My Life and Thoughts

These are some of the literary works cited in The Possessed, in chronological order by author’s year of birth.

Mir Ali Shir Nevai (Alisher Navoi) (1441–1501). Layli and Majnun (1484); Farhod and Shirin (1484); The Seven Planets (1484); The Language of Birds (1498); The Judgment of Two Languages (1499).

Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530). The Baburnama (ca. 1529).

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). Don Quixote (1605, 1615).

William Cowper (1731–1800). The Task (1785). 

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783–1842). Rome, Naples, and Florence (1826); The Red and the Black (1830); The Charterhouse of Parma (1836).

Ivan Lazhechnikov (1792–1869). The House of Ice (1835).

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Eugene Onegin (1833); “The Queen of Spades” (1834); Journey to Arzrum (1835); The Bronze Horseman (1837).

Nikolai Gogol (1809–52). Dead Souls (1842); “The Overcoat” (1842).

Ivan Goncharov (1812–1891). Oblomov (1859).

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81). The Idiot (1868–69); Demons (1872).

Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910). Anna Karenina (1875–77); The Kreutzer Sonata (1889); The Living Corpse (1900).

Henry James (1843–1916). The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Sherlock Holmes stories (1892–1927).

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). “The Black Monk” (1894); “Lady with Lapdog” (1899); Uncle Vanya (1899).

Thomas Mann (1875–1955). The Magic Mountain (1924).

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938). “Just for joy, take from my palms” (1920); “When Psyche—life—descends to the shades” (1920).

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). “Homeward!” (1925); “At the Top of My Voice” (1930).

Isaac Babel (1894–1940). 1920 Diary; “How It Was Done in Odessa” (1923); Red Cavalry (1926); “In the Basement” (1931); “Guy de Maupassant” (1932).

Abdulla Qodiriy (1894–1938). Past Days (1922–25).

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 –1986). “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940); “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1952).

Daniil Kharms (1905–42). “Pushkin and Gogol” (1934).

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008). Cancer Ward (1968).

Valentin Pikul (1928–1990). Word and Deed (1975).

Loyal readers!  I’m completely thrilled to relate that, thanks to your support, The Possessed made it to #19 on the New York Times best sellers list for paperback nonfiction, right below No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels!  I’m so happy and honored to learn that the American people are only slightly less interested in my harrowing undercover journey to the inner circles of graduate school as they are in the significantly more harrowing journey of Agent Dobyns!  Thanks to all of you, including my new friend T. Mercer!

Hells Angel photograph by Paul Ryan	Fedor Dostoevsky painting by Vasily Perov

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My first two guest posts, CSI Pushkin’s House and Pushkin Reloaded, are currently up at the New Yorker Book Bench.  Many many thanks to super book-blogger Macy Halford for her kind endorsement of my hardest-working intern!  Thanks also to Gideon Lewis-Kraus and the unstoppable Dave Lull for alerting me to the unfolding story of Pushkin’s sofa.

Coming up very soon: a stirring defense of weekends by my own guest-blogger, Peli Grietzer.  A nous deux, Slate—history will decide which of us made the right call on this one.

Pushkin’s sofa	Pushkin sofa

Dear readers, thanks for all the kind comments on “Safe Laughs,” as well as for notifying me that I-14, a bit like the Lev Tolstoy Accordion Academy, is at this point only a beautiful dream of the future, and the road one was actually driving down in 2007 was California State Route 14.  I have just posted those outtakes here—they include Dostoevsky’s prophetic analysis of the psychology of road rage.

In other beautiful fictions, the FSG winter 2010 catalog is now available online, and if waiting for enormous pdf files to load is one of your special hobbies, I warmly encourage you to check it out.  All others will have to content themselves with this excerpt:

In The Possessed we watch [Batuman] investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.

Although “Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg” certainly has a nice ring, there is this interesting circumstance that I have never, to the best of my knowledge, actually been to Switzerland.  Yet. I figure the Macmillan group can see into the future, and that must be the subject of my next book.  Avanti!

This clock tells the time of the future.

Arghh, dear readers—I can’t keep up with you guys! I did finally reply to the comments. But I keep receiving such amazing additions to the beard bibliography! All Russian readers with an interest in beard semiotics are urged to consult Gregory Freidin’s 1993 article about his own beard, in the context of Gogol’s Overcoat, and the larger question of cultures and subcultures in Russia during the late ’80s and early ’90s (“Dve shineli, ili anekdot s borodoi,” Znamia 2 (1993)). The footnotes alone include many promising additions to the field of beardobibliography… I mention here only A. D. Leach’s “Magical Hair (Curl Bequest Prize Essay, 1957),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 80.2 (1958).

“My beard is a part of nature—and yet, it is also a sign,” writes Freidin, who grew a beard at the end of the ’60s, with the intention of embracing a Bohemian subculture. But there remained the problem of all the famous non-subcultural beards, like those of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Engels, Marx, the Academician Timiryazev, and nearly all the “classic” Russian writers. (“On the symbolic map crossed by the demarcation line between Russian and Soviet literature, the surname Tolstoy was an invariant sign, while the beard was a sign of differentiation”: Alexei Tolstoy has a zero-value beard, but Lev Tolstoy has a “beard approaching infinity.”)

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