The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman.
Title: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.
Author: Elif Batuman.
Genre: Non-fiction, literary criticism, linguistics, books, Russian lit, autobiography, travel log.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: February 16th, 2010.
Summary: Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student are some of the themes Batuman explores in the book. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, she searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence--including her own.
My rating: 8/10
♥ Anna Karenina was a perfect book, with an otherworldly perfection: unthinkable, monolithic, occupying a supercharged gray zone between nature and culture. How had any human being ever managed to write something simultaneously so big and so small - so serious and so light - so strange and so natural? The heroine didn't turn up until chapter 18, and the book went on for nineteen more chapters after her death, and Anna's lover and her husband had the same first name (Alexei). Anna's maid and daughter were both called Anna, and Anna's son and Levin's half brother were both Sergei. The repetition of names struck me as remarkable, surprising, and true to life.
♥ In fact I had no historical consciousness in those days, and no interest in acquiring one. It struck me as narrow-minded to privilege historical events, simply because things happened to have worked out that way. Why be a slave to the arbitrary truth? I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years - it took the experience of lived time - to realize that they really are the same thing.
♥ ...as for Raisa, the elderly pensioner with whom I was living, she only turned on the news when it was about the Lewinsky scandal. "I don't watch our news - it's so dark. It leaves you feeling bad."
"Monica Lewinsky leaves me feeling bad, too," I said.
Raisa shrugged. "For you in America, it's a big drama, but for us, it's just funny. Your Clinton is a young, healthy, good-looking man! Where's the misfortune? Look at our half-dead Yeltsin... if we found out Boris Nikolaevich was sleeping with a young girl, we would declare a national holiday."
♥ Some Eastern scholars believe that Romeo and Juliet was informed by a Latin translation of Layli and Majnun. How else to explain all the shared features: star-crossed lovers from feuding families, heroes who make journeys into exile, poetic orations over heroines' corpses? Shakespeare scholars object that Shakespeare couldn't possibly have read Layli and Majnun in any language, that his sources are known to have been French and Italian - and that, as for unhappy families, star-crossed lovers, and exiled heroes, they are simply universal.
♥ ..I became aware of a deep flaw in my understanding of the world and human knowledge. I had previously thought of knowledge as a network of connections that somehow preserved and safeguarded the memory of what they were connecting. But of course it was only people who remembered things; words and ideas themselves had no memory. The Uzbek language truly was related to both Turkish and Russian, by either genetic origin or secondary contract... but that didn't make it a reconciliation between the two. When you studied Uzbek, you weren't learning history or a story; all you were learning was a collection of words. And the larger implication was that no geographic location, no foreign language, no preexisting entity at all would ever reconcile "who" you were with "what" you were, or where you came from with what you liked.
♥ If I didn't resist the circumstances that pushed me to Uzbekistan that summer, it was because I believed that out-of-the-way places and literatures are never wasted on writers.
♥ Among Chekhov's stories, "The Black Monk" is notable for its Gothic overtones, its clinically accurate picture of megalomania, and the number and diversity of its critical interpretations. Badgered by readers to reveal its true relevance to his soul, Chekhov explained that the story had been inspired by a dream in which he saw a black monk moving toward him through the whirlwind. Why is it that no consciously invented stories ever point beyond themselves as multifariously as dreams?
♥ Now the spaceship is poised for takeoff, the Sibyls look down from the ceiling, and the black monk shimmers briefly in the air, before dematerializing and reappearing somewhere else. Martians are transporting the ice palace to Saturn, for it to take its place among Ulughbek's 1,1018 stars. They're hoping it will teach them to understand adverbs. Somewhere even further away, the beast waits in its thicket, watching the snow pile soundlessly on the hillside. Now the blank monk is calling me - he says it's time to go, time to start collecting the ashes. This is the kind of work that will kill you. But I'll have you know, DJ Spinoza, that I haven't given up. If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.