Elif Batuman: The Possessed. Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 296 pp.
The book begins with a bang-up first 80 or so pages, and that initial spark should provide enough momentum to propel most readers to the end, though by the final chapter we do seem to be coasting. I particularly liked Chapter One, “Babel in California,” about an international conference devoted to the author of Red Cavalry. Here Batuman’s delightfully dry sense of humor is on full display. Academic conferences in her view are not deadly boring affairs that drag on and on, but rather a series of comic catastrophes and embarrassments, familiar to anyone who has read David Lodge’s Changing Places or Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. Batuman, who exudes disdain for famous scholars who deliver papers that don’t measure up, has a wonderful cast of characters to work with here – backstabbing Stanford and Berkeley professors, a hapless German researcher, a righteous English translator and publisher, plus a collection of graduate students who are to varying degrees either all-knowing or humorless or feckless. One comes away with an enhanced appreciation for the archive at the Hoover Institute, which supplied materials for the conference exhibition, and somewhat diminished respect for some of the archivists who work there.
There is no indication that Batuman is familiar with Jonathan Brent’s Inside the Stalin Archives, published two years before her book, but it is instructive to read Brent’s chapter “The Secret Death of Isaac Babel” in conjunction with hers. They share at least one character – Antonina Pirozhkova, Babel’s daughter – plus a discussion of the exact same passage from his diary. Compare their differing translations of his 1920 encounter with the downed American pilot Frank Mosher: On meeting him, did Babel rhapsodize, “O, the scent of Europe, coffee, civilization,” (Batuman, pg. 44), or “Ah, but all at once – the smell of Europe, its cafés, civilization…” (so says the translation used by Brent, pg. 177)? “Scent” vs. “smell” may be a matter of interpretation, but “coffee” vs. “café” is a matter of fact that could be checked. In the end, my nod goes to Batuman for developing the point that “Frank Mosher” was really the alias for Merian Cooper, who later went on to create the character (and produce the movie) of “King Kong.”
After this wonderful opening, though, the book takes an unexpected turn with its extended account of a summer the author spent in Samarkand. This is so long that it is split up into three separate, interspersed chapters. It is true that in Batuman’s hands, Samarkand appears to be a city populated solely by colorful eccentrics, but even so there is perhaps rather more information than one might want on this ancient town and on the Uzbek language and its relationship to Turkish. While she may have believed that “out-of-the-way places and literatures are never wasted on writers,” it’s also true that “Uzbekistan was more like a worse-off Turkey, with an even more depressing national literature.” (pp. 247, 236) Not that these are uninteresting topics (see her passage on why learning Old Uzbek is like reading Borges), but all of this would feel more at home in a travelogue rather than a book about Russian books and the people who read them.
The chapter on a Tolstoy conference at Yasnaya Polyana recaptures some of the spirit of the opening pages, particularly the lost-luggage saga. As an eighteenth-centuryist, I was greatly interested in the chapter on Empress Anna; in most histories of Russia, the Greats (Peter and Catherine) soak up all the attention, and not much is left over for the likes of Anna (Peter’s niece) and later Elizabeth, who, taken together, did rule for two decades. Batuman perceptively describes Anna’s bizarre ice house built on the frozen Neva River in 1740 (Anna seems to have inherited her uncle’s propensity for the extreme), and its tame recreation in the winter of 2006.
The final chapter, on The Possessed and Batuman’s circle of fellow grad students who seem bent on recreating in their own lives the relationship between Stavrogin and his disciples, was somehow dissatisfying. Maybe the spirit of Dostoyevsky was in the air, but for whatever reason, instead of amusing mishaps we get brooding self-absorption. First we are treated to a plot summary of Dostoyevsky’s novel, which is necessary for those of us who haven’t read it since high school. Then there is a dose of Girardian literary theory. In the final pages a new book is repeatedly invoked, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, which appears to have more than passing significance, though Batuman never makes clear just what this significance is. We learn neither the author’s name, Eugene Ostashevsky, nor the fact that – despite the title – this is a volume of contemporary surrealist poetry. Are these facts too well known to need disclosure?
On the whole, while Batuman writes well (it’s not every graduate student who gets published by The New Yorker and Harper’s after all), she is less entertaining when writing about books than about the people who read them. Though in both cases she meets a high standard, with the former we sense a bit too acutely the clever graduate student scoring points. With the latter, there is more warmth and individual observation.
Historical footnote: At Poltava, it wasn’t Charles XIII who suffered devastating defeat; as every schoolboy knows, it was the maniacal Charles XII. (pg. 204)
Finally a tip of the hat to my colleague Mark Teeter, whose review first alerted me to this book. His column “Extreme English” (online at themoscownews.com) is well worth checking out. (Update: The Moscow News discontinued publication in 2014, its website announcing on March 14 of that year: “This channel frozen until further notice.”)
© Hamilton Beck
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