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These days I get to do very little reading outside work. Here is what registered:
Genetically engineered Salmons are coming to a supermarket near you
The new mayor of Reykjavik
That we should all pay more attention to privacy debates (Ezra Klein, David Brooks, James Kwak)
Andrew Sullivan freaking out on Obama's Petraeus decision.
I loved reading “The Possessed: The adventures with Russian books and people who read them” (Review here)
The book is structured around the years that Batuman spent chasing a doctorate in Russian literature in Northern California (she went to school in Stanford), Russia and Samarkand (where she was trying to learn the Uzbek language). It is hard to classify the genre – it is something between a memoir, a travelogue and a meditation on Russian literature (Would you call Song lines a travel story?). It got somewhat trying when Batuman writes about her struggles with the Uzbek language in Samarkand. (I guess it is fair to say she didn’t think much of Samarkand or its literature. And I suspect she is right in her reading of contemporary drudgery that is Samarkand. But then I never enjoyed Paul Theroux either…). But it is mostly a great, rollicking read – traversing a period of Russian history and literature that I am familiar with from my childhood years, but haven’t really gone back to in a very long time. It has wonderful asides, awesome details that I never knew, and sudden insights that kept me engaged.
Here is Batuman talking about Dostoevsky’s trip to Europe in 1867:
I learned that forty-six year old Dostoevsky had gone abroad shortly after his marriage in 1867 to Anna Snitkina, the twenty-one year old stenographer who had helped him meet the time line for The Gambler. The couple left Russia partly because Dostoevsky believed that the European climate was better for his epilepsy, and partly to escape his creditors, relatives, and hanger ons who were making Anna’s home life a misery. Ironically, considering the text that brought them together, Dostoevsky was seized anew in Dresden by his pathological obsession with Roulette. He made a three-day trip to the famous casino of Homburg, which in fact dragged on for ten days, during which he lost not only all his money but also his watch, so that after wards, he and his wife never knew what time it was.
When the newlyweds decided to move to Switzerland that summer, Dostoevsky was unable to resist the lure of a stop in Baden-Baden. In between epileptic fits, he lost most of Anna’s jewelry and managed to cement a lifelong animus against long time Baden resident Ivan Turgenev. The contretemps were precipitated by a chance meeting with Ivan Goncharov, author of Oblomov, who told Dostoevsky that Turgenev had seen him on the street but had decided not to say anything, “knowing how gamblers do not like to be spoken to.” Because he happened at that time to owe Turgenev fifty roubles, Dostoevsky couldn’t be seen to be avoiding him (which he was). At their subsequent meeting, Turgenev said such terrible things about Russia that Dostoevsky finally suggested that he buy a telescope. “What for?” Turgenev asked. Dostoevsky said the telescope would help Turgenev see Russia better, so he would know what he was talking about. Turgenev became “horribly angry.” Dostoevsky had taken up his hat and was preparing to leave when he “somehow, absolutely without intention,” ended up disburdening himself of everything that had “accumulated on his soul about the Germans in three months.” Nothing good, it turned out had accumulated in his soul about the Germans, whom Turgenev, by contrast, admired deeply. The two writers parted, vowing never again to set eyes upon one another.The Dostoevskys were by this point desperate to leave Baden-Baden, but Fyodor Mikhailovich had gambled away the necessary funds. Finally Anna’s mother sent them a money order. On the day of their departure for Geneva, Dostoevsky was unable to restraint himself and lost fifty francs and a pair of Anna’s earrings at roulette. An hour and half before their train was scheduled to leave, Dostoevsky rushed back to the casino and lost twenty more francs.