THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTEDABSURDLY! 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 piecesfor 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 influenceincluding her own.
Batuman’s subsequent piecesfor 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 influenceincluding her own.
Elif Batuman was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey. She now lives in Twin Peaks, San Francisco (near the radio tower). She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Prize. She teaches literature at Stanford University.
Elif Batuman’s voiceunpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literaturehas made her one of the most admired writers of her generation. 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 takes her reader to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg as she investigates a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. The student devoted to the Russian classics will 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.
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 influenceincluding her own.
The seven essays here are expansive, wide-ranging, almost impossible to categorize, merging criticism and personal experience, scholarship and life. Although bounded by the author’s devotion to Russian literature, The Possessed is really a kind of autobiography in reading, in which the characters are Tolstoy, Isaac Babel and Pushkin.”David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"Odd and oddly profound . . . Among the charms of Ms. Batuman’s prose is her fond, funny way of describing the people around her . . . Perhaps Ms. Batuman’s best quality as a writer thoughbeyond her calm, lapidary proseis the winsome and infectious delight she feels in the presence of literary genius and beauty. She’s the kind of reader who sends you back to your bookshelves with a sublime buzz in your head. You want to feel what she’s feeling."Dwight Garner, The New York Times
The seven essays here are expansive, wide-ranging, almost impossible to categorize, merging criticism and personal experience, scholarship and life. Although bounded by the author’s devotion to Russian literature, The Possessed is really a kind of autobiography in reading, in which the characters are Tolstoy, Isaac Babel and Pushkin.”David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
It’s not surprising that some people never get over these books, and Batuman, for her part, goes to get a Ph.D. in Russian literature. Meanwhile, she travels through a country just poignant and absurd enough to showcase her capacious sense of humor (which has room for Isaac Babel, romantic mishaps, and missing luggage) . . . The main attraction is Elif Batuman herself.”Benjamin Moser, Harper’s Magazine
Hilarious, wide-ranging, erudite, and memorable, The Possessed is a sui generis feast for the mind and the fancy, ants and all. And, unlikely though this may sound, by the time you’ve reached the end, you just may wish that you, like the author, had fallen down the rabbit hole of comp lit grad school. Batuman’s exaltations of Russian literature could have ended up in scholarly treatises gathering dust in university stacks. Instead, she has made her subject glow with the energy of the enigma that drew her to it in the first place.”Liesel Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review
Batuman writes with superb wit . . . There’s something melancholy, as well as beautiful, in using literature not just to illuminate experience but actually to create it. Batuman’s writing waltzes in a space in which books and life reflect each other. The effect is dizzying sometimes, and maybe that’s one of her points; her roving sensibility deliriously encompasses many styles and moods. If Susan Sontag had coupled with Buster Keaton, their prodigiously gifted love child might have written this book.”Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times Book Review
For Batuman, the Russian classics are a prism through which we can examine our own lives, whose close study might just lead us toward unlocking what she describes as the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love.’”Peter Terzian, The Boston Globe
A hugely engaging mix of scholarly spelunking . . . and subtle personal revelation . . . Batuman, a gifted and almost painfully funny raconteur, encounters literary royalty and astronomer kings, as well as many epically borderline personalities who attend academic conferences. As it turns out, investigating how the lives of the masters informed their art leads to the revelation that oftentimes, it’s art that gives shape to life.”Megan O’Grady, Vogue
I’m no great partisan of the Russian novel . . . So when I rave to you, dear readers, about Elif Batuman’s hilarious and charming The Possessed, understand that the author has entirely bewitched me despite my relative indifference to her subject. Ten pages in, I already knew I’d read her on pretty much anything. Which is not to say that The Possessed failed to enlighted me about both Russian books and the people who adore them . . . I’m hooked.”Laura Miller, Salon
Wonderfully grotesque, like a cross between Borges and Borat . . . Shows how the life of literary scholarship is really livedat its most ridiculous, and at its most unexpectedly sublime.”Adam Kirsch, Slate
