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Red wine, cosmpolitans & marängsviss after tacos made the perfect traditional Swedish ‘tjejkväll’ on Saturday evening with my friends in the Scandinavian department.

“Like much of Dostoevsky’s work, [The Possessed]

consists primarly of scandalous revelations,

puntuated by outbreaks of mass violence.”

[Elif Batuman, The Possessed]

It took me two days to finish reading The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them by Elif Batuman. This morning I left it on the kitchen table before taking off to the university with the following words to Critical Companion: “Read & rejoice! A book about a comp lit slav who made it out of [grad school] alive!” (In the original note, I wrote ‘here’ and not ‘grad school’ but this would not be meaningful to most of the readers of this blog – unless it has become a secret hit among the struggling grad school community?) The book was written by a girl who completed her graduate education in comparative literature – with an emphasis on the form of the Russian novel – at Stanford, thus the work focus on, not very surprisingly, her experiences during the years when she was a graduate student studying Russian literature there. One of the younger professors in my department here at Berkeley figures prominently in the book, as she is a close friend of Elif Batuman, and when I saw her today I could not but exclaim that I had literally ‘heard’ her voice in the quoted dialouges between her and Elif in the book. (She said the writer did not ask her permission to reproduce her words before publishing; this surprised me as I would verify that everything I thought Critical Companion had said to me was in fact what she had meant to say.) At first I was so excited about the book that I told everyone in my department they must read it [to this someone commented: “I already read it and I don’t think it’s my genre: overly educated people talking about literature”], but that’s before I got to the last chapter – named also “The Possessed” – which deals more specificially with Elif Batuman’s time at Stanford and centers on relationships between the graduate studens she knew there and which are perhaps not all that interesting to someone viewing the process from the outside. Also, I think she could have left out the men in her life as they seem to add little to nothing to the overarching narrative – but maybe she inserted scenes of inter-gender relations so as not to leave the reader wondering if she’s gay. Either way, for me it was a refreshing read: especially her rendering of the absurdly funny Babel conference at Stanford and the bizarre adventures of the ‘International Tolstoy scholars’ in Russia resounded in light of my own experiences at similar conferences both at Stanford and in Russia. This summer, Girl-C [one of the ‘older’ graduate students in my department] heard me talk about my time in Russia in June this year and concluded that I could write an ‘even better’ version of The Possessed as my stories are ‘even more fascinating.’ So a few days ago I sat down to try and make some sense of my own adventures with Russian books and the people who read them – it wasn’t solely inspired by Elif Batuman or even Girl-C, but I had for sometime already been pondering the possibility of collecting stories of my time in Russia in a [somewhat] coherent collection to be called «Записки красивой женщины» [The Notes of a Beautiful Woman/En vacker kvinnas anteckningar]. I decided on this particular ‘humbling’ title because I realize that many of my experiences in Russia – as well as of life in general – have been informed by my appearance and that rather than leaving the reader wondering about the probabilities of certain events I would’ve wanted the source to be evident from the start. But I immediately stumbled on a gigantic problem for the structure of my narrative: the beginning. What everyone always wants to know is why a girl from Sweden – such ‘a wonderful and wonderfully stable country’ – packs up and leaves for Russia at the age of 19; not stopping at Saint Petersburg or even Moscow but taking it to the next level and going to live in Siberia and ending up spending several years in the Urals. The reasons for these are manifold but in the end all of my choices may be traced back to one and the same origin – an origin that cannot be vocalized yet less the rest of the narrative take on a different meaning – which makes constructing an articulate geneology problematic. I tried to circumscribe my own reasoning, my own logic, my own vivid experience in these fragile attempts at making a text out of what has been piling up in my head but ended up only with different ‘myths of creation,’ sort of like when someone is trying to make a religion out of assorted beliefs. God always has to start from somewhere – light must be separated from dark and the latter called day and the former night – for the rest of the story to mean something. During my brief time in graduate school, I have learned that we should first and foremost look for meaning and try to answer the question “What does it mean?” I have issues with ‘meaning’ because I doubt there is such a thing to begin with. I do believe that we may construct meaning, that we may derive it out of something – but to make any large claims about ‘meaning’ seems to me too close to asserting a presence of ‘truth.’ Before finding ‘meaning,’ we need to agree on a certain amount of things ‘meaningful’ in/to the human experience; thus, similar to how proving something as ‘true’ is also rendering something else as ‘false’ we must designate certain other aspects of the human experience as not meaningful. When I was trained as a philologist in Russia and also devoted a large amount of my time to close reading of literary texts, our relationship to them was different: it wasn’t a search for meaning, but rather an attempt at showing features in the text of importance. To be ‘important’ and to be ‘meaningful’ I think are different things. As a Russian philologist, you’re never asked to produce any final results; you come upon something interesting in a text, you trace it, you analyze your findings, and make a conclusion something like ‘this is important in the framework of the work as a whole or for this particular author’s way of writing or in literary history.’ As a literary scholar in the US, however, you do basically the same things except you’re expected to explain why these features are meaningful, i.e. what they mean for the work as a whole or for this particular author’s way of writing or in literary history. For me, meaning is not obvious.

