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    The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
    Unavailable
    The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
    Unavailable
    The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
    Audiobook9 hours

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

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    Jacket Illustration © 2017 Roz Chast 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 14, 2017
    ISBN9781524781583
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Possessed

    3.5/5

    199 ratings26 reviews

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    • 1/5
      I had such high hopes for this book, but I couldn't enjoy it. I read the first two chapters carefully, but after that I just skimmed through it, hoping it would get better. The author has an unfortunate habit of dismissing anything she isn't personally interested in as completely useless to the entire world, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
    • 3/5
      Clever book. Travel plus lit crit. Russian, mostly 19th century. Recommend. (Kindle.)
    • 3/5
      Batuman's experiences as a student in Samarkand are excellently presented, and much of the rest of the book is fascinating. I don't think the subtitle quite captures what she was after. I'll be more interested in the sequel, if and when there is one.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Russian lit will never read the same for me after this one!
    • 4/5
      Hilarious AND dropped some science on me about literary theory and Russians. I wonder / am concerned, in a fairly bougie way, about what her nearish and dearish think of how she's written about them--though she's always fair, I think, just enviably personal.
    • 5/5
      Worth the read even for the description of the people who attend Russian Literature conferences. Fabulous, and one of those books which send you into a whole new look at a field of literature. I plan a long wallow, myself, but will wait for summer as so much writing from Russia talks about the cold...
    • 3/5
      Batuman is clearly very intelligent and has a great eye for the absurd, but unfortunately the essays end up being too random and shapeless to make much of an impact. There are many good moments lost in the muddle. It's probably best to read her in small doses.
    • 5/5
      I highly recommend this book. It's more of a humorous travel book and memoir than a review of Russian literature. But Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and a host of other eccentrics are in here, too.
    • 5/5
      A personal and literary memoire by a six-foot tall, first generation Turkish American woman with a pellucid writing style and a delightful sense of humor. As described in the second part of the title, it's about her years in graduate school studying Russian literature, and about the literature itself. A whole lot more gets included, however, including creative writing schools, life in Samarkand, and some very strange people. Before she committed herself to graduate school, Ms. Batuman tells us, her real focus was writing a novel. but what she ended up with was "a huge non-novel". That could suggest discursiveness, and the memoire is certainly discursive -- it wanders around a wide range of subjects, which sometimes seem to show up simply because they interested Ms. Batuman. Given her keen eye and delightful style, this is fine with me, but some readers may prefer something more structured. In any event, we are likely to hear much more of Ms. Batuman, and I look forward to doing so.
    • 3/5
      Batuman spins a memoir out of not very much but her level, humorous tone easily keeps one interested and engaged, even without wanting to immerse oneself in the Russian literary canon quite so intimately. Her account of summer in Samarkand is convincing, and nicely self-deprecating, and makes one itch to be back in the gap year-ish mode of the transient abroad. The tale of the house of ice reconstruction in St Petersburg is intriguing, and her spirited attempt to contrive a new Tolstoy conspiracy theory, although itself barely credible, is great fun.
    • 4/5
      This is an unusual book, and it is different than I thought it would be (I picked it up after hearing the author interviewed on public radio). It's less about Russian books than it is about the author's adventures as a graduate student in comparative literature. Still, it's an engaging read.
    • 3/5
      Many have reviewed this book already, so below are my ramblings.My thoughts are is that I liked the humor and the writing is engaging. It certainly left me with wanting to read Russian authors (which I have done little of as of yet). The book does veer off on several tangents, but I recall reading a passage near the end of the book that Elif had many things she wanted to write about, but needed a venue, thus she came up with this book of what could be considered connected essays.It is worth the read!
    • 3/5
      Very uneven set of essays. Some hilarious, some beautiful/tragic/insightful about literature, some downright boring. Such is life. Read at your own discretion.
    • 4/5
      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"



