When a Creative Writing guru tells her that she has the choice of being an academic who writes about books or an author who writes them, Batuman rebels: ‘Don Quixote, I realized, had broken the binary of life and literature. He had lived life and read books; he lived life through books, generating an even better book.’ If Don Quixote is one influence here, another could be Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying, which argues that real life is a tacky and often preposterous copy of great art.

The Possessed is composed of eight autobiographical essays (previously published in the New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine) that chronicle Batuman’s academic apprenticeship in Stanford University’s Russian Department. Alluding to Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name, Batuman and the people she meets are ‘the Possessed’ – infected and transformed by Russian literature. A strange mixture of autobiography, satire and literary criticism, each piece ends up as an elegant and hilarious meditation on the relation of art to life, and vice versa. Luckily, possession by Russian classics is a benign and indeed fruitful malady.

Batuman’s descriptions make you hunger for distant languages and literatures. Her account of studying Old Uzbek in Samarkand leaves you with the sad thought that unless Batuman herself decides to translate them, most of us will never get a chance to read the Uzbek classics such as the poet Alisher Navoi (who implores his beloved to ‘take the muscles out my body and make a leash for your little dog!’) or Abdulla Qahhor (described by one enthusiast as writing ‘in the style of Chekhov, but at a one-thousand-times higher level’), or to luxuriate in the subtleties of Old Uzbek’s one hundred different words for the verb ‘to cry’ and more than seventy for ‘duck’.

Batuman breathes books: literature informs and supercharges everything she sees. Life in Samarkand is ‘like a Borges story – except that Borges stories are always short, whereas life in Samarkand kept dragging obscurely on and on’. A television commercial for maternity clinics, where ‘babies lolled beatifically in individual glass basins’ , reminds her of Swift’s A Modest Proposal. She excels at judicious condemnations. Of Creative Writing courses she writes: ‘Whatever reservations I had about the usefulness of reading and analyzing great novels went double for reading and analyzing the writings of a bunch of kids like me.’ Chekhov’s Lady with Lapdog is used to deride the feeble and pretentious Best American Stories 2006: ‘No contemporary American short story writer would have the courage not to name that lapdog,’ she observes. Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk exemplifies the demoralised state of the Turkish novel: ‘The thing that immediately struck one about the Turkish novel is that nobody read it, not even Turkish people. Even in 1997, of course, there was Orhan Pamuk, already writing novels … and you could see how miserable he was about it.’

Batuman celebrates writers who refused to let life get in the way of art. The heroes of this triumph over the facts are Uzbekistan’s great poet, Adib Akhmad Yugnakiy, who, though congenitally blind, could demonstrate ‘his preternatural poetic vision’ by ‘molding a cooked bean into the shape of a ram, an animal he had never seen before’, and the wild Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who demanded that Stalin ‘deliver reports about the production of poetry as he would about pig-iron and smelting steel!’

But in twentieth-century Russia life crushed art. Batuman’s deepest affinity is for the short story writer Isaac Babel, who was executed in Stalin’s purges. While The Possessed is usually unstoppably funny, Batuman broods over the photographs of Babel (he was never photographed without his glasses) taken just before his execution:

Photographed in profile, Babel gazes into the distance, chin raised, with an expression of pained resoluteness. Photographed head-on, however, he seems to be looking at something quite close to him. He seems to be looking at someone whohe knows to be on the verge of committing a terrible action. Of these images, a German historian once observed: ‘both show the writer without his glasses and one black eye, medically speaking a monocle haematoma, evidence of the violence used against him’. I felt sorry for the German. I understood that it was the inadequacy of ‘without his glasses and with one black eye’ that drove him to use a phrase so absurd as ‘monocle haematoma’. The absence of glasses is unspeakably violent. You need long, Latin words to describe it.

This passage, and many more like it, put The Possessed leaps and bounds ahead of a standard book on Russian culture such as Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance (2002), where the discussions of literature occupy roughly the same level as Tolstoy’s Wikipedia entry.

Art can take a hard battering from life. Writers and the academics who worship them often seem rather absurd, malfunctioning creatures. But Batuman – in Isaac Babel’s words, ‘a martyr to books’ – finds something admirable, even transcendent in that unworldly calling, for all its eccentricities and hardships. Finishing The Possessed, you think of the dying writer in Henry James’s ‘The Death of the Lion’, whosays of his vocation: ‘Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’