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

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year

From the author of Either/Or and The Idiot, Elif Batuman's The Possessed presents the true but unlikely stories of lives devoted--Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully!--to the Russian Classics.

No one who read 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.

Author: Elif Batuman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 02/16/2010
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.59lbs
Size: 8.22h x 5.60w x 0.81d
ISBN: 9780374532185


Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Finalist
Award: Literary Award - Runner-Up


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/15/2009 pg. 57
Publishers Weekly 11/02/2009 pg. 43
Library Journal 11/15/2009 pg. 64
Booklist 02/15/2010 pg. 21
New York Times Book Review 03/21/2010 pg. 13
New York Times Book Review 03/28/2010 pg. 20
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/05/2010 pg. 30
Entertainment Weekly 01/07/2011 pg. 74
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/08/2010 pg. 28

About the Author
Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of the novels Either/Or, The Idiot, and the nonfiction book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.