Roaming from Tashkent to San Francisco, this is the true story of one budding writer’s strange encounters with the fanatics who are devoted – absurdly! melancholically! ecstatically! – to the Russian classics. Combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Gogol to Goncharov with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence, The Possessed introduces a brilliant and distinctive new...

Roaming from Tashkent to San Francisco, this is the true story of one budding writer’s strange encounters with the fanatics who are devoted – absurdly! melancholically! ecstatically! – to the Russian classics. Combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Gogol to Goncharov with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence, The Possessed introduces a brilliant and distinctive new voice: comic, humane, charming, poignant and completely, and unpretentiously, full of an infectious love for literature.