The Possessed, Elif Batuman
The Possessed, Elif Batuman
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The Possessed
Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Author: Elif Batuman

Narrator: Elif Batuman

Unabridged: 9 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 03/14/2017


Synopsis

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 

About The Author

Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of 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. The Idiot is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.


Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on March 18, 2025

is there any better feeling than discovering a book you didn't know about from one of your favorite authors? all the selin-heads know that the protagonist of the idiot and either/or bears striking similarity to their author, which makes this book, about elif batuman's postgrad discovery of her love o......more

Goodreads review by David on March 06, 2011

There are flashes of charm in this book, counterbalanced by some very tedious patches indeed. Elif Batuman is apparently well-connected enough to have Roz Chast do the artwork for the book cover. She also seems to have a remarkable talent for self-promotion. This book has generated a considerable am......more

Goodreads review by Ines on January 31, 2020

What a strange and particular reading, I read it in a few days, not because it had something very special, I was more than curious to read the experiences lived by Elif in the various Russian places she visited. Yes, this PhD student is very good at making us believe this introspection of books, whic......more

Goodreads review by Katia on December 27, 2019

It is a mixture of personal experience including PhD studying and various related travel assignments with the analysis of the grandees of Russian literature. Babel, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky all take turns alongside with more obscure Lazhechnikov. I do not think everyone will enjoy i......more

Goodreads review by Claire on June 12, 2022

As a fan of The Idiot and Either/Or, I enjoyed spending more time in Elif Batuman’s brain, even if I found this early book of hers to be a somewhat uneven read. The actual analysis/contemplation of the Russian authors and texts here was a bit dense for me (as someone who has not read much Russian li......more