    • 1/5
      More of a vanity piece about the author rather than anything else. The biline "Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them" would probably rather be better replaced with "adventures I went on while getting travel grant money to connect what I saw or ate or read today to Russian lit".
    • 4/5
      This is the first thing I've read of Elif Batuman's. Still, I'd imagine that anything she writes, regardless of subject matter, would be witty, interesting, and resemble a New Yorker article. Summer in Samarkand was the best.
    • 1/5
      I had such high hopes for this book, but I couldn't enjoy it. I read the first two chapters carefully, but after that I just skimmed through it, hoping it would get better. The author has an unfortunate habit of dismissing anything she isn't personally interested in as completely useless to the entire world, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
    • 4/5
      I've known people like Elif Batuman--brilliant people who can't reply to the question "How are you today?" without a.) quoting literature, and then b.) quoting some obscure but relevant work of critical theory (and then maybe c.) adding an interesting bit of historical trivia, just for fun). It can take awhile to realize that, for this kind of person, that is actually how they feel--they've answered your question, you just might have to work a little harder to translate it into an "I'm fine" or an "I've been better." The Possessed is a book by, about, and for this kind of person, and for those of us who enjoy following them down their twisty, sometimes obsessive, often wise and utterly delightful paths. (I also feel like Batuman wins bonus points for making me want to re-read Pushkin--I didn't think that could happen, but This Kind of Person is notoriously persuasive...)
    • 5/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Regular readers know that I've become a big fan recently of the so-called "NPR-worthy" book; and by that I mean a nonfiction title that combines the research of academia with the quirkiness and readability of the beach-and-airport crowd, delivering a lively but thought-provoking manuscript by the end that becomes the darling of "Fresh Air" and "Charlie Rose" aficionados. For example, see the nearly perfect The Possessed by Elif Batuman, which starts with the dry facts of the Turkish-American author being a comparative-lit doctorate trained at Harvard and Stanford and with a soft spot for Russian novels, but then explodes from there into a winding trek full of digressions and all kinds of fascinating anecdotes, as she shows how her much more straitlaced writing in the past for The New Yorker and Harper's has led her to all kinds of interesting situations (from an academic conference at Leo Tolstoy's old estate to attempting to spend the night in a life-sized ice castle in the middle of St. Petersburg), and how these experiences were filled with bizarre characters, ivory-tower pissing contests, and all kinds of other unforgettable details. As such, then, this is partly a well-done primer on Russian literature, partly a Lonely-Planet-style travelogue about the former Soviet republics of southwest Asia, partly a confessional journal about academia and growing up in an immigrant family, and partly a gonzo-journalism look at the kinds of people who flock to Russian literature in the first place. It's a beguiling combination of elements, hard to explain but easy to love, and I find it here at the end of the year just squeaking in on time to CCLaP's best-of list for 2010. It comes highly recommended, not just for the book itself but in the hopes that it'll inspire other 21st-century essayists to put out books that are similar in nature.Out of 10: 9.6
    • 3/5
      This was a very fun book, especially as it mirrors my experiences in Grad School quite well (not in specifics, but in the general attitudes and projects she describes). I especially liked the story about the Ice House.
    • 4/5
      The line about the answers being found in stories and literature resonates with me. How I wish everyone had that message. I really loved this book!
    • 4/5
      If you've never spent time in a graduate seminar on the history of the Russian language studiously avoiding the eyes of your fellow students as the professor repeatedly refers to "The Great Vowel Movement," or never been called upon to discuss the significance of "The Great Mowing Scene" in Anna Karenina, you may not enjoy this smart and funny book quite as much as I did, but there is much in it that is interesting even for those not fully conversant with the works of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Batuman is at her best when describing her personal experiences with the absurdities of the academic world and the real-life characters she encounters at home and abroad while pursuing an advanced degree in comparative literature. Her attempts at integrating literary theory and philosophy into the accounts of her adventures make for somewhat heavier going; I was reminded that the lasting value of my own literary studies has turned out to lie as much in the places I traveled to and the people I met as in the books that I read (though heaven knows, there were enough of them!). Another lasting benefit -- I stand ready to supply the name of Vronsky's horse to anyone who finds themselves momentarily at a loss in cocktail-party conversation...
    • 3/5
      The first third touched me, it revealed that sweetened affinity with my nerdy soul. The latter bits were stillborn excerpts from travel pieces lost on the rocks. It was devoured swiftly, and, at least initially, with savor.
    • 2/5
      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.”
    • 5/5
      I was really blown away by this book, despite hearing nothing but praise when it came out. Batuman's essays are about the experience of studying Russian literature—both in the literature and in the studying. She attends academic conferences filled with people who would easily substitute for characters in the books, who squabble about the silliest things.

      On top of this amazing subject, Batuman brings her own incredible skills as a writer. She is so good that the challenges of writing disappear, and you're able to enjoy what's going on. I feel like even this praise is short-changing her, as the quality of her writing was what shocked me most about the book, even having read her stuff in other venues.

      And in the end, it all catalyzes into the titular essay of the book: a deep-dive into Dostoevsky and study of how his book Demons (or literally translated as "The Possessed") works. It is stunningly good.