GO EAST, YOUNG WOMAN

When reading Elif Batuman’s "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them", her debut book of essays, it’s easy to feel as though you are witnessing a love affair. “Half understanding” is how she describes her infatuation with Russian literature. She adores the way reading Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, et al, involves oscillating between visceral resonance and terrified confusion. The result is an intellectual thrill—both for her and her readers. Batuman’s “fascination with Russianness” began casually. As a child, a first-generation Turkish-American in New Jersey, she found herself bewildered by the eccentric mannerisms of her Russian piano teacher. Mystification becomes bewitchment after she discovers an old copy of "Anna Karenina" as a teenager at her grandmother’s apartment in Ankara. “How had any human being ever managed to write something simultaneously so big and so small—so serious and so light—so strange and so natural?” What Batuman loved about the novel is what she would later love about Russian literature in general: these seemingly irreconcilable paradoxes. For her "Anna Karenina" is “a prefect book, with an otherworldly perfection; unthinkable, monolithic, occupying a supercharged grey zone between nature and culture.” Indeed, the book's contrast echo Russia itself, that sprawling country peppered with weird little villages. Elif Batuman is a great traveller. With an ear for odd idioms and an eye for colour, she has a keen sense of the delightful detail. An endearing guide—droll, funny, introspective and self-deprecating—she deals affectionately with the absurd. Her essays are rooted in her years at Stanford University, where she earned her PhD in comparative literature, devised a controversial theory of Tolstoy’s death and organised a conference on Isaac Babel. We then follow her from the rolling hills of Palo Alto to the chaos of Samarkand in her quest to learn "Old Uzbek", an Altaic language she hoped would fuse her Turkish background with her Russian fascination. This trip—both academic and personal—informs the rest of these essays. The result is an impressive and often hilarious balance of travelogue, memoir and literary theory. We learn of her daily hardship in Samarkand, living with her impoverished “hostmother” and studying with a professor who resembled an “anthropomorphic piece of furniture in a Disney movie”. We discover that before Genghis Khan invaded Samarkand, “scholars were drinking tea from special porcelain teacups that rang different musical notes when you tapped them with a spoon”. She gazes both outward and inward. In the wake of a romantic break-up, she asks, “What is it you love, when you’re in love?” She applies the same scrutiny to her romance with Russian literature. “[L]ove is a rare and valuable thing, and you don’t get to choose its object. You just go around hung up on all the least convenient things—and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that’s the wonderful gift right there.” Access to Batuman’s passions is a privilege, inspiring and unforgettable. "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Elif Batuman, out now ~ ALICE GREGORY