The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

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.

Of course, there are many differences between my story and that of Hans Castorp. But there are also similarities. The seven years I ended up spending in the Stanford comparative literature department were also a matter of love, and fascination with Russianness. This love was also prefigured during my schooldays by a chance encounter with a Russian person, and developed in an institutional setting.

The first Russian person I ever met was my teacher at the Manhattan School of Music, where I studied the violin on Saturdays. Maxim wore black turtlenecks, played a mellow-toned, orange-colored violin, and produced an impression of being deeply absorbed by considerations and calculations beyond the normal range of human cognition. Toward the end of one lesson, for example, he told me that he had to leave ten minutes early—and then proceeded to spend the entire ten minutes unraveling the tortuous logic of how his early departure wasn’t actually depriving me of any violin instruction. “Tell me, Elif,” he shouted, having worked himself up to an almost amazing degree. “When you buy a dress, do you buy the dress that is the most beautiful . . . or the dress that is made with the most cloth?”

Another time, Maxim instructed me to listen to a particular Soviet recording of the Mozart violin concerti. Sitting in a wooden library carrel, I listened to all five concerti in a row: a fluid, elegant performance, with passages of singing intensity through which one seemed to glimpse the whole cosmic pathos of Mozart’s life on earth. But as I listened, I found myself distracted by the CD case, by the slightly blurred three-quarters photograph of the soloist, who looked literally indistinguishable from my violin teacher. The stiff posture, the downturned mouth, the intent and melancholy eyebrows—everything was the same. His name was even Maxim, although he had a different surname.

The following week, Maxim specifically asked whether I had noticed anything unusual about the violinist.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well, let’s say, his appearance. In Moscow, at the conservatory, people used to say that he and I looked alike . . . very much alike. More than the brothers.”

“Actually, yeah—I did sort of notice that from the photograph.”

At this innocuous remark, an expression of gloom descended upon him, as abruptly as if someone had dropped a black cloth over his head. “It’s nothing, nothing,” he said, sounding almost angry.

Probably the strangest episode with Maxim involved the yearly juried examinations at the music school. In the weeks before the exams, Maxim was constantly changing his mind about which études and scales I should prepare, even telephoning me once in the middle of the night to announce a change in plan. “We have to be very well prepared because we do not know who is on this jury,” he kept saying. “We do not know what they will ask you to play. We can guess, of course, but we cannot know.”

When the day of the juries came, I was called into the examination room, with its grand piano and long table, at the head of which, presiding over two more junior faculty members, sat not some unknown judge, but Maxim himself.

“Hello, Elif,” he said pleasantly.

Such mystifications can have a very strong effect on young people, and this one was compounded by the circumstance that I had just read Eugene Onegin, and had been particularly moved by Tatyana’s dream: the famous sequence in which Pushkin’s heroine finds herself crossing a snowy plain, “surrounded by sad murk,” and pursued by a bear. The bear scoops her up and Tatyana loses consciousness, waking up as the bear deposits her at the end of a hallway where she hears cries and the clink of glasses, “as if at some big funeral.” Through a crack in the door she sees a long table surrounded by reveling monsters—a dancing windmill, a half crane, a half cat—presided over, as she realizes with inexplicable horror, by none other than Eugene Onegin.

Tatyana’s dream is fulfilled in waking life at her name-day party: an ill-fated event during which Onegin, motivated apparently by nothing but boredom, breaks Tatyana’s heart and fatally quarrels with his young friend Lensky. (By the time Onegin falls in love with Tatyana, years later in Moscow, it’s too late. She still loves him but is married to an old general.) I read Onegin in Nabokov’s English edition, and was greatly struck by his note that the language of the dream not only contains “echoes of rhythms and terms” from Tatyana’s experiences earlier in the book, but also foreshadows the future: “a certain dreamlike quality is carried on to the name-day party and later to the duel.” The guests at Tatyana’s party and at the balls in Moscow, Nabokov writes, “are benightmared and foreshadowed by the fairy-tale ghouls and hybrid monsters in her dream.”

To me it seemed that the violin jury had also been benightmared and foreshadowed by Tatyana’s dream, and that some hidden portent was borne by Maxim’s apparition at their head.

