In a world defined by categories, Elif Batuman and Lorin Stein, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, had a problem positioning Batuman's debut book, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, due out February 23.

They couldn't figure out exactly where the book fit. Part literary criticism, part travel writing, part memoir, Batuman's collection of seven nonfiction pieces moves from the campus of Stanford University to Uzbekistan, contemplating everything from Isaac Babel to an overweight mathematician in Florence who confides in an e-mail to Batuman: “I haven't had sex with a woman.... Also I haven't done laundry in almost a month and all my underwear is dirty.” But, somehow, it all ties in with Russian literature.

“We didn't know whether it was memoir or essays or what,” says Batuman, 32. “And then finally my editor decided to just run with it. His idea was to market it as a fun look at something serious.” The result is a collection of engagingly fresh essays not just about Russian literature but about people who are enamored with it, following a deceptively simple premise of traveling to where the authors—Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski—traveled while they were writing their novels. Think of it as an accessible literary travelogue by a self-effacing narrator with a dry sense of humor. “The idea,” Batuman says, “was to follow literature and to see where it leads you in the world.”

One of the odder places was Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, where Batuman traveled on a grant to learn Uzbek. The road from Tashkent to Samarkand passes for a short distance through Kazakhstan, and on the drive Batuman noticed the Kazakh landscape was bare of trees. Then suddenly they reappeared. She asked the driver if they had passed back into Uzbekistan; yes, he said, you could tell because the trees were back.

“'They, um, don't have trees in Kazakhstan?'

“He shook his head, frowning. 'Don't like them.'

“'The Kazakhs don't... like trees?'

“The driver shook his head more emphatically. 'No way.' ”

That was the end of the conversation, and such moments, Batuman says, evoke the anomalies that make life interesting.

“I remember from my childhood that you see the world in the space of differences,” she says. “You can ask someone and maybe they'll tell you, but it's going to be some random thing that you're not going to understand. I felt sort of thrown back into that. You look out the window, and it was true, there really weren't any trees.”

Batuman grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of Turkish immigrants. She fell into Russian by a circuitous route that began in high school with a Russian violin instructor while she was reading Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, followed by stumbling across her mother's copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina while visiting her grandmother in Ankara. Batuman wants to write novels herself. But she passed over creative writing programs in favor of earning a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Stanford University, focusing on Russian literature as well as French and English. She now teaches there part-time and lives in San Francisco.

Where fiction (usually) is carefully plotted and constructed, the events in Batuman's essays—versions of some have appeared in N+1 and the New Yorker—unfold inadvertently, built around chance encounters, conversations, and telling juxtapositions. And wry tales, like the Uzbek landlord who, after not receiving a cash bonus from Batuman, began removing furniture from her suite of rooms, one piece at a time, until there was nothing left but audio tapes by a Swedish yogi.

“That's kind of how I experience my life,” Batuman says. “The very small extent to which it was conscious, I was thinking about the idea that life is this contingent thing that becomes necessary as you live it and how the minute something happens, it sort of becomes necessary.... I don't know if I'm particularly bad at planning, but I'm always surprised by things.”

She compares it to Tolstoy's War and Peace, in which characters are introduced, but then disappear from the narrative, or whose significance to the story isn't immediately clear. “A lot of things are accidental and you don't plan for them, and you don't even notice them at first,” Batuman says. But “they can turn out to be these fateful, life-determining encounters.”