The Possessed

In Bukhara we visited the emir’s palace, which was overrun by peacocks.

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.

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

a personage whose refrigerator-like build, rubbery face, and heavy eyelids brought to mind some anthropomorphic piece of furniture in a Disney movie.

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.

Gulchekhra, our “host mother”—they really called her that, as if we were tapeworms—came outside.

each writer in the history of literature is a qaqnus: he spends his whole life gathering firewood with which to burn up the previous generation of writers.

Among the stories we read in that class, Chekhov’s “Lady with Lapdog” moved me much more deeply. I especially remember the passage about how everyone has two lives—one open and visible, full of work, convention, responsibilities, jokes, and the other “running its course in secret”—and how easy it is for circumstances to line up so that everything y

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