If this incident didn’t immediately send me looking to Maxim’s national literature for answers, it was nonetheless at the back of my mind that summer when I discovered a 1970s Penguin edition of Anna Karenina in my grandmother’s apartment in Ankara. I had run out of English books, and was especially happy to find one that was so long. Think of the time it must have taken for Tolstoy to write it! He hadn’t been ashamed to spend his time that way, rather than relaxing by playing Frisbee or attending a barbecue. Nobody in Anna Karenina was oppressed, as I was, by the tyranny of leisure. The leisure activities in Tolstoy’s novel—ice skating, balls, horse races—were beautiful, dignified, and meaningful in terms of plot.

I spent the next two weeks flopped on my grandmother’s super-bourgeois rose-colored velvet sofa, consuming massive quantities of grapes, reading obsessively. Anna Karenina seemed to pick up exactly where Onegin left off, in the same world, as if the people in the opera house were also benightmared by Tatyana’s dream, whose atmosphere had already seeped into Anna’s experiences at the horse races and on the snowbound train. It was the same world, the same air, only everything was bigger—as if a minutely detailed dollhouse had been transformed into a real house with long hallways, shining fixtures, a rambling garden. Elements from Onegin reappeared: a snowy dream, a fatal ball, a revolver, a bear. It was as if all of Onegin had been dreamed by Anna, who in her own life fulfilled Tatyana’s unresolved fate.*

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.

My mother was happy to see me reading what turned out to be her old copy of Anna Karenina. “Now you can tell me what it really means!” she said. My mother often asked me to tell her what things really meant: books, movies, things people said to her at work. (She worked at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where people seemed to make particularly inscrutable remarks.) The pretext for these questions was that I am a native English speaker and she isn’t. Actually, my mother studied from early childhood at an American school in Ankara and speaks beautiful English, and I remember only one time that her question was to any extent resolved by my telling her the literal meaning of an English phrase. (The phrase was “Knock yourself out.”) In all other instances—and, in fact, also in that instance—“What does that really mean?” itself really meant something like: “What underlying attitude toward me, or toward people like me, is represented by these words?” My mother believed that people harbored essential stances of like or dislike toward others, and betrayed these stances in their words and actions. If you came out looking terrible in a photograph, it was a sign that the person who took it didn’t really like you.

“So what did it all mean?” my mother asked, when I had finished Anna Karenina. “What was Tolstoy trying to say? Did Vronsky just not really love Anna?”

We were in the kitchen in Ankara, a city with an anagrammatic relationship to Anna Karenina, drinking what Turkish people call “Turkish tea”: very strong, sugary Lipton, served in little tulip-shaped glasses.

I said that I thought Vronsky had really loved Anna.

“He couldn’t have loved her enough, or she wouldn’t have killed herself. It just wouldn’t have happened.” My mother’s theory was that the double plot in Anna Karenina represents the two kinds of men in the world: those who really like women, and those who don’t. Vronsky, a man who really liked women, overwhelmed Anna and was overwhelmed by her—but some part of him was never committed to her in the way that Levin, a man who essentially did not like women, was committed to Kitty.

“That kind of makes sense,” I admitted.

“Is Tolstoy saying that it’s better for women to be with men like Levin? Kitty made the right choice, and Anna made the wrong choice, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t know. Looking back, by that point I had already acquired certain ideas about literature. I believed that it “really meant” something, and that this meaning was dependent on linguistic competence, on the Chomskians’ iron law: “The intuitions of a native speaker.” (“You really speak English,” my mother would say admiringly, in our conversations about books.) That’s probably why I decided to study linguistics when I got to college; it didn’t even occur to me to study literature. I remember believing firmly that the best novels drew their material and inspiration exclusively from life, and not from other novels, and that, as an aspiring novelist, I should therefore try not to read too many novels.

I was also uninterested by what I knew of literary theory and history. It was a received idea in those days that “theory” was bad for writers, infecting them with a hostility toward language and making them turn out postmodern; and what did it have to offer, anyway, besides the reduction of a novel to a set of unpleasant facts about power structures, or the superficial thrill of juxtaposing Pride and Prejudice with the uncertainty principle? As for history, it struck me as pedantic, unambitious. Why all that trouble to prove things that nobody would ever dispute in the first place, like that an earlier author had influenced a later author?

