Elif Batuman’s work has appeared in n+1, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 2010. Her first book, The Possessed (2010), a collection of comic interconnected essays about the pursuit of Russian literature, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her second book, The Idiot, was published by Penguin Press in 2017. She has been a writer in residence at Koç University in Istanbul, a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College, and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, and a Whiting Award in Nonfiction.
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The PossessedAdventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
“The American girl will judge the leg contest!” they announced. I was still hoping that I had misunderstood them, even as German techno music was turned on and all the boys in the camp, ages eight to fourteen, were paraded out behind a screen that hid their bodies from the waist up; identifying numbers had been pinned to their shorts. I was given a clipboard with a form on which to rate their legs on a scale from one to ten. Gripped by panic, I stared at the clipboard. Nothing in either my life experience or my studies had prepared me to judge an adolescent boys’ leg contest. Finally the English teacher, who appeared to understand my predicament, whispered to me some scores of her own devising, and I wrote them on the form as if I had thought of them myself.
The Possessed:Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them -
The PossessedAdventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Chekhov was nine years old when War and Peace was published. He admired Tolstoy tremendously and longed to meet him; at the same time, the prospect of this meeting filled him with such alarm that he once ran out of a bathhouse in Moscow when he learned that Tolstoy was also there. Chekhov did not want to meet Tolstoy in the bath, but this apparently was his inescapable destiny. When at last he worked up the nerve to go to Yasnaya Polyana, Chekhov arrived at the exact moment when Tolstoy was headed to the stream for his daily ablutions. Tolstoy insisted that Chekhov join him; Chekhov later recalled that, as he and Tolstoy sat naked in the chin-deep water, Tolstoy’s beard floated majestically before him.
The Possessed:Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them -
The PossessedAdventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Today, Russians remember Empress Anna primarily for her love of jesters, dwarfs, and Germans, all of whom enter into her biography at an early point. In 1710, when Anna was seventeen, her uncle Peter the Great arranged her marriage to Duke Friedrich Wilhelm, the German ruler of the small duchy of Courland: a strategic alliance, intended to bolster Russia’s support of Courland against its big neighbors, Prussia and Poland. At the wedding banquet, the tsar cut open two pies with his dagger. A splendidly dressed dwarf jumped out of each pie and together they danced a minuet on the table. The next day, Peter treated his guests to a second wedding: that of his favorite dwarf, attended by forty-two other dwarfs from all corners of the empire. Some foreign guests saw a certain symmetry in the double wedding, one between two miniature people, the other between two pawns in the great game of European politics.
The Possessed:Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
“Hilarious, wide-ranging, erudite, and memorable, The Possessed is a sui generis feast for the mind and the fancy, ants and all. And, unlikely though this may sound, by the time you’ve reached the end, you just may wish that you, like the author, had fallen down the rabbit hole of comp lit grad school. Batuman’s exaltations of Russian literature could have ended up in scholarly treatises gathering dust in university stacks. Instead, she has made her subject glow with the energy of the enigma that drew her to it in the first place.” —Liesel Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review
“Batuman writes with superb wit . . . There’s something melancholy, as well as beautiful, in using literature not just to illuminate experience but actually to create it. Batuman’s writing waltzes in a space in which books and life reflect each other. The effect is dizzying sometimes, and maybe that’s one of her points; her roving sensibility deliriously encompasses many styles and moods. If Susan Sontag had coupled with Buster Keaton, their prodigiously gifted love child might have written this book.” —Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times Book Review [on The Possessed]
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The Whiting selection committee was delighted that Ms. Batuman had resisted the temptation to write a conventional memoir, instead taking a more slant approach in these deft, antic essays. “She doesn’t take herself too seriously, but she takes her enterprise completely seriously, even while remaining funny about it. She is sly, charming, erudite. The work takes utterly unexpected turns. Who would have believed the lives of contemporary graduate students could match the models of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in obsessiveness, wanderlust, and belief in the power of literature to transform the world?”