Elif Batuman completed her PhD in comparative literature just before publishing her essay collection The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. While working towards the degree, she spent a summer abroad translating and analyzing Uzbek and Russian prose and poetry. She poses an insight on novel writing: “the novel form is about the protagonist’s struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.” The Possessed is her evidence of this argument.
The introduction begins with her simplistic writing style, her endless questions, and her deep love for literature, which I was familiar with in her two novels that I had read already. She reflects on what she has learned, but confesses that it isn’t much. Her goal is to understand the human condition, but neither writing nor studying writing truly helps her in doing so, yet feels fulfilling anyway. As she enrolls in seminars and lectures and gets acquainted with her classmates, one of the topics she studies is craft, which she argues “says nothing about the world and human meaning,” further highlighting how her search for the truth of human existence is ultimately unattainable, but which graduate school can attempt to bring her understand a bit more.
Batuman’s adventure begins at Stanford University, where a conference on the works of Russian writer Isaac Babel is taking place. She tries to locate Babel’s daughter and granddaughter in the airport, and as the search becomes more difficult, her writing gets stoically funnier. After she finds them, the conference begins.
With childlike curiosity, she becomes a magnifying glass through which the conference is judged—which presentations are arguable, and which ones fail to understand Babel’s thought process completely? Though her surveillance of the collective disdain of the scholars towards each other was amusing, I felt like a window shopper while reading it, not truly able to understand the inside jokes between the scholars and their niche subject of interest but not able to turn away either.
After the conference, Batuman goes to Samarkand, Turkey, to write travel guides for the travel agency Let’s Go. She then attends the Internal Tolstoy Conference in Moscow, in which she wears the same clothes for several days because the airport lost her suitcase; she tries to prove that Tolstoy was killed, but is unsuccessful. Afterwards, she travels to St. Petersburg to interview locals about an ice palace built in 1740 by Anna Ioannanova, who made her jester get married inside.
While studying Uzbek poetry with local professors, Batuman embarks on a thorough and astonishing history lesson on the Uzbek language: it began centuries ago as several Turkish dialects that few people were actually literate in. When the Soviet Union was conquering parts of Central Asia, they brought Russian influence to the pronunciation of Uzbek words, and it became mixed with Persian, Turkish, and Arabic grammar and capitalization rules. For several more hundreds of years, Uzbek still had no standard written or spoken orthography. Then, about a decade before The Possessed was published, Uzbekistan passed a law making Uzbek the official language instead of Russian, but with a Latin alphabet, so that “everyone who had attained literacy after 1950 now needed to relearn the alphabet.” Determined to comprehend the human condition, Batuman becomes a historian, taking the windy path through the thicket of early Turkic civilization.
In the final chapter, titled “The Possessed,” Batuman returns from her travels feeling a bit empty, like she has just woken up from a dream. She is unable to translate Uzbek poetry anymore, as though her ability to do so stayed behind as she flew back to the United States. She also feels desensitized to reading poetry in English, and her return to campus life and her doctoral requirements feels lacking.
Using the literary studies of René Girard, a French philosopher, she argues that there is “no such thing as human autonomy or authenticity,” and that “the way in which humans fulfill their desires is through contagious imitation with the purpose of being their desires.” She connects Girard’s critique to historic proto-novels: Don Quixote, for example, wants to imitate a dashing soldier with an elegant wife, which is why he projects beauty and grace upon Dulcinea, a peasant from his village, to complete his quest to be just like his favorite protagonists. He just wants to imitate someone whom he deeply resonates with. In this way, humans fulfill their desires through contagious imitation to become what they desire.
I too feel empty after having traveled with Batuman to Central Asia. The journey is supposed to matter more than the destination, but I sat in the same upholstered chair by a large bay window from start to finish. Just as she is possessed with the desire to understand prolific writers and their devout readers, I am possessed with her detective pursuit to discover the truth about human existence.
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman. New York, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, February 2010. 304 pages. $18.00, paper.
Ariana Duckett is a writer and editor based in southern California. She has been published in WORD Magazine, Vagabond City Lit, Atticus Review, and Lunch Ticket. She was the Editor-in-Chief of two magazines and a guest editor for Inlandia: A Literary Journey twice. She aspires to publish a novel someday, and roller skates in her free time.
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