The Possessed

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them is a literary travel memoir by Elif Batuman about a life of devotion to Russian classics. The memoir is written as a series of essays, many of which take place in Russia and Eastern Europe, exploring the strange lives of people committed to the reading and study of Russian classics, and the world in which these books were composed. The book was launched from an essay about people whose lives converge at a conference about the great writer Isaac Babel and continues on to cover subjects such as ice palaces, murder mystery, and Old Uzbek language.

The overall theme of The Possessed is one of love and its strange manifestations – Batuman reflects on her own strange obsession as a graduate student of Russian literature with her chosen subject, and the many wandering paths she takes following the footsteps of her favorite, long-dead writers, trying to uncover secrets lost to history about their minds and actions. She writes similarly about her uncle, who spent the last years of his life living in a garden shed, composing a book about spiders and string theory, and the couple she lived with briefly in Moscow, a mathematician and a biologist, one of whom was fired from her post at the Academy of Sciences and spent all night playing Super Mario on a Nintendo Gameboy.

These stories take many divergent paths. In the first essay, Babel in California, Batuman writes about a conference at Stanford about the writer Isaac Babel, with a number of comic interludes depicting the few remaining relatives of Babel, whom Batuman manages to lose at the San Francisco airport. The essay also talks about Babel's influence on King Kong, and other oddities, which portray the strange and nuanced world of Eastern European literature. The climax of the essay comes when Babel's first and second wives go head to head at the dinner table, with one shouting at the other, “That old witch will bury us all."



In other essays, Batuman writes about her own travels in St. Petersburg, Switzerland, and elsewhere, tracing the lives of famous Russian authors. Part of Batuman's work is critical, as she engages in fresh new writings on some of her favorite authors as she walks in their shoes. She writes about Pushkin, for example, as she traces his journeys through the Caucasus. She investigates a possible murder on Tolstoy's estate while writing about Tolstoy's life and literature. Her interest, in particular, is in the weird; this is clear as she writes about the reproduction of an eighteenth-century ice palace, which was recreated as a model of the palace of Anna Ivanovna. Batuman traveled to St. Petersburg on a journalistic assignment to see the palace, where she wondered about its purpose. It was beautiful, a work of art, but also a haunted house, a fairy tale, a science experiment, a “flood momentarily checked.” Batuman is fascinated by the symbolism of the palace, which is both whimsy and the constrictions of marriage. It is a demonstration of human vanity and waste, of power and empire.

In the final essay in the memoir, Batuman writes about her experience at Stanford, comparing her fellow graduate students and their culture to Dostoevsky's novel Demons, which is translated into English as The Possessed. This essay, in which Batuman talks about the strange power of obsession, comes to a head when she reveals that one of her fellow graduate students gave away everything he owned to move to Zagreb, where he studied theology and then moved to an island monastery thousands of miles from the place where he and Batuman met.

Elif Batuman is an author, journalist, and academic from New York City. She has written two books, The Possessed, and a novel called The Idiot, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Batuman has written extensively for The New Yorker, as well as The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and Harper's. She has received a Whiting Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, among other honors. Batuman received a degree in comparative literature from Stanford and studied the Uzbek language in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. She was also a writer-in-residence in Istanbul from 2010-2013.