Started on 5.14.25, finished on 5.28.25

I love Elif Batuman so much! The Idiot is one of my most-recommended books, and I also loved Either/Or. I think she is so funny, I love the way she thinks and the connections she makes, and I just love the way she writes. This book wasn’t on my radar when I first read the novels, but it’s on a nonfiction list I’ve been working through with a friend, and I’ve waited patiently until we randomly selected it from the list. While Russian literature is decidedly not an interest of mine, I knew this book would be full of the author’s signature charm and I was not disappointed. The book is partly autobiographical, and I have to admit those parts were my favorite. I love hearing about her travels, the way she interacts with people, and her life in academia.

Click here to buy this book on Bookshop.org

My favorite quotes:

“Every day they brought me cans and cans of corn, and nearly a whole watermelon, which I ate alone in the cabin.”

“My plan for after graduation was still to write a novel—but writing novels takes time, and time is expensive.”

“The Collected Works of Isaac Babel fills only two small volumes. Comparing Tolstoy’s Works to Babel’s is like comparing a long road to a pocket watch.”

“A straightforward relationship to factual truth never was one of Babel’s top priorities.”

“I now understand that love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don’t get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things—and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that’s the wonderful gift right there.”

“That’s how it is: Pushkin is everywhere. To this day, ‘Pushkin’ is used interchangeably with the phrase ‘someone’s uncle’ in Russian expressions such as: ‘And who will foot the bill—Pushkin?’”

“I stayed in all the novelty hotels—tree house hotels perched on stilts, troglodyte hotels carved from dolomites—and everywhere I found the same atmosphere of distrust. The travelers lived in terror of getting ripped off, or missing an ‘authentic’ experience. The locals were terrified lest they miss some ‘opportunity’ afforded by their foreign visitors.”

“Many times I had been told that Hungarian was related to Turkish, that the Hungarians and Turks descended from the same Altaic peoples, that Attila the Hun was Turkish, and so on. When I went to Hungary, however, I discovered that Hungarians do not share these beliefs at all. ‘Of course we have some Turkish words in our language,’ they would say. ‘For example, handcuffs. But that’s because you occupied our country for four hundred years.’”

“The class was taught in Russian by a Soviet-trained linguist called Alla who advised us, among other things, to treat our more stupid students with sympathy, ‘as if they had cancer.’”

“All around me, girls were buying absolutely unwearable-looking clothes: sheer dresses with V-necks down to the navel; jeans measuring literally two inches from waist to crotch; rhinestone-encrusted G-strings with no elasticity whatsoever.”

“Tolstoy insisted that Chekhov join him; Chekhov later recalled that, as he and Tolstoy sat naked in the chin-deep water, Tolstoy’s beard floated majestically before him.”

“Although I sometimes tried speaking Uzbek with Gulya, she would switch to Russian almost immediately, pointing out that we would understand each other better. Like most people, she was more interested in communicating her own thoughts and feelings than in helping to keep alight the flame of the Eastern Turkic languages.”

“‘You know, Emma, it’s hard for me to take English seriously, since I already speak three languages: Tajik, Russian, and Uzbek. English is much easier and simpler than these languages, so the little details of it aren’t really important to me.’”

“‘He’s a second-rate novelist. Do you read second-rate political theorists? Have you read James Harrington? No? He was the main republican of the English Revolution!’”

“‘The reinforced it with wood and plastic, so it wouldn’t fall on our heads. But what of it—roofs fall everywhere, we’re used to it.’”

“‘We Uzbeks don’t get into these ideological debates,’ Muzaffar explained. ‘We keep an open mind. We don’t know if there was a man on the moon, or if there wasn’t a man on the moon. We weren’t there.’”

“He told her that if she loved him, she would quit smoking. She said that love and smoking were completely unrelated.”