Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture 9781442684539

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MADNESS AND THE MAD IN RUSSIAN CULTURE

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EDITED BY ANGELA BRINTLINGER AND ILYA VINITSKY

Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9140-6

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Madness and the mad in Russian culture / edited by Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8020-9140-7 1. Mental illness – Russia (Federation) – History. 2. Mental illness in literature. I. Brintlinger, Angela II. Vinitsky, Ilya DK32.B816 2007

306.4’61

C2006-904366-3

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Note on Translation and Transliteration

xi

Introduction: Approaching Russian Madness angela brintlinger

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PART ONE: MADNESS, THE STATE, AND SOCIETY 1 A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine the Great and the Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Controversy 25 ilya vinitsky 2 The Osvidetel’stvovanie and Ispytanie of Insanity: Psychiatry in Tsarist Russia 46 lia iangoulova 3 Madness as an Act of Defence of Personality in Dostoevsky’s The Double 59 elena dryzhakova 4 Vsevolod Garshin, the Russian Intelligentsia, and Fan Hysteria 75 robert d. wessling 5 On Hostile Ground: Madness and Madhouse in Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ 90 lev loseff

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Contents

PART TWO: MADNESS, WAR, AND REVOLUTION 6 The Concept of Revolutionary Insanity in Russian History martin a. miller

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7 The Politics of Etiology: Shell Shock in the Russian Army, 1914–1918 117 irina sirotkina 8 Lives Out of Balance: The ‘Possible World’ of Soviet Suicide during the 1920s 130 kenneth pinnow 9 Early Soviet Forensic Psychiatric Approaches to Sex Crime, 1917–1934 150 dan healey PART THREE: MADNESS AND CREATIVITY 10 Writing about Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887–1907 173 angela brintlinger 11 ‘Let Them Go Crazy’: Madness in the Works of Chekhov margarita odesskaya

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12 The Genetics of Genius: V.P. Efroimson and the Biosocial Mechanisms of Heightened Intellectual Activity 208 yvonne howell 13 Madwomen without Attics: The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative Iurodivaia 226 helena goscilo 14 A ‘New Russian’ Madness? Fedor Mikhailov’s Novel Idiot and Roman Kachanov’s Film Daun Khaus 242 andrei rogachevskii 15 Methods of Madness and Madness as a Method 263 mikhail epstein

Contents

Afterword 283 julie v. brown Bibliography

301

Contributors 329

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Acknowledgments

This project is the result of many hands and heads. It all started when Tatiana Smorodinskaya introduced Angela to Ilya Vinitsky – ‘If you’re interested in madness, you should meet Ilya,’ she said. ‘He knows all about crazy Russians.’ By that time, Ilya had designed and taught his course ‘Madness and Madmen in Russian Culture’ at the University of Pittsburgh, where Helena Goscilo proved to be as passionate about madness as he was. The course has migrated with him to the University of Pennsylvania. The idea for an international conference met enthusiasm from Angela’s colleague Halina Stephan, who not only facilitated the conference ‘Those Crazy Russians’ at Ohio State in April 2003, but lent her wholehearted intellectual approval as well as her beautiful home for part of the festivities. The OSU Slavic Center, Office of International Affairs, Slavic Department, and College of Humanities all supported the conference financially. The participants in the conference, most of whom are represented here in the volume, journeyed many miles and with complicated itineraries to reach Columbus, though one traveller never made it, and two almost didn’t make it back home. The convivial and collegial atmosphere of our working conference was matched only by the co-operation and kindly correspondence which followed as the articles for the book began to come together. Working in both English and Russian, these scholars brought together by the intellectual and cultural problems inherent in insanity have overcome international boundaries and communicated, mostly electronically, throughout the months. Two important additions to our kommanda were Barbara Poston and Ona Renner-Fahey, who ably translated two

