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Review of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 296 pages, $15

“Besides reading, there was no place,” declares Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. For most of its history, Russia has been a place where books have seemed more real, carried more authority, than the “real” world. And, from Tsar Nikolai I’s self-assignation as Pushkin’s personal censor, to Stalin’s 2 a.m. phone call to Boris Pasternak to ask if he considered Osip Mandelstam a “master,” Russian rulers have certainly acted as if they were. Given the perennial drone about the death of literature, no wonder so many non-Russian readers continue drawing close to the Russian classics. Of these readers, Elif Batuman—a recent Stanford PhD who writes for n+1, Harper’s Magazine, and the New Yorker—is the funniest and most eloquent.

While most of the essays in Batuman’s debut, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, have appeared in earlier variants in magazines, the book’s chapters—which describe surreal adventures in Samarkand, at a Stanford Isaac Babel conference, at the annual International Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana, and in Petersburg inside a reconstruction of Empress Anna’s grotesque 1740 ice palace—revolve often around the same “characters” and always around the same theme: how the literary orders experience, and how the best literature somehow captures the disorder of experience.

When you try to follow life, she writes, “events and places succeed one another like items on a shopping list. There may be interesting and moving experiences, but one thing is guaranteed: they won’t naturally assume the shape of a wonderful book.” For Batuman, the result of this revelation is that instead of pursuing an MFA in creative writing, she opts for a literature PhD—for what better way, she reasons, is there to pursue one’s love for the wonderful books that do manage to at once shape and contain the shopping list of experience? “What if you tried study instead of imitation . . . What if you wrote a book and it was all true?”

Batuman’s genre is a symbiotic blend of memoir and literary criticism, so organically intertwined that one gets the feeling that neither memoir nor literary criticism should be written any other way. After all, a memoir that is not literary commentary would seem to live in willful ignorance of the old truth that truths are old: “There is nothing new under the sun . . . Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” (The Talmudic Rabbis stretch that last line from Ecclesiastes to suit themselves, tweaking it carnivorously: “And he who studies much will savor the taste of meat.” Much study = mixed grill!)

The Possessed is a mixed grill of much study. Its hallucinatory hilarity will be instantly and painfully recognized by anyone who has ever been possessed by books and surrounded by others likewise possessed. Here is a typical passage, about two Chinese filmmakers at the Isaac Babel conference, in which the real and the literary cannot be disentangled:

In the Chinese Red Cavalry, the screenwriter told us, Cossacks would be transformed into “barbarians from the north of China”; the Jewish narrator would be represented by a Chinese intellectual. “There are not so many differences between Jews and Chinese,” he explained. “They give their children violin lessons, and they worry about money. Lyutov will be a Chinese, but he will still have ‘spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.’” At nose, he touched his nose, and at heart, he struck his chest…. Looking at the Chinese filmmakers, I remembered Victor Shklovsky’s account of how Babel spent the whole year 1919 writing and rewriting “a story about two Chinese.” “They grew young, they aged, broke windows, beat up a woman, organized this or that”; Babel hadn’t finished with them when he joined the Red Cavalry. In the 1920 diary, “the story about the Chinese” becomes part of the propaganda that Babel relays in the pillaged shtetls: “I tell fairy tales about Bolshevism, its blossoming, the express trains, the Moscow textile mills, the universities, the free food,…and, to crown it off, my tale about the Chinese, and I enthrall all these poor tortured people.” At Stanford, we had it all: a university, free food, and, to crown it off, the Chinese.

In this mad laundry list of quotations, there is method. The passage captures how literature has the power to render the “other” comprehensible, though what is often rendered is precisely the other’s incomprehensibility. And yet, like the shattered people listening to Babel’s mysterious and unknowable “tale about the Chinese,” we seek amusement, comfort and communion in it.

The book takes its title from “Dostoevsky’s weirdest novel, The Demons, formerly translated as The Possessed, which narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous” to Batuman’s experiences in graduate school. And in many ways, this volume is an academic picaresque, its peregrinations tenderly held together by the narrator’s voice and physical presence—a lanky, Quixotic, “six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman,” with an uncanny, Kramer-shlimazl luck for landing in ridiculous situations (or stumbling onto literary material in both senses of the term).