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.

In the meantime I became a linguistics major. I wanted to learn the raw mechanism of language, the pure form itself. For the foreign language requirement, I enrolled in beginning Russian: maybe someday I could tell my mother what Tolstoy really meant.

The nail in the coffin of my brief career as a linguist was probably a seminar I took that winter about the philosophy of language. The aim of this seminar was to formulate a theory that would explain to a Martian “what it is that we know when we know a language.” I could not imagine a more objectless, melancholy project. The solution turned out to consist of a series of propositions having the form “ ‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.” The professor, a gaunt logician with a wild mane of red hair and a deep concern about Martians, wrote this sentence on the board during nearly every class, and we would discuss why it wasn’t trivial. Outside the window, snow piled deeper and deeper. You Martians who so love form and logic—what are you doing here, so far from home?

By contrast with the philosophy of language and my other classes in psycholinguistics, syntax, and phonetics, beginning Russian struck me as profoundly human. I had expected linguistics (the general study of language) to resemble a story, and Russian (the study of a particular language) to resemble a set of rules, but the reality was just the opposite. For the first several months of Russian class, we studied an ingenious text called “The Story of Vera.” It opened with Vera, a physics graduate student, going to visit her boyfriend and classmate, Ivan. Ivan wasn’t home—he had left a note saying, “Forget me.” “Why did we never understand him?” Ivan’s father sighed, and slammed the door in Vera’s face. These initial installments used an amazingly small vocabulary and grammar. As the story progressed, details of the plot were filled in, along with the missing cases and tenses, so that knowledge was accompanied by the means of its expression. In this way, introductory Russian manifested itself to me as a perfect language, in which form was an ideal reflection of content.

As it turned out, Ivan had fled to Siberia to work in the lab of his estranged uncle, and somehow got married there. Vera followed him, and fell in love with another physicist, whom she met in a taxi at the Novosibirsk airport. In the last chapter, Vera went to a physics conference and presented a paper, which was received as “the very latest word in physics.” Ivan, who was also at the conference, congratulated her and seemed ready to offer some explanation of his actions, but Vera didn’t care anymore.

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. This association was further strengthened when I myself fell in love with one of my classmates from Russian class, a math major who had briefly studied Russian as a child behind the Iron Curtain. His Russian name was Valya, which was close to his Hungarian name. He was a senior, and was going to spend the summer in Budapest before heading to Berkeley for graduate school. I was only a freshman, so clearly, after June, we were never going to see each other again—except that then he somehow got me a summer job with a philanthropic organization that sent American college students to teach English in Hungarian villages.

There was something mysterious and absent about Valya, and in fact it turned out that, like Ivan in the story from Russian class, he also had a girlfriend about whom I knew nothing, and whom he eventually married. By the time this mystery was revealed to me, it was too late not to go to the Hungarian village, so I went. But, like Tatyana reading the manual of dream interpretation, I was already aware of something somewhere portending “a multitude of sad adventures.”

In the village of Kál, I was hosted by an extremely kind family who drove me to see all the local historic sites, most of which commemorated victories over the Ottoman invaders. I taught English for seven hours a day, which proved to be interesting but exhausting work. I didn’t call Valya at all for the first two weeks. In the third week the village sent me to a children’s camp at a beautiful historic town on the Danube. All the female staff slept in a single cabin: me, a young English teacher, and five gym teachers. Unknown parties had strongly impressed upon the camp organizers that I, as an American, ate nothing but corn and watermelon. Every day they brought me cans and cans of corn, and nearly a whole watermelon, which I ate alone in the cabin. In the absence of any formal duties I was pursued in their every free minute by a group of tiny, indefatigable Hungarian girls, who gently demanded that I play badminton with them and braid their hair.

I was surviving this all OK until Saturday evening, when the gym teachers organized a special entertainment: a boys’ leg contest.

“The American girl will judge the leg contest!” they announced. I was still hoping that I had misunderstood them, even as German techno music was turned on and all the boys in the camp, ages eight to fourteen, were paraded out behind a screen that hid their bodies from the waist up; identifying numbers had been pinned to their shorts. I was given a clipboard with a form on which to rate their legs on a scale from one to ten. Gripped by panic, I stared at the clipboard. Nothing in either my life experience or my studies had prepared me to judge an adolescent boys’ leg contest. Finally the English teacher, who appeared to understand my predicament, whispered to me some scores of her own devising, and I wrote them on the form as if I had thought of them myself.

