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Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture
Angela Brintlinger (Edited by), Ilya Vinitsky (Edited by)
9781487520205
Paperback / softback, published 19 October 2015
344 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.56 kg
"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." - D. Beer (Slavonic and East European Review/vvol88:03:10) ‘A series of fascinating essays that approach the problem of insanity in Russian culture from wide-ranging disciplinary angles.’ - Valeria Sobol (The Russian Review) ‘The most comprehensive interdisciplinary survey of its kind.’ - Dmitri Shalin (Russian Journal of Communication) ‘A cornucopia of delights for specialists and generalists alike.’ - Scarlet Marquette (Slavic and East European Journal) ‘The volume is a broad mosaic ... exciting and kaleidoscopic.’ - Elena L. Grigorenko (PsycCRITIQUES) ‘This collection of essays is both an excellent introduction to madness and an opportunity to probe this fascinating terrain in depth.’
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.
Acknowledgments Introduction: Approaching Russian Madness PART ONE: MADNESS, THE STATE, AND SOCIETY 1 A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine the Great and the Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Controversy 2 The Osvidetel’stvovanie and Ispytanie of Insanity: Psychiatry in Tsarist Russia 3 Madness as an Act of Defence of Personality in Dostoevsky’sThe Double 4 Vsevolod Garshin, the Russian Intelligentsia, and Fan Hysteria 5 On Hostile Ground: Madness and Madhouse in Joseph Brodsky’s‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov' PART TWO: MADNESS, WAR, AND REVOLUTION 6 The Concept of Revolutionary Insanity in Russian History 7 The Politics of Etiology: Shell Shock in the Russian Army, 1914–1918 8 Lives Out of Balance: The ‘Possible World’ of Soviet Suicide during the 1920s 9 Early Soviet Forensic Psychiatric Approaches to Sex Crime, 1917–1934 PART THREE: MADNESS AND CREATIVITY 10 Writing about Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887–1907 11 ‘Let Them Go Crazy’: Madness in the Works of Chekhov 12 The Genetics of Genius: V.P. Efroimson and the Biosocial Mechanisms of Heightened Intellectual Activity 13 Madwomen without Attics: The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative Iurodivaia 14 A ‘New Russian’ Madness? Fedor Mikhailov’s Novel Idiot and Roman Kachanov’s Film Daun Khaus 15 Methods of Madness and Madness as a Method Afterword Bibliography
Note on Translation and Transliteration
ANGELA BRINTLINGER
ILYA VINITSKY
LIA IANGOULOVA
ELENA DRYZHAKOVA
ROBERT D. WESSLING
LEV LOSEFF
MARTIN A. MILLER
IRINA SIROTKINA
KENNETH PINNOW
DAN HEALEY
ANGELA BRINTLINGER
MARGARITA ODESSKAYA
YVONNE HOWELL
HELENA GOSCILO
ANDREI ROGACHEVSKII
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN
JULIE V. BROWN
Contributors