ELIF BATUMAN
The Possessed
ELIF BATUMAN was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey. She now lives in San Francisco. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She teaches at Stanford University.
The Possessed
The Possessed
ADVENTURES WITH RUSSIAN BOOKS
AND THE PEOPLE WHO READ THEM
Elif Batuman
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX NEW YORK
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2010 by Elif Batuman
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2010
Some of these essays have appeared, in slightly different form, in Harper’s Magazine, n+1, and The New Yorker.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Batuman, Elif, 1977–
The possessed : adventures with Russian books and the people who read them / Elif Batuman. —1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-53218-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Russian literature—Appreciation. I. Title.
PG2986 .
B33 2010
891. 7'09—dc22
2009025416
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
INTRODUCTION
BABEL IN CALIFORNIA
SUMMER IN SAMARKAND
WHO KILLED TOLSTOY
SUMMER IN SAMARKAND (CONTINUED)
THE HOUSE OF ICE
SUMMER IN SAMARKAND (CONCLUSION)
THE POSSESSED
Works Consulted
The Possessed
Introduction
In Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, a young man named Hans Castorp arrives at a Swiss sanatorium to visit his tubercular cousin for three weeks. Although Castorp himself does not have tuberculosis, he somehow ends up staying in that sanatorium for seven years. The plot of The Magic Mountain mirrors the history of its composition: Mann set out to write a short story, but ended up producing a 1,200-page novel. Despite the novel’s complexity, its central question is very simple: How does someone who doesn’t actually have tuberculosis end up spending seven years at a tuberculosis sanatorium? I often ask myself a similar question: How does someone with no real academic aspirations end up spending seven years in suburban California studying the form of the Russian novel?
In The Magic Mountain, it all happens because of love. While visiting his cousin, Castorp becomes infatuated with another patient: the estranged wife of a Russian officer. Her high cheekbones and her gray-blue “Kirghiz-shaped eyes” recall to him a childhood fascination with Slavicness—specifically, with an idolized older boy at school, from whom the hero once, in the happiest moment of his life, borrowed a pencil. The Russian lady’s eyes, in particular, “amazingly and frighteningly resemble” those of this schoolboy; indeed, Mann emends, “ ‘resembled’ was not the right word—they were the same eyes. ” Under their mesmerizing influence, Castorp is seized by a passion to learn about samovars, Cossacks, and the Russian language, colorfully characterized by Mann as “the muddy, barbaric, boneless tongue from the East. ” One afternoon, Castorp attends a lecture titled “Love as a Pathogenic Force,” in which the sanatorium psychoanalyst diagnoses his entire audience as so many victims of love: “Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed. ” Castorp recognizes the truth of this lecture. He ends up so terribly in love with the married Russian woman that he develops a fever and appears to have a damp spot on one of his lungs. This real or imagined damp spot, combined with the hope of glimpsing his beloved at mealtimes, is what keeps him on the Magic Mountain.