The next day, Sunday, I was alone in the cabin reading when someone came crashing through the door. It was the winner of the boys’ leg contest, a fourteen-year-old daredevil named Gábor, his prizewinning left leg covered in blood.

“Can you help me?” he asked, handing me a first aid kit.

Closer inspection revealed a long, jagged gash on his knee. I had opened the first aid kit and successfully identified a bottle of iodine when we were joined by two of the gym teachers.

“Lukács Gábor, you leave the American alone!” they shouted and, steering the boy away, disinfected and bandaged his knee in a visibly efficient fashion. The English teacher appeared at my side: “He wants something from you,” she said darkly.

During the lunch hour, as soon as they had brought me my watermelon, I slipped away to the commuter rail station, bought a phone card, and called Valya’s parents’ house in Budapest. Valya asked where I was. Two hours later, he and his mother drove up in his mother’s Opel, with a canoe tied to the roof. His mother thought it would be fun for us to go canoeing on the Danube. She drove back in the car, and we actually paddled that canoe all the way back to Budapest, which took more than seven hours. All around us, towering sixteen-wheel trucks glided by on barges. Apparently it was illegal for the trucks to drive on the streets on Sundays.

In Budapest, having missed the docking place, we ended up moored in a swamp. Valya dragged the canoe aground, helped me out, and then went to find a pay phone. I was supposed to stay with the canoe.

“I should be back in fifteen or twenty minutes,” he said.

The sun sank behind some prehistoric-looking vegetation, and a liquid blueness descended upon the world. Valya was gone for two hours, which I spent guarding the canoe—from whom? By what means? Noticing a willow nearby, I entertained and dismissed the idea of concealing the canoe with willow branches. As it happened, the only sentient beings I saw in the whole two hours were a man with four goats, none of whom evinced any interest in either me or the canoe, and two policemen. The policemen stopped their mopeds when they saw me, and tried to question me in Hungarian. The only question I understood was whether I was homeless. “Do you have a house?” they said loudly, and one of them put his hands over his head in the shape of a pointed roof.

“My friend went to the telephone,” I said. To my surprise, this explanation seemed to satisfy the policemen. “Good, good,” they said, then got back on their mopeds and rode away.

I had just taken a pen and notebook out of my bag and was trying in the dark to write a note explaining that I was incapable of guarding the canoe anymore when I heard the approach of pounding footsteps. They grew louder and louder and then Valya flopped down to the ground beside me, out of breath, his shirt torn and muddy. He had been chased several kilometers cross-country by a wild dog. He must be the kind of man who likes women, I remember thinking.

The next afternoon, Valya drove me back to the camp, stopping at the Thai embassy to pick up his visa—he was leaving the next day for a math conference. After we said goodbye, I spent some hours wandering around the historic town, its Serbian graveyards and churches. Eventually I had to return to the campground. I was greeted at the gate by the English teacher, closely followed by the bandaged boy leg champion.

“You have been . . . loafing,” said the English teacher accusingly.

“Your hair looks cool,” Gábor said.

“No it doesn’t!” snapped the English teacher.

Today this all strikes me as somehow typical of the way things happen, when you try to follow life. Events and places succeed one another like items on a shopping list. There may be interesting and moving experiences, but one thing is guaranteed: they won’t naturally assume the shape of a wonderful book.

When I got back to school that fall, I couldn’t face linguistics again—it had let me down, failed to reveal anything about language and what it meant. But I kept studying Russian. It seemed like the only possible place to look for an explanation for the things that had happened to me. I even signed up for an accelerated class. Two years later—without, incidentally, having read more than seven or eight novels—I found myself about to receive a degree in literature: after folklore and mythology, the major with the fewest requirements.

Among the not very numerous theoretical texts I read as a literature major, one that made a strong impression on me was Foucault’s short essay on Don Quixote in The Order of Things, the one that likens the tall, skinny, weird-looking hidalgo to “a sign, a long, thin graphism, a letter that has just escaped from the open pages of a book.” I immediately identified with this description because elif, the Turkish word for alif or aleph—the first letter of the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets—is drawn as a straight line. My parents chose this name for me because I was an unusually long and skinny baby (I was born one month early).

