Elif Batuman’s voice—unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature—has made her one of the most admired writers of her generation. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed.

Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman takes her reader to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg as she investigates a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. The student devoted to the Russian classics will 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.

Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.