The Possessed draws on Elif Batuman's articles in the New Yorker, Harper's and n+1 to tell the true story of one woman's intellectual and sentimental education and her many strange encounters with fellow scholars devoted - absurdly! melancholically! beautifully! - to the Russian classics.
'A series of gloriously misbegotten adventures in search of Tolstoy, Doestoevsky, Babel, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev...wonderfully vivid.' Chicago Tribune