The seven essays here are expansive, wide-ranging, almost impossible to categorize, merging criticism and personal experience, scholarship and life. Although bounded by the author’s devotion to Russian literature, The Possessed is really a kind of autobiography in reading, in which the characters are Tolstoy, Isaac Babel and Pushkin.”David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
It’s not surprising that some people never get over these books, and Batuman, for her part, goes to get a Ph.D. in Russian literature. Meanwhile, she travels through a country just poignant and absurd enough to showcase her capacious sense of humor (which has room for Isaac Babel, romantic mishaps, and missing luggage) . . . The main attraction is Elif Batuman herself.”Benjamin Moser, Harper’s Magazine
Hilarious, wide-ranging, erudite, and memorable, The Possessed is a sui generis feast for the mind and the fancy, ants and all. And, unlikely though this may sound, by the time you’ve reached the end, you just may wish that you, like the author, had fallen down the rabbit hole of comp lit grad school. Batuman’s exaltations of Russian literature could have ended up in scholarly treatises gathering dust in university stacks. Instead, she has made her subject glow with the energy of the enigma that drew her to it in the first place.”Liesel Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review
Batuman writes with superb wit . . . There’s something melancholy, as well as beautiful, in using literature not just to illuminate experience but actually to create it. Batuman’s writing waltzes in a space in which books and life reflect each other. The effect is dizzying sometimes, and maybe that’s one of her points; her roving sensibility deliriously encompasses many styles and moods. If Susan Sontag had coupled with Buster Keaton, their prodigiously gifted love child might have written this book.”Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times Book Review
For Batuman, the Russian classics are a prism through which we can examine our own lives, whose close study might just lead us toward unlocking what she describes as the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love.’”Peter Terzian, The Boston Globe
A hugely engaging mix of scholarly spelunking . . . and subtle personal revelation . . . Batuman, a gifted and almost painfully funny raconteur, encounters literary royalty and astronomer kings, as well as many epically borderline personalities who attend academic conferences. As it turns out, investigating how the lives of the masters informed their art leads to the revelation that oftentimes, it’s art that gives shape to life.”Megan O’Grady, Vogue
I’m no great partisan of the Russian novel . . . So when I rave to you, dear readers, about Elif Batuman’s hilarious and charming The Possessed, understand that the author has entirely bewitched me despite my relative indifference to her subject. Ten pages in, I already knew I’d read her on pretty much anything. Which is not to say that The Possessed failed to enlighted me about both Russian books and the people who adore them . . . I’m hooked.”Laura Miller, Salon
Wonderfully grotesque, like a cross between Borges and Borat . . . Shows how the life of literary scholarship is really livedat its most ridiculous, and at its most unexpectedly sublime.”Adam Kirsch, Slate
If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that when you hear Russian literature,’ you think of college classes you wish you’d cutand books that can seem as long as a Siberian winter. But in this delightful debut, Elif Batuman makes you look at Russian literature from a fresh perspective, using an unusual blend of memoir and travelogue as she delves into lives and personalities of such Russian literary giants as Isaac Babel, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy.”Scott Martel, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
A rare gem: a genuine affirmation of deep readingof caring about ideas and being carried of by themfrom an exceptional writer who’s not event 35.”SF Weekly
It’s not often that one laughs out loud while reading a book of literary criticism. In seven delightfully quirky essays that combine travelogue and memoir with criticism, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed takes us on an unconventional odyssey through the world of Russian literature . . . Part sleuth, part pundit, Batuman both plays the game of literary exegesis and skewers it.”The Christian Science Monitor
Possibly the best thing to come out of a graduate program in recent years . . . By writing about her personal experiences with such charm, Batuman manages to make literature accessible in a way few critics can: She loves the Russians, and because, over the course of the book, you come to love her a little bit, you come to love the Russians as well. She’s an example of not just how to appreciate literature, but how to live life through literaturewithout losing yourself.”The Dallas Morning News
While some parts of the essays read like spy thrillers, others are more like episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, with academic stealing one another’s parking spaces and then giving the finger . . . Batuman does what a...
