The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

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In Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, a young man named Hans Castorp arrives at a Swiss sanatorium to visit his tubercular cousin for three weeks. Although Castorp himself does not have tuberculosis, he somehow ends up staying in that sanatorium for seven years. The plot of The Magic Mountain mirrors the history of its composition: Mann set out to write a short story, but ended up producing a 1,200-page novel. Despite the novel’s complexity, its central question is very simple: How does someone who doesn’t actually have tuberculosis end up spending seven years at a tuberculosis sanatorium? I often ask myself a similar question: How does someone with no real academic aspirations end up spending seven years in suburban California studying the form of the Russian novel?

In The Magic Mountain, it all happens because of love. While visiting his cousin, Castorp becomes infatuated with another patient: the estranged wife of a Russian officer. Her high cheekbones and her gray-blue “Kirghiz-shaped eyes” recall to him a childhood fascination with Slavicness—specifically, with an idolized older boy at school, from whom the hero once, in the happiest moment of his life, borrowed a pencil. The Russian lady’s eyes, in particular, “amazingly and frighteningly resemble” those of this schoolboy; indeed, Mann emends, “ ‘resembled’ was not the right word—they were the same eyes.” Under their mesmerizing influence, Castorp is seized by a passion to learn about samovars, Cossacks, and the Russian language, colorfully characterized by Mann as “the muddy, barbaric, boneless tongue from the East.” One afternoon, Castorp attends a lecture titled “Love as a Pathogenic Force,” in which the sanatorium psychoanalyst diagnoses his entire audience as so many victims of love: “Symptoms of disease are…

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