The overall theme of The Possessed is one of love and its strange manifestations – Batuman reflects on her own strange obsession as a graduate student of Russian literature with her chosen subject, and the many wandering paths she takes following the footsteps of her favorite, long-dead writers, trying to uncover secrets lost to history about their minds and actions.
The book was launched from an essay about people whose lives converge at a conference about the great writer Isaac Babel and continues on to cover subjects such as ice palaces, murder mystery, and Old Uzbek language. The memoir is written as a series of essays, many of which take place in Russia and Eastern Europe, exploring the strange lives of people committed to the reading and study of Russian classics, and the world in which these books were composed. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them is a literary travel memoir by Elif Batuman about a life of devotion to Russian classics.
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