I wrote before of my hunger for Elif Batuman's chronicle of the lovers of Russian literature, those books of weird dark lace. Laura Miller's review of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them only exacerbates it. Miller admits straight off that she doesn't count herself as among those who especially love the writers with names that firespit off the tongue (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenov, Chekhov). Yet she is immediately "bewitched" by Batuman's project, which she describes as "hilarious and charming."
The fact that I could never quite understand what was going on put me off of Russian novels; for Batuman, it's a prime attraction. Her "fascination with Russianness" dates back to her early youth when, as a first-generation Turkish-American from New Jersey, she took violin lessons from a Russian named Maxim. His behavior baffled her, particularly the period during which he exhaustively coached her for a juried examination, repeatedly insisting, "We have to be very well prepared because we do not know who is on this jury." When she turned up for the exam, she found the panel headed up by "not some unknown judge, but Maxim himself."
Captivated, Batuman developed an appetite for what she calls "mystifications." "What I used to enjoy in poetry," she writes, "was precisely the feeling of only half understanding." Most essayists would probably approach the cognitive netherland of semi-communication as a sad and serious dilemma, but for Batuman it's a kind of heaven, lush with comic possibility. Russians, with their unfathomable and melodramatic behavior, strike her as both awe-inspiring and amusing.
Review copy, where are you?
Image Credit: Salon
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