I thought of Foucault’s essay again when I recently came across a psychological study showing that Americans tend to choose careers whose labels resemble their names. Thus the name Dennis is statistically overrepresented among dentists, and the ranks of geoscientists contain disproportionately high numbers of Georges and Geoffreys. The study ascribed these phenomena to “implicit egotism”: the “generally positive feelings” that people have about their own names. I wonder whether some of the Dennises in dentistry school ended up there by a different motivation: the secret wish to bring arbitrary language in tune with physical reality. Maybe that’s why I was drawn in by Don Quixote: it gave me a way to fulfill the truth of my name in the world’s terms. It would be fitting, since this is the point of Foucault’s essay: Don Quixote decides to prove that he is a knight just like the knights in chivalric romances, and that the world he inhabits is likewise a forum for proving heroism, and so he sets out to find—or create—resemblances between the word and the world. “Flocks, serving girls, and inns become once more the language of books to the imperceptible degree to which they resemble castles, ladies, and armies,” writes Foucault.

Don Quixote, I realized, had broken the binary of life and literature. He had lived life and read books; he lived life through books, generating an even better book. Foucault, meanwhile, broke my idea of literary theory: instead of reducing complexity and beauty, he had produced it. My interest in truth came only later, but beauty had already begun to draw me into the study of literature.

My plan for after graduation was still to write a novel—but writing novels takes time, and time is expensive. I took the precaution of applying to some PhD literature programs. I did not consider getting a creative writing MFA, because I knew they made you pay tuition, and go to workshops. Whatever reservations I had about the usefulness of reading and analyzing great novels went double for reading and analyzing the writings of a bunch of kids like me. I did, however, send an application to an artists’ colony on Cape Cod. To my surprise, they offered me a fiction writing fellowship, on the basis of a seventy-five-page first-person narrative I had written from the perspective of a dog.

One extremely windy and rainy day that March, I rented a car and drove to Cape Cod, to see just what kind of outfit these people were running. The colony was located on the grounds of a prerevolutionary lumber mill. I made my way over a muddy wooden footpath to a boatlike building, where a man was making a video recording of a machine apparently designed to pour concrete onto the floor out of a vat. When I asked him where the writers were, the artist waved his hand at the window, at the teeming rain.

I located the writers in a trailer, huddled around a space heater, wearing plaid shirts and plastic-rimmed glasses. The program director, a windswept, gray-eyed local writer of romantic appearance, treated me with remarkable kindness, especially considering my status as the twenty-one-year-old author of a first-person dog novella. Nonetheless, we weren’t on the same page. Our priorities and our worldviews were not synchronized.

“What will you do if you don’t come here?” he asked. I told him I had applied to some graduate schools. There was a long pause. “Well, if you want to be an academic, go to graduate school,” he said. “If you want to be a writer, come here.”

I wanted to be a writer, not an academic. But that afternoon, standing under a noisy tin awning in a parking lot facing the ocean, eating the peanut-butter sandwiches I had made in the cafeteria at breakfast, I reached some conclusive state of disillusionment with the transcendentalist New England culture of “creative writing.” In this culture, to which the writing workshop belonged, the academic study of literature was understood to be bad for a writer’s formation. By what mechanism, I found myself wondering, was it bad? Conversely, why was it automatically good for a writer to live in a barn, reading short stories by short-story writers who didn’t seem to be read by anyone other than writing students?

• • •

I turned down the writing fellowship. The director of the writing colony sent me a postcard with a photograph of a sailboat on it, wishing me luck. My boyfriend at the time, Eric, had been offered a job designing intelligent radar detectors in Silicon Valley, and I had been offered five years of funding in the comparative literature department at Stanford. We moved to California, a place I had never been before. Under rolling green hills, positrons were speeding through the world’s longest linear accelerator; in towers high above the palm trees lay the complete Paris files of the Russian Imperial secret police. Stanford was essentially the opposite of a colonial New England lumber mill.