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Acknowledgments

difficult Russian texts. The final ingredient in the mix was Julie V. Brown, the reigning expert on the history of Russian psychiatry (a fact made clear in our bibliography and notes throughout the volume). Julie’s afterword acts as a synthesis, bringing the volume to a contemporary close. Jill McConkey, our editor at the University of Toronto Press, believed in the project from the moment it surfaced in her inbox. The Press’s two anonymous reviewers offered useful and insightful suggestions. Jill’s associates Barbara Porter and Judy Williams have helped her shepherd the text through the publishing process. Judy is especially to be commended – her abilities to spot typos and grammatical, stylistic, and logical infelicities in both English and transliterated Russian are uncanny, particularly as she does not know Russian. Her copyediting was superb and has made this a much better volume. Tania Ivanova-Sullivan created our works cited in a valiant attempt to impose order on the many authors. Much of the initial editing was cheerfully offered by Steven Conn, whose unerring judgment is as rare as it is valuable (and valued). Steve was instrumental in keeping Angela sane and has probably been even more excited and proud of this volume than she is, and that is saying quite a lot. Angela would like to dedicate this volume to her father, who in the late 1970s successfully hid his fear at her initial interest in things Russian, in the late 1980s came to Russia to see what those crazy Russians were like in person, from the late 1990s began to read her scholarship about Russia with good cheer and immense pride, and to this day continues to support her and challenge her in her chosen profession. Thanks, Dad. In his turn, Ilya would like to dedicate the collection to his daughter Anna, who was born in the US and whose favourite song is ‘Boom, boom, ain’t it great to be crazy?’ Publication was made possible through the financial assistance of the College of Humanities at Ohio State University, as well as the OSU Slavic Department, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Note on Translation and Transliteration

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in the text are our own. We use the Library of Congress transliteration system, except in the case of widely known names, such as Dostoevsky, and where already anglicized forms are part of common usage or where we are citing from English translations of books published with another spelling (such as Tatyana Tolstaya). We have used MLA style for references, and all authors’ names are spelled according to the LC system in references and works cited. Citations from the Soviet Academy editions of writers’ collected works will refer to the author, PSS, and the volume number.

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MADNESS AND THE MAD IN RUSSIAN CULTURE

Pyotr Kosolap, Madness (Mad Fiddler at the Body of His Dead Mother), 1863. The Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Russia

Introduction: Approaching Russian Madness angela brintlinger

The Explanation, when it comes, will come not from the mental, but from the physical side – from the study of the neurosis, not from the analysis of the psychosis. Henry Maudsley (1874) I walked and thought: the world is stricken by madness. Madness is becoming the norm. The norm evokes a sense of miracle ... Sergei Dovlatov, The Sanctuary (1983)

Even as the Soviet Union crumbled, themes of medical and forensic psychiatry as well as psychotherapy gained new prominence in Russian social and cultural discourse. One of the first examples was Alfred Schnittke’s opera Life with an Idiot, based on the story by Viktor Erofeev. The opera premiered in Amsterdam in April 1992, marrying Schnittke’s dissonent modernist musical vision with an attempt to juxtapose ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ psyches. Russians discovered the history of psychoanalysis in Russia in a book by their countryman Alexander Etkind (Eros of the Impossible, 1993) and learned of the West’s reappraisal of psychiatry and mental institutions in the first Russian translation in 1997 of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965).1 Fictional works focused on life in the ‘madhouse,’ among them the 1998 novels by Viktor Pelevin (Chapaev and Pustota) and Vladimir Makanin (Underground, or a Hero of our Time).2 Films, too, began to address the topic of mental illness, in connection with contemporary events like the war in Chechnya as well as historical events – from the Revolution to dissident culture to Afghanistan.3 Just as the last decades of the nineteenth century saw an intensified public discussion of mental illness and its place in society,4 so too in

