkand almost made me stick pencils in my eyes, just to make it stop. Fortunately, the Kindle has an off switch. Two other chapters, the author's ruminations on Dostoyevsky prompted by a trip to Venice and an account of a conference devoted to Isaac Babel that she helped organize at Stanford, were readable, but not particularly interesting. Ms Batuman, or her editor, should have realized that departmental gossip, though it might be catnip for graduate students, is of almost no interest to anyone else.
One point needs to be addressed. Elif Batuman does not want you to think of this book as just a collection of travel pieces. Seven years in graduate school have apparently given her higher aspirations. So she places this really bizarre section at the end of her introductory chapter, in which she essentially seems to be claiming profundity by association. This kind of thing:
"What if you read 'Lost Illusions' and ... you went to Balzac's house and Madame Hanska's estate, read every word he ever wrote, dug up every last thing you could about him - and then started writing?
That is the idea behind this book."
Say what now? Is Ms Batuman suggesting that simply attending a conference on Tolstoy held at the Tolstoy estate will provide deep insight into his work, or magically improve the quality of one's writing about Tolstoy? This seems charmingly naive, not to say stupid. Or is she just trying to assign some kind of retrospective meaning to her seven years at graduate school?
At any rate, the book is studded throughout with Batuman's assorted drive-by thoughts about various authors, most of them Russian. These are largely innocuous, with the exception of her "analysis" of Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed", which is an embarrassment from start to finish. A plodding, blow-by-blow summary that stretches for pages is followed by a summary of what her Stanford professor told the class about it, leading in to her infatuation with charismatic classmate Matej, a smouldering Croatian cliche straight from central casting whose "narrow glinting eyes and high cheekbones" cause her to lose control altogether:
"a long-limbed, perfectly proportioned physical elegance, such that his body always looked at once extravagantly casual and flawlessly composed".
Matej alternates between smouldering and brooding, reducing his classmates (male and female) to a state of drooling concupiscence, eventually triggering some kind of epiphanic advance in Batuman's understanding of "The Possessed" (was the trigger his two-pack-a-day habit, the discovery that his great-uncle was a cardinal, or just the shock of finally landing him in bed?) It's to Batuman's credit that her discussion of "The Possessed" avoids the usual mind-numbing academic jargon -- an unfortunate side effect is that its utter banality becomes impossible to conceal.
I cannot agree with those more enthusiastic reviewers who suggest that Batuman offers particularly keen insights. She clearly enjoys reading, but is not especially adept at engaging the reader's enthusiasm. Unless you have a particular interest in obscure Uzbek poets, or the tedium of life in the former Soviet Union, this much-hyped book is likely to disappoint you.
It seems only fair to add that a recent New Yorker article by Ms Batuman, about Turkish soccer fans, was everything this book was not - interesting, tightly written, and great fun to read.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
HIlarious & Engaging
By Yarrow
This is the funniest, sweetest, most rewarding non-fiction book I've read in awhile. Although it's extremely literary, it's also hilarious, to the point that I had to give up on reading it in the quiet study area of the NYU library last week because I kept laughing out loud, to the annoyance of my chemistry-textbook-bound fellow students. It's also incredibly absorbing and addictive-- twice I actually missed my subway stop on the train because I was so engrossed in Elif Batuman's storytelling abilities.
Some highlights!
- the part in "Babel in California", the first essay in the book, in which Batuman compares the expression on the face of a certain elderly literary scion as that of "a cat which does not want to be picked up".
- all of the episodes with the comically evil landlady in "Summer in Samarkand"--the sections in which the furniture begins to disappear are gaspingly hilarious.
- so many moments with the Tolstoy scholars in "Who Killed Tolstoy?" which I read when it originally came out in Harper's last year--it's every bit as good the second time around.
This is a rare, rare book, and completely worth the ten bucks to buy it, take it everywhere with you, and read it more than once. A gem!
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