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them Features
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User Reviews about The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
To be honest, I got this book on a whim. Having just gotten a Kindle as a present, and heading off to the former soviet union yet again after being there for 2 years ( I was only back in the US for about 6 weeks) I decided that instead of all the historical Non-fiction i read about this part of the world, why not read a book about the books I felt I could never read. After all, these books scared me. Have you seen their size? They make good anti-mugging tools, and the stories are grand on a scale the size of the country. How is one supposed to follow all the plots, and the dreams, and the dreams within the plots within the dreams within the balls?? Even though I have studied, lived and worked in this part of the world, I couldn't get into the literature.
That is, until I read this book. This book starts by explaining a love story of sorts that isnt even a "real Russian story", but to me thats what this book is, a great love story. Her adventures lead her all over the Russian landscape, both in books and in real life. They cause her to ask questions which are intrinsic to being Slavic it seems, "When you love someone, what is it that you actually love?" and "who actually killed a man many are 100% sure died because of a stroke". And listening to her talk with so much care in her heart for these books, which have scared me ever since I tried to read War and Peace in its original Russian and French double type, I began to see that my fear was wrongly placed. It was really in the rash move of a student who knew only little Russian to try and take on the Russian Epic.
Since picking up this book I have bought, or found, 25 russian books for my kindle or in properback (in english except for one) which I will be reading as I sit in the Post-Soviet world again, in my own version of a Summer in Samarkand.
To those who say its too expensive for a kindle I beg to differ. Her ability to get me interested in writers (who you can get almost all, if not all, of their books for Free from the kindle), to get me into the lives and discussions about the books, to basically show me the literary criticism field, all without me realizing what I was doing, is more than worth it. I hope she gets most of it, but even if she doesn't, I will be buying this book again. -- The Possessed: Or how I learned to stop worrying and Read Russian Lit
Recently, a blood relative with no past history of Russophilia took a Russian literature course in college. He was utterly enthralled and is now considering a year off to work in Mother Russia. Such is the power of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.
This uniquely compelling force of Russian literature is the central theme of Batuman's book, subtitled "Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Yet the "people" here are mainly Batuman herself, and The Possessed is largely a memoir of her intellectual explorations of the Russian literary landscape.
That does not make the book any less interesting. On the contrary, Batuman's first person narrative enlivens her exploration. Her self-deprecation and (at times astonishingly frank) openness about her own personal life make this a fascinating read. There is a remarkable breadth and combination of unexpected elements, from a hilarious conference on Isaac Babel, to an episode of CSI Tula, to her own bizarre attempt to transfuse Russian culture and literature by way of extended stays in Uzbekistan.
In short, Batuman's tale of personal discovery is as diverting and multi-threaded as a nineteenth century novel. And it's a great summer read that will help you rediscover your own initial fascination with all things Russian.
As reviewed in Russian Life magazine. -- The uniquely compelling force of Russian literature... explained
If you're looking for a scholarly text on Russian literature along the lines of Isaiah Berlin's "Russian Thinkers" then you would do well to stay away from this book. I have no doubt that Ms. Batyman is capable of writing such a book, and prehaps one day she will, but this isn't it. What "The Possessed" is, however, is a well written, often humorous, collection of essays that deal primarily with Ms. Batyman's experiences as both student and scholar, and that only lightly touches upon the lives and works of such literary luminaries as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Babel.
But while "The Possessed" may be light on original insights and observations, it does do a better job than almost any other book I've read of capturing the narrow, insular, often tedious world of graduate studies, espeically in a field as esoteric and heavily mined as that of Russian Lit. And it's also a pretty good travelogue, taking the reader on extended excursions to Tolstoy's sprawling estate, to one of the more remote corners of the former Soviet Republic, and finally to a St. Petersburg Ice Palance built to last for not even a single winter season.
In short, this is one book -- short analysis, high on humor -- that can be judged by its comic book-like cover. I'm going to keep my copy of "The Possessed," if only to re-read some of its more funny passages, while hoping that Ms. Batyman will eventually write a weightier companion volume to set along side it. -- A Not-So-Serious Look At Serious Russian Lit
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! -- HIlarious & Engaging
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