Newark Star-Ledger
March 7, 2010
In her delightful
debut nonfiction book, “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the
People Who Read Them” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15 paperback), writer Elif
Batuman explores the eccentrics, the obsessives and the romantics like herself
who study the dark works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pushkin.
In
2001, Batuman was a recent college grad struggling to finish a novel. A broken
arm and several other occurrences led her to enter a doctoral program in
comparative literature at Stanford University, where Batuman became immersed in
the melancholy world of Russian studies. Mixing hilarious personal stories with
astute observations on the world of academia, Batuman chronicles a California
symposium on the murdered writer Isaac Babel, whose elderly daughters are
fighting tooth and nail; a conference at Tolsoy’s farm in Russia filled with
professors and lunatics; and a trip to an ice palace in St. Petersburg. Batuman
recounts the comic summer she spent in Uzbekistan, as well as the psychodrama
of graduate students at Stanford acting out the tortured love stories in
Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed.”
Batuman,
32, was raised in New Jersey. She earned her doctorate in comparative
literature at Stanford, where she teaches. She spoke with freelance writer
Dylan Foley by telephone from her home in San Francisco.
Q.
Could you tell us what draws people into studying Russian language and
literature?
A.
By the time I got to college, the Cold War was basically over. Even for my
generation, the appeal was that Russia was the only place in the world that was
exactly like America, but everything was opposite and everything was secret.
The difficulty of the language attracts ambitious people, but also people who
are attracted to things that will always be hard and challenge them.
As
for the literature, the darkness and depressing nature is a big part of it. I
grew up in Florham Park and Summit. In high school, my friends and I were
always phenomenally depressed, even though we weren’t Russian. There was
something about “The Three Sisters,” where the sisters were trapped: “Oh,
someday, I am going to go to Moscow.” (In that Chekov play,) there was
something very familiar to me about growing up in the suburbs. It was a very
strange place, where nothing was accessible. New York was very close, but it
was also somewhere else.
Q.
You won a grant to study the Uzbek language in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, but found
out the language wouldn’t help your academic career. You were told if you
rejected the grant, you would never get another one, so you and your soon-to-be
ex-boyfriend went to Uzbekistan for a summer. Why?
A.
There is a Henry James line, “You should never regret a generous error.” That
has been a policy of mine. When in doubt, it is better to do the less
conservative thing and to err on the side of the more colorful, possibly
terrible mistake. That comes from thinking of yourself as a writer.
Even
if I have a completely horrible time, I will have some material I wouldn’t have
had otherwise.
The
mid-20s is also such a bad time in your life. You will probably be depressed
and miserable anyway. If you are in a breakup, you might as well go all the way
and spend the summer in Samarkand, with no air-conditioning, learning a
language you have no use for. At least it adds some romance to a depressing
situation.
Q.
Led by a charismatic Croatian grad student, you and a small group studied
Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed” and accidentally mimicked the unhealthy love
triangles in the book. What happened?
A.
We were all very young, but we were all graduate students and used to analyzing
and overanalyzing everything. The creepy quality was how we all played out our
roles, even though they were potentially very damaging, and even though we knew
better and knew what was happening.