For many years, I gave little thought to the choice I had made between creative writing and literary criticism. In 2006, n+1 magazine asked me to write about the state of the American short story, using the Best American Short Stories anthologies of 2004 and 2005 as data. Only then, as I turned the pages in the name of science, did I find myself remembering the emptiness I had felt on that rainy day on Cape Cod.

I remembered then the puritanical culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of “craft.” I realized that I would greatly prefer to think of literature as a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft. What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning? All it had were its negative dictates: “Show, don’t tell”; “Murder your darlings”; “Omit needless words.” As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits—of omitting needless words.

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. The first sentences were crammed with so many specificities, exceptions, subverted expectations, and minor collisions that one half expected to learn they were acrostics, or had been written without using the letter e. They all began in medias res. Often, they answered the “five Ws and one H.”*

The premium on conciseness and concreteness made proper names a great value—so they came flying at you as if out of a tennis ball machine: Julia, Juliet, Viola, Violet, Rusty, Lefty, Carl, Carla, Carleton, Mamie, Sharee, Sharon, Rose of Sharon (a Native American), Hassan.† Each name betrayed a secret calculation, a weighing of plausibility against precision: on the one hand, John Briggs and John Hillman . . . on the other, Sybil Mildred Clemm Legrand Pascal, who invites the reader to call her Miss Sibby. On the one hand, the cat called King Spanky; on the other, the cat called Cat. In either case, the result somehow seemed false, contrived—unlike Tolstoy’s double Alexeis, and unlike Chekhov’s characters, many of whom didn’t have names at all. In “Lady with Lapdog,” Gurov’s wife, Anna’s husband, Gurov’s crony at the club, even the lapdog, are all nameless. No contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name that lapdog. They were too caught up in trying to bootstrap from a proper name to a meaningful individual essence—like the “compassionate” TV doctor who informs her colleagues: “She has a name.”

But names don’t work that way. As Derrida once wrote, the singularity of the proper name is inextricable from its generality: it always has to be possible for one thing to be named after any other named thing, and for different people, like the characters in Anna Karenina, to be called by the same name. The basic tension of the name is that it simultaneously does and does not designate the unique individual. As someone who likes to keep to a minimum her visits to Planet Derrida—that land where all seemingly secondary phenomena are actually primary, and anything you can think of doing is an act of violence, practically by virtue of your having thought about it using some words that were also known to Aristotle—I nonetheless felt that Derrida had been right about names. More important, he had really thought about names, about how special they are, so that, even if Of Grammatology was more painful to read than the Best American Short Stories, still it belonged to a discourse that tried to say something about what things mean.

Moreover, even if the literary criticism discourse is no less susceptible than the creative writing workshop to charges of self-sufficiency and hermeticism, it has one crucial advantage: its fundamentally collaborative premise. Each work of criticism is supposed to build upon the existing body of work, to increase the sum total of human understanding. It’s not like filling your house with more and more beautiful wicker baskets. It’s supposed to be cumulative—it believes in progress.

The creative writing workshop, by contrast, seems to have a collaborative premise, and does indeed involve a collaborative process—but the signs of that process are systematically effaced from the finished product. Contemporary short stories contain virtually no reference to any interesting work being done in the field over the past twenty, fifty, or hundred years; instead, middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions, people continue to be upset by power outages and natural disasters, and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things.

I don’t know if I ended up siding with the academics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or if I ended up in graduate school because I already secretly sided with the academics. In any case, I stopped believing that “theory” had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?

This isn’t to say that graduate school was one long walk in the park, especially not at first. I did have the good fortune to strike an immediate friendship with one of my classmates, Luba, a Russian émigré who had grown up in Tashkent. I feel very lucky to have met such a wonderful person at that delicate point in my career. In between sessions of a seminar on an obscure school of 1920s Russian filmmakers, known for their “eccentric” use of circus paraphernalia and human-size rubber mannequins, we would take long walks around the graduate-student housing complex, invariably getting lost, and once even falling into some kind of a ditch. Like Mann’s hero in his first weeks on the Magic Mountain, I thought: This can’t last much longer.

