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Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
February 2010
On Sale: February 16, 2010
304 pages
ISBN: 0374532184
EAN: 9780374532185
Paperback
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Fiction
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.
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