The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010)

Once I saw that this book existed, I felt compelled to read it. I have not read nearly the breadth of Russian works as Elif Batuman (who actually studied it, to be fair) but I have often loved a good Dostoevsky novel or Chekhov short story and the more I venture down that Russian rabbit hole, the more addictive I find it. The Russians were the deep thinkers and even beyond that...Dostoevsky was the deepest perseverator in my opinion...he couldn't let even ordinary thoughts go and small actions, grievances, ideas festered into full length novel masterpieces.


Batuman examines a little more than Russian literature here, though. She really talks quite a bit about a stay in Uzbekistan and all the areas around Turkey and the Ukraine. She wears her fascination of languages and explores both their uses to express oneself and their goal to help perpetuate a culture and nationality. It is clear that Batuman is knowledgeable but she takes the reader on a little journey as she learns even more about these things and exposes us to her own insights and discoveries in a way that seems quite new and spontaneous.


There is enough factual knowledge and basis in these chapters to lay a very nice structural foundation and to really help the reader learn about Russian history. However, it isn't like reading a textbook, partially because there is a great deal in here about personal interactions with others in these countries and Batuman's own personal life. It's very well balanced in this regard and quite engaging as well. This book is filled with thoughts of a possible Tolstoy murder, Anna Ionnovna's ice palace, an analysis of Dostoevsky's The Possessed and more but there's definitely a deeper love for the material and a burning need to consume and understand everything that makes this particular novel so rich.


This is a novel to read, then read some more Russian literature, then read this one again. Repeat as necessary.


Memorable Quotes:

pg. 113 "Air travel is like death. Everything is taken from you."

pg. 114 "When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase Resignation of the soul?"

pg. 158 "Persian, Diloram told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and cor crying while uttering the sound hay hay. Old Uzbek had special verbs for being unable to sleep, for speaking while feeding animals, for being a hypocrite, for gazing imporingly into a lover's face, for dispersing a crowd."

pg. 159 "What did you know about Uzbekistan once you learned that Old Uzbek had a hundred different words for crying? I wasn't sure, but it didn't seem to bode well for my summer vacation."


pg. 169 "All his life, Navoi wanted to write an answer to The Logic of Birds. Finally, at age fifty-eight, he wrote The Language of Birds, the central figure of which is an ugly , ash-colored bird called the qaqnus. The qaqnus bird has one thousand teeth and its beak, and each tooth sings a melody. Collecting thorns and twigs, it builds a tall nest, sits on top of it, and starts to sing. Its song is incredibly beautiful, but makes human listeners sick. (The song is called navo, the root of he name Navoi) As a function of singing, the qaqnus sets itself on fire, burns up, rises to heaven, and becomes a flower. A little bird comes from the ashes; that's its baby. The baby then spends its whole life collecting its own bonfire."


pg. 195 "The ice palace had no clear purpose, but many unclear purposes. It was a torture device, a science experiment, en ethnographic museum, a work of art. It was a suspended disaster, a flood momentarily checked, a haunted house, a distorted fairy tale, with its transparent coffin, parodic prince, and dwarfs. The ice palace represents the prison house of marriage, the vanity of human endeavor, the dialectic of empire and subject. Laden with endless meaning, like an object in a dream, the House of Ice appears in poems about dreams."


pg. 284 "Italian scientists identified a new pyschopathology: la sindrome di Stendhal, a state triggered by beautiful works of art and characterized by "loss of hearing and the sense of color, hallucinations, euphoria, panic, and the fear of going mad or even of dying. Unmarried European men between the ages of twenty-five and forty were found to be particularly susceptible. The average hospital stay was four days."

pg. 290 "If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them"



( )

Very uneven set of essays. Some hilarious, some beautiful/tragic/insightful about literature, some downright boring. Such is life. Read at your own discretion. ( )

Russian lit will never read the same for me after this one! ( )

Good but not as good as I thought it was going to be. Ms Batuman too openly displays the exoskeleton of the book by her frequent references to her attempts to become a writer. With this volume of memoirs from her time as a student and researcher she has succeeded. But it amounts to little more than a collection of anecdotes of her travels to the East on various short study and research assignments linked with pieces of literary criticism culled from her student tutorial submissions and rewritten in a more reader friendly, journalistic style.

It's always good to read the reactions of visitors to a new country and culture. They see things in a naive, innocent way that gives some clarity. Ms Batuman does that well enough. But the whole doesn't amount to very much. We gain no new insights into Russian literature or culture and not a great deal about Ms Batuman herself. ( )

I love Russian literature and was drawn to the concept of the book, and indeed the parts of this book that relate to classic 19th century Russian literature were interesting to me. An example of this was Batuman’s visit to the International Tolstoy Conference and how she weaved in stories about the end of Tolstoy’s life as well as his relationship with Chekhov. She also has a funny way of relating stories of her travel adventures. There is a little too much about her summer in Samarkand, Uzbekistan (spread over three of the seven chapters), her Turkish heritage, and Stanford intelligentsia for my tastes though.

Quotes:
On secrecy and the double life, from Babel:
“I especially remembered the passage about how everyone has two lives – one open and visible, full of work, convention, responsibilities, jokes, and the other ‘running its course in secret’ – and how easy it is for circumstances to line up so that everything you hold most important, interesting, and meaningful is somehow in the second life, the secret one.”

On writing:
“I remembered then the puritanical culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of ‘craft’. I realized that I would greatly prefer to think of literature as a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft. What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning? All it had were its negative dictates: ‘Show, don’t tell’; ‘Murder your darlings’, ‘Omit needless words.’ As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits – of omitting needless words.” ( )