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

Anna, “I just remembered it’s kind of an inappropriate joke. Maybe I’ll tell you another time.”
    By now, every single person at the table was staring at me. Frank leaned over the arm of his wheelchair toward Freidin’s wife, a professor at Berkeley who was also in a wheelchair. “Who is that?” he asked loudly.
    “That is Elif, a graduate student who has been very helpful to Grisha,” she replied.
    “Ah.” Joseph Frank nodded and turned his attention to his pasta.
    These events took a toll on me, and I overslept the next morning, missing the nine a.m. panel on biography. I got to the conference center as everyone was leaving for lunch, and immediately spotted Luba, who is my height, with huge, sad, gray eyes, and an enormous quantity of extremely curly hair.
    “Elishka!” she exclaimed. “Did you just wake up? Don’t worry, I wrote everything down for you, in case you want to use it in a novel.” We went to the student union for lunch, and Luba told me about the panel.
    Three different people were writing biographies about Babel. The first, Freidin, presented on the Other Babel. Thesecond, an American journalist, talked about her experiences researching Babel’s life in 1962 Moscow. She had interviewed Babel’s old acquaintance, the French chargé d’affaires, Jacques de Beaumarchais (descendant of the author of
Figaro
), and was followed by the KGB, whom Beaumarchais gallantly instructed “
Fichez le camp!
” but the KGB took her in for questioning anyway. The third, Werner Platt, a German who taught Russian history in Tashkent, read a paper called “Writing a Biography of Isaac Babel: A Detective’s Task,” largely about getting kicked out of various Russian archives and not managing to find out anything about Babel. On the premise that “good detective work means returning to the scene of the crime,” the historian had made pilgrimages to Babel’s old house in Odessa, the Moscow apartment, the dacha in Peredelkino—only to find that all had been torn down. Undiscouraged, Platt got on a bus to Lemberg. In his diary Babel had mentioned Budyonny’s decision not to attack Lemberg in 1920: “Why not? Craziness, or the impossibility of taking a city by cavalry?” Looking around Lemberg, Platt concluded that, as Babel had implied by calling Budyonny’s withdrawal “crazy,” Lemberg was indeed a beautiful city.
    His talk was poorly received. Someone had muttered: “For an incompetent scholar, everything is ‘a detective’s task.’ ” It seemed that some of the documents that Platt had been unable to access in the archives had been published years ago. “You can buy this in the Barnes & Noble,” someone said.
    Platt had also made some provocative claims about the lost manuscripts, which led to a free-for-all about the location and contents of the missing folders.
    “Empty!” an unknown Russian had shouted. “The folders were empty!”
    Nathalie Babel had stood up and taken the microphone—“The best part,” Luba said, sitting up straighter and reading from her notebook in a deep, sepulchral voice.
    “WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, I WAS TOLD THAT MY PUPPY WAS A WRITER.” Pause. “LATER I HEARD PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT ISAAC BABEL, SAYING THAT HE WAS A GREAT WRITER.” Pause. “TO ME, HE WAS MY PUPPY.”
    Long pause.
    “I AM CONFUSED.”
    Another pause.
    “I AM
CONFUSED
.”
    One minute, two minutes passed, in total silence. Finally, somebody asked Nathalie whether it was true that she was “still sitting on some unpublished letters.”
    Nathalie Babel sighed. “LET ME TELL YOU A STORY ABOUT LETTERS.” The story was that Nathalie Babel had come into possession of a trunk of her father’s letters. (“Her puppy’s letters,” Luba explained.) “I KNEW THE BIOGRAPHER WOULD COME,” she said, “BUT HE ANNOYED ME. SO I GAVE THE LETTERS TO MY AUNT. WHEN THE BIOGRAPHER CAME, I SAID, ‘I HAVE NOTHING.’ ” And where were the letters now? Nathalie Babel didn’t know. “MAYBE THEY