My Love Affair with Russia's Greatest
Godwin, Richard, The Evening Standard (London, England)
THE POSSESSED: ADVENTURES WITH RUSSIAN BOOKS AND THE PEOPLE WHO READ THEM by Elif Batuman (Granta, Pounds 16.99) EARLY ON in The Possessed, Elif Batuman -- who may yet turn out to be Mikhail Bulgakov reincarnated as a Turkish-American female -- describes her feelings on reading Anna Karenina as a teenager. Idling on her grandmother's velvet sofa in Ankara, she found in the novel an "otherworldly perfection"; it occupied "a supercharged gray zone between nature and culture".
The Possessed is an account of Batuman's subsequent possession by Russian literature and her post-grad career at Stanford University and it comes to occupy its own supercharged grey zone …
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Publication information:
Article title: My Love Affair with Russia's Greatest .
Contributors: Godwin, Richard - Author.
Newspaper title: The Evening Standard (London, England).
Publication date: April 7, 2011.
Page number: 33.
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