The Possessed

I learned that, no matter how hard you tried to think about Chekhov here, you kept falling over Tolstoy. There was no way around it, and in fact the thing seemed to have been fated before they were born.

Turkish people thought that every language was close to our Turkish language. Many times I had been told that Hungarian was related to Turkish, that the Hungarians and Turks descended from the same Altaic peoples, that Attila the Hun was Turkish, and so on. When I went to Hungary, however, I discovered that Hungarians do not share these beliefs at

The title of this book is borrowed from Dostoevsky’s weirdest novel, The Demons, formerly translated as The Possessed, which narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous, in certain ways, to my own experiences in graduate school.

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

Indeed, Pushkin’s cartoonish omnipresence is one of the wonderful things about Russian literary culture.

This story encapsulates the riddle of free will in human history: a realm where, as Friedrich Engels observed, free wills are constantly obstructing one another so that, inevitably, “what emerges is something that no one willed.”

I thought it was the dictate of craft that had pared many of the Best American stories to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns—like entries in a contest to identify as many concrete entities as possible, in the fewest possible words.

Tatyana and Onegin, Anna and Vronsky, Ivan and Vera: at every step, the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love appeared bound up with Russian.

Shklovsky proposes that the history of literature proceeds not in a straight line, but in a bent one, like the L-shaped path of a chess knight. The authors who influence one another are not always the ones you would expect: “the legacy is transmitted not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew.” Furthermore, literary forms themselves grow by a