In fact, between classes, conferences, teaching, and endless lunches, it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to get anything but term papers written at Stanford. At the end of the year, I filed for a leave of absence and moved to San Francisco where, between odd jobs, I wrote a great deal. Nonetheless, the result somehow wasn’t a novel. It didn’t have a beginning or an end. It didn’t seem to be telling any particular story. This was surprising and difficult for me to understand. It had occurred to me to worry in advance about writer’s block, but the production of a huge non-novel just wasn’t a possibility I had anticipated.

I was thinking over the problem on the evening of September 13, 2001, while running to the Golden Gate Bridge, when I tripped over some kind of plastic barrier, erected, I later learned, with the intention of protecting the bridge from terrorists. Some other joggers helped me to my feet. My arm felt very strange. I walked to the nearest hospital and spent some hours in the waiting room, where a ceiling-mounted television showed endless footage of bodies being excavated from the World Trade Center. Eventually I was admitted to the emergency room, where doctors removed the gravel from my knees, x-rayed my arm, informed me that my elbow was broken, and outfitted me with a cast and sling. The bill came to $1,700. This experience caused me to take a cold, hard look at the direction my life was headed. What was I doing, running around this world—a place about which I clearly understood nothing—with no health insurance and no real job, writing an endless novel about God knows what? A week later, the department head called and asked if I wanted to return to Stanford. I said yes.

That’s when I was sucked in, deeper than I ever expected. 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.

When I reemerged into the real world, I thought differently about lots of things. I no longer believed that novels should or could be inspired only by life, and not by other novels. I knew now that this belief was itself a novelistic device—that it was precisely the European novel tradition, after Don Quixote, that gave rise to the idea of the falseness and sterility of literature, its disconnect with real life and real education.

In fact, this idea wasn’t unambiguously present in Don Quixote. Consider the famous “book inquisition” episode, in which the priest and barber attempt to cure the knight’s madness by purging his library. The received version of this episode is that Quixote’s friends burn most of his books, mirroring the received message of Don Quixote that romances are stupid and dangerous. But if you actually keep count, you see that, of thirty books mentioned during the inquisition, only fourteen are consigned to the flames, while another fourteen are officially pardoned. This equivalence reflects the balance between life and literature in the plot—which, as Foucault observed, consists of “a diligent search over the entire surface of the earth for forms that will prove that what the books say is true.” Quixote’s adventures in the world, his friendship with Sancho Panza, his reconciling of sundered lovers, the entertainment he affords to countless bored Spaniards—all this, no less than the damage he causes, comes from his determination to experience life in terms of his favorite books, to bring books into the field. Don Quixote could only have been written by someone who really loved chivalric romances, really wanted his life to resemble them more closely, and understood just what it would cost.

Thinking about Don Quixote, I began to wonder about other possible methods for bringing one’s life closer to one’s favorite books. From Cervantes onward, the method of the novel has typically been imitation: the characters try to resemble the characters in the books they find meaningful. But what if you tried something different—what if you tried study instead of imitation, and metonymy instead of metaphor? What if, instead of going out into your neighborhood pretending to be the hero of Amadís of Gaul, you instead devoted your life to the mystery of its original author, learned Spanish and Portuguese, tracked down all the scholarly experts, figured out where Gaul is (most scholars think Wales or Brittany)—what if you did it all yourself, instead of inventing a fictional character? What if you wrote a book and it was all true?

What if you read Lost Illusions and, instead of moving to New York, living in a garret, self-publishing your poetry, writing book reviews, and having love affairs—instead of living your own version of Lost Illusions, in order to someday write the same novel for twenty-first-century America—what if instead you went to Balzac’s house and Madame Hanska’s estate, read every word he ever wrote, dug up every last thing you could about him—and then started writing?

That is the idea behind this book.

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* The Formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum expresses this idea in Tolstoy in the Seventies, characterizing Anna Karenina as “a continuation of Eugene Onegin,” and Anna as “a kind of reincarnation of Tatyana.”

* For example: “The morning after her granddaughter’s frantic phone call, Lorraine skipped her usual coffee session at the Limestone Diner and drove out to the accident scene instead”; “Graves had been sick for three days when, on the long, straight highway between Mazar and Kunduz, a dark blue truck coming toward them shed its rear wheel in a spray of orange-yellow sparks.”

† The Best American anthologies of 2004 and 2005 each included one story involving the Islamic world, each with a character called Hassan.