The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Batuman Elif

Author:Batuman, Elif [Batuman, Elif]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780374532185
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Every day for two hours, after my language class with Muzaffar, I studied “Old Uzbek” literature with Dilorom Salohiy, an assistant professor at Samarkand State University. Dilorom, who held doctoral degrees in both Russian and Uzbek literature, was a beautiful woman in her early forties, with high cheekbones, olive skin, and slightly Asiatic eyes outlined in kohl. She wore small gold hoop earrings and long silk dresses printed with tiny, amazingly variegated flowers. One dress had so many colors that I wrote them down in my notebook: brown, fuchsia, green, yellow, white, pink, purple, black, and orange-red. Unlike Muzaffar, Dilorom spoke perfect Russian, but she didn’t know any English at all. Her voice was soft and regretful, as if she were gently breaking you some terrible news.

Dilorom spoke in Uzbek most of the time, very slowly, often addressing me as qizim (“my girl,” “my daughter”). She didn’t like to speak Russian, and used it only as a last resort. Nonetheless, to my surprise, I understood most of what she said—or at least I understood something, continuously, most of the time she was talking. The Chaghatay texts we read together in class, on the other hand, were almost completely impenetrable. I recognized about three words in ten, which, due to the metaphorical style of the writing, wasn’t enough to get even the most basic gist. You would understand man, snake, and evil, and the poet could be talking about anything, from politics, to love, to snakes. At the end of each class, Dilorom loaned me a Russian or modern Uzbek translation to read at home. Sometimes the books seemed to confirm what she told me in class; other times, they seemed completely unrelated.

It was, furthermore, impossible to find any external confirmation of anything Dilorom told me simply by walking into a bookstore: no Uzbek literature was being printed in book form while I was there. The bookstores sold only romance and detective novels, Russian editions of Windows for Dummies, newspapers, and endless manuals about pregnancy and child-rearing. The state had recently declared the Uzbek birth rate to be in a crisis, and baby propaganda assailed you from all media outlets. One television commercial showed the spotlessly clean free maternity clinics open to all those who fulfilled their civic duty of procreation. Rosy babies lolled beatifically in individual glass basins. The resemblance of these basins to casserole dishes was accentuated by the maternity nurses’ white aprons and tall white hats, which resembled chef’s hats. This commercial always made me think of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”

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