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When Elif Batuman's first book, Ecinniler, which was on the "Best Books of 2010" list in America, was selected by our club Sabit Kalem, I bought it and read it. I confess, I'm not sure I would have bought it and read it if the club had not chosen it. I'm glad it was chosen and I read it, this is truly a well-equipped non-fiction literary criticism that proceeds very differently.
Possessed, as it is known, is the name of Dostoyevsky's famous work. Batuman also expresses the issue. As soon as I started reading the introduction, I thought I was reading the preface first. As I turned the pages, I could only realize that we were entering the book and the author's style. While putting the themes of Russian classics on paper, Batuman also wrote about his own experiences and the difficulty of the dilemma between being a writer or an academic. Reading is fun for the readers, but challenging times for the writer...
The adventure that begins with The Magic Mountain leads to the summers spent in Samarkand, Tolstoy's suspicious death, and from there to the Ice Palace, and ends with Dostoyevsky's famous novel, The Possessed. The book does not contain spoiler information, which includes fan-catching parts of the classics (except for the Possessed). It was written mostly to understand them and bring them to peace. We can explain that Tolstoy's Anna Karenina continues where Pushkin's Yevgeny Onegin left off (we had read the Russian classic with the group), and Dostoyevsky's Possessed characters with Rene Gerard's concept of "mimetic desire" (all desires are learned or imitated from someone else). works.
An entertaining and instructive work written on Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Akhmatova, Gogol, Babel, Ali Şir Navai and many more. I recommend you not to miss it.