Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture

by Angela Brintlinger (Editor), Ilya Vinitsky (Editor)

Overview

The problem of madness has preoccupied Russian thinkers since the beginning of Russia's troubled history and has been dealt with repeatedly in literature, art, film, and opera, as well as medical, political, and philosophical essays. Madness has been treated not only as a medical or psychological matter, but also as a metaphysical one, encompassing problems of suffering, imagination, history, sex, social and world order, evil, retribution, death, and the afterlife.

Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture represents a joint effort by American, British, and Russian scholars - historians, literary scholars, sociologists, cultural theorists, and philosophers - to understand the rich history of madness in the political, literary, and cultural spheres of Russia. Editors Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky have brought together essays that cover over 250 years and address a wide variety of ideas related to madness - from the involvement of state and social structures in questions of mental health, to the attitudes of major Russian authors and cultural figures towards insanity and how those attitudes both shape and are shaped by the history, culture, and politics of Russia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487520205
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Publication date:	10/19/2015
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.01(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

Angela Brintlinger is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University.

Ilya Vinitsky is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration

Introduction: Approaching Russian Madness
ANGELA BRINTLINGER

PART ONE: MADNESS, THE STATE, AND SOCIETY

1 A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine the Great and the Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Controversy
ILYA VINITSKY

2 The Osvidetel’stvovanie and Ispytanie of Insanity: Psychiatry in Tsarist Russia
LIA IANGOULOVA

3 Madness as an Act of Defence of Personality in Dostoevsky’sThe Double
ELENA DRYZHAKOVA

4 Vsevolod Garshin, the Russian Intelligentsia, and Fan Hysteria
ROBERT D. WESSLING

5 On Hostile Ground: Madness and Madhouse in Joseph Brodsky’s‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov'
LEV LOSEFF

PART TWO: MADNESS, WAR, AND REVOLUTION

6 The Concept of Revolutionary Insanity in Russian History
MARTIN A. MILLER

7 The Politics of Etiology: Shell Shock in the Russian Army, 1914–1918
IRINA SIROTKINA

8 Lives Out of Balance: The ‘Possible World’ of Soviet Suicide during the 1920s
KENNETH PINNOW

9 Early Soviet Forensic Psychiatric Approaches to Sex Crime, 1917–1934
DAN HEALEY

PART THREE: MADNESS AND CREATIVITY

10 Writing about Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887–1907
ANGELA BRINTLINGER

11 ‘Let Them Go Crazy’: Madness in the Works of Chekhov
MARGARITA ODESSKAYA

12 The Genetics of Genius: V.P. Efroimson and the Biosocial Mechanisms of Heightened Intellectual Activity
YVONNE HOWELL

13 Madwomen without Attics: The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative Iurodivaia
HELENA GOSCILO

14 A ‘New Russian’ Madness? Fedor Mikhailov’s Novel Idiot and Roman Kachanov’s Film Daun Khaus
ANDREI ROGACHEVSKII

15 Methods of Madness and Madness as a Method
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN

Afterword
JULIE V. BROWN

Bibliography
Contributors

What People are Saying About This

Caryl Emerson

‘“Madness (bezumie) is a language,” Mikhail Epstein writes in his contribution to this wonderfully eclectic and wide-ranging volume. In the Russian literary tradition, that language has enjoyed high status: it was spoken by holy fools, saintly idiots, honest citizens incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, great poets in their capacity as prophets. In the post-Soviet period, this spectrum broadened to include de-ideologized studies of neurosis, depression, suicide, fan hysteria, shell shock, revolutionary trauma — all of which are discussed here by Russians from inside their own culture as well as by outsiders and bi-culturals. A fascinating book on that most difficult task: making cultural sense out of worlds and psyches designed to work on the far side of reason.’

Editorial Reviews

"This collection is an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which the shifting discourse of madness offers a rich and varied lens through which to explore Russia's troubled experience of modernity."

Slavonic and East European Review/vvol88:03:10 - D. Beer

‘A series of fascinating essays that approach the problem of insanity in Russian culture from wide-ranging disciplinary angles.’

The Russian Review - Valeria Sobol

‘The most comprehensive interdisciplinary survey of its kind.’

Russian Journal of Communication - Dmitri Shalin

‘A cornucopia of delights for specialists and generalists alike.’

Slavic and East European Journal - Scarlet Marquette

‘The volume is a broad mosaic ... exciting and kaleidoscopic.’

PsycCRITIQUES - Elena L. Grigorenko

'This collection of essays is both an excellent introduction to madness and an opportunity to probe this fascinating terrain in depth.'

Left History vol 20:01:2016 - Nigel Raab

"This collection is an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which the shifting discourse of madness offers a rich and varied lens through which to explore Russia's troubled experience of modernity."

Slavonic and East European Review/vvol88:03:10 - D. Beer

‘This collection of essays is both an excellent introduction to madness and an opportunity to probe this fascinating terrain in depth.’

Left History vol 20:01:2016 - Nigel Raab