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the last decade of the twentieth century Russians became more informed about modern psychiatry and psychology, both in the forms of therapists and psychotropic drugs – and began to talk about mental illness in new ways. This interest in madness and psychiatry surely stems from the more general reassessment and reconsideration of Russian and Soviet history made possible in the post-Soviet period. Among other things, Russians have now begun to confront fully what Western human rights organizations and scholars had been decrying for decades: the systematic use of psychiatric incarceration – the practice of treatment, or torture, of dissidents in the Soviet era – as part of a larger apparatus of statesponsored repression. The use of psychiatry as part of that apparatus was formalized in 1959, when Nikita Khrushchev defined any kind of dissent or social deviation as mental illness. Quoted in Pravda as saying that ‘a crime is a deviation from generally recognized standards of behavior, frequently caused by mental disorder,’5 Khrushchev thus gave carte blanche to psychiatric panels working under the aegis of the KGB (Medvedev 200).6 As the epigraph from Sergei Dovlatov suggests, the concept of the ‘norm’ was problematic for Soviet and now post-Soviet citizens, and the meaning of madness was even more unclear. Russians have always used descriptive terms implying madness, insanity, and temporary loss of reason to denote their friends, colleagues, and enemies, not to mention administrative practices and whole systems of government.7 The term ‘crazy Russian’ is now almost universally recognized among Englishspeaking people – but what may seem hyperbolic, colloquial or mocking has a serious and scientific side to it as well. The history of the cultural construct of mental illness and of the development of psychiatry as a field of medicine is part of the context for the ubiquity of ‘craziness’ in Russian culture and literature. An equally important part of that context is the relationship between medicine, the ill, and state structures, including the church and its monasteries.8 Some scholars – and doctors – have ‘blamed’ the Russian state itself for fostering mental disturbances among its people. Laura Engelstein has referred to the Russian regime’s preference for the police or custodial state (Polizeistaat), aimed at ‘promot[ing] the general well-being through surveillance and active social intervention,’ rather than instituting a Rechtsstaat or the rule of law (84–5). Englestein’s analysis was foreshadowed by early Russian psychiatrist Petr Tutyshkin, who suggested something similar at the Third Congress of Russian Psychiatrists in 1911, and argued that it was the duty of psychiatrists to replace the

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concepts of ‘lawlessness’ and ‘tyranny’ dominant in the consciousness of the Russian masses with ideas of ‘legality’ and ‘rights’ in order to prevent the moral degeneration of the Russian people (‘Zadachi’ 737). As one of his colleagues wrote in the wake of the Revolution of 1905: Psychiatry, in analysing the pathological effects of the political repression we are enduring, should acknowledge that the disease-producing seeds of lawlessness and brute force are being scattered throughout our land. The effects will be experienced by future generations of psychiatrists ... We are witness only to their earliest and weakest, however disheartening, growth. (Sholomovich)9

Thus psychiatrists before the Bolshevik Revolution expressed a certain fear for the psyches of the Russian people in the face of tsarist political repression, not to mention their extensive scholarly discussions of the effects of poverty, starvation, alcoholism, and poor hygiene on the mental health of the people. The collapse of the Soviet Union has also enabled scholars – both Russian and others – to evaluate the role of psychiatry and psychiatric practice in Russian history and culture. Despite the centrality, indeed, the near-ubiquity, of madness in Russian discourse of various kinds, the subject has not been treated as extensively by scholars as one might expect. This can be explained in part by the fact that under the Soviet regime psychiatry was so tightly connected to political and human rights issues that it was difficult for scholars to treat it seriously in other contexts. Of course, the complicated connection between political or social dissent and a diagnosis of insanity is not exclusively Soviet. The contemporary poet and performer Dmitry Prigov was indeed incarcerated by Soviet authorities in the late 1980s explicitly for his literary acts, but in the nineteenth century Russian philosopher Petr Chaadaev was also discredited through accusations of madness. Nor, of course, is the connection exclusively Russian – the psychiatric hospital has acted as a potent metaphor for a number of societies. Most famously, perhaps, American writer Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) investigated ideas and conditions similar to those we see in fictionalized Russian wards of the 1980s and 1990s.10 Still, when Tom Stoppard set his 1978 play Every Good Boy Deserves Favor in an asylum, he chose to set that asylum in Brezhnev’s Russia, not in America or Britain.11 At its premiere, his work was perceived within a context of worldwide censure of Soviet psychiatric practice – bulletins, news reports, and entire books published at the time echoed the 1977 statement of the World Psychiatric Associa-

