It was a textbook dialogue that hooked Batuman, one between “Vera,” a physics graduate student, and “Ivan,” Vera’s physicist boyfriend, who with no explanation moves to Siberia and eventually marries someone else, by which time “Vera didn’t care anymore.” Adding this star-crossed pair to the cast of Slavic malcontents she’d previously come across — including Anna Karenina at her grandmother’s apartment in Ankara, and Maxim, her brooding violin teacher in Manhattan — Batuman concluded that “at every step, the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love appeared bound up with Russian.”