Sometimes I think nothing means anything.

Other times, I think anything can mean nothing.

This makes for certain complications when you try to articulate any kind of lived experience in a form to be read by others: what did it all mean then? What does it mean now? If I disregard the beginning as irrelevant – or opt for one of the many myths I have circulated throughout the years – this leaves me with a problem of a different sort: how do I sort out what is important? I have a lot of extremely funny stories from Russia, like for example that time in 2009 when Marina [my former student and now teacher of Swedish at Ural State University] searched for the house of Kuikhelbecker in the villages outside of Kurgan – without finding it. Or when I and this other Swedish woman in 2005 went to visit a monastery outside of Omsk and ended up in a 24 hour orgy with this group of men in a village. What I remember most of that journey was how embarrassed I was to ask the bus driver to stop at a restroom on our way there. But this doesn’t mean anything in the general scope of things. Rather, readers would like to know what kind of songs were sung and how much we drank and perhaps how the child that was created during those hours of debauchery [not mine!] perished some months later in a miscarriage… The problem is that most of my stories have such a twist to them; instead of just being absurd glimpses of where being possessed by Russian literature may lead you, they also display clearly what sort of tragedy can happen in those places. I was never the detached observer during my years in Russia, and I think this makes it especially difficult to write about them. All the people I met there became my friends and I created bonds to them and I know their stories and what happened to them subsequently. I never approached Russians as ‘the Other’ mainly because something else was at stake for me there but also because this doesn’t correspond to my view of human beings. Maybe I was ‘the Other’ to them – but never for too long; we met halfway and I made sure we intersected there. Also, there is the problem of honesty – as well as probability. Here I don’t always think about this language that I speak fluently enough to consider it a second native language, partly for it is treated as a given in this profession and partly for I have here encountered other Swedish people to interact with. Now I’m revitalizing the part of me that is Swedish; in Russia, I could only speak Swedish with my students – after having taught them – whereas here I can have lunch with the graduate students in the Scandinavian department and speak Swedish everyday if I feel like it. Maybe that is also an additional difficulty in construction my own version of ‘adventures with Russian books and the people who read them,’ namely that I’m also something else – apart from being a graduate student in Russian literature at an American university. That’s why I started writing my En vacker kvinnas anteckningar in Swedish – perhaps more to challenge myself and figure out what my voice sounds like in my native language after all of these years of only using it arbitrary.

”Det finns inga problem, bara utmaningar” according to a popular Swedish expression. The Swedish word ‘utmaning’ is very close to the Russian word for ‘challenge’: вызов. It has the same root – to call – and the same prefix, ‘out of’ or ‘from’ something. I’m not a comparative linguist, however, so my fiddling with semantics ends here.

Maybe all of this is premature. After all, Elif Batuman wrote her book after graduate school. Though now is temporally and spatially after Russia, I’m not done having adventures with Russian books and the people who read them. All this said, I can highly recommend this book – it has even been translated into Swedish! Go get it and you may also rejoice in the narrative of someone who made it out of here.