6 Angela Brintlinger

tion condemning Soviet psychiatric repression – and still today the play reminds us that these questions about madness and society have a particular urgency in the Russian context. That urgency was only redoubled as the Soviet era came crashing to its end. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, this topic can be treated anew. As Russians began their struggle, now nearly two decades old, to replace old social structures and moral guidelines with new ones, the post-Soviet period proved the right time for Russian society to reconsider its understanding and treatment of the mentally ill. In that spirit, a wide variety of scholars gathered for an international conference, organized by myself and Ilya Vinitsky, and held at Ohio State University in April 2003, which we called ‘Those Crazy Russians: Madness in Russian Culture, History, and Society.’ This volume is the fruit of that forum. We have attempted to consider madness broadly and inclusively, to look at the ways in which mental illness has been understood in Russia – by the populace, the state, the medical authorities, and the creative personalities who have incorporated various psychological abnormalities into their literary casts of characters – and the ways in which mental instabilities have been dealt with in Russia by a wide variety of institutions and individuals – from the tsarist government to the Red Army, from poets and philosophers to legal and medical professionals. We range over some 250 years of Russian history and delve into topics as wide-ranging as melancholy and shell shock, sexuality and suicide, revolution and genetics, and of course literature and literary uses of madness and manias. Our approaches are sociological, historical, philosophical, political, literary, and cultural. The scholars involved in the project also vary: we are philosophers, historians, culturologists, anthropologists, and literary critics, from the United States, Great Britain, and Russia. As a whole, our volume aims to investigate problems related to the general topic of Russia and madness, as well as to the specific topics which form our specializations. There are and always have been competing definitions of madness and shifting boundaries between normalcy and deviance. In putting the volume together, we have elected to use a variety of terms almost interchangeably. Madness, insanity, lunacy – all were used at different moments to describe the phenomenon of mental illness, and we have not stripped that language away, even if some of it now seems anachronistic. That inclusiveness also extends beyond notions of madness as individual pathology. In addition to being a ‘disease,’ ‘madness’ is also

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a cultural symbol, a metaphor, an epithet, and so on, and the broad spectrum of how it has been used in Russia is part of what we are trying to capture. The volume is divided into sections to explore three main areas of how madness is reflected and represented in secular society: ‘Madness, the State, and Society’; ‘Madness, War, and Revolution’; and ‘Madness and Creativity.’ Within the sections the articles proceed in a relatively chronological order, considering the way madness has been constructed in the modern age in Russia, from the eighteenth century to the present day, within the institutions of the state and the army as well as in intellectual, literary, and medical milieux. In this collection, we are primarily concerned with the social implications of the mad in modern Russian culture, and we have thus not delved much into the medieval period, nor have we looked very closely at the construction of madness within the context of the Orthodox Church. We leave those deliberations to other scholars and another volume. In the post-Soviet period, mental illness and all that surrounds it have for cultural and intellectual figures served as perhaps the most apt metaphor for the Russian and Soviet past and for its present. If under the Soviets Russians were fond of exclaiming ‘What a madhouse!’ (Nu i durdom!), then certainly conditions of post-Soviet life have kept that expression on the tip of their tongues. Fools, the Mad, and Madhouses: The Medieval and Early Modern Period The Russian cultural tradition includes the category of ‘fools for Christ,’ iurodivye, who were considered to be ‘touched’ or ‘blessed.’ This cultural role had a variety of characteristics, but included nakedness or nearnakedness, an often deliberate lack of hygiene, including public spitting, urination, and defecation, the wearing of chains, and incoherent or incomprehensible speech acts. Holy fools were not just a part of daily culture, but were even canonized as saints in the Russian Orthodox Church as early as the thirteenth century. The clear lack of stigma in accepting the role of holy fool is demonstrated by Ivan IV (1533–84), or Ivan the Terrible, who occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of Parfenii the holy fool (Murav, Holy Foolishness 19). This tradition from early Russian history has survived throughout modern Russian history, and holy fools have been visible in both life and literature, particularly in the works of Dostoevsky.

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The historian of madness Roy Porter called the twentieth century the ‘psychiatric century’ (Madness 9), though near its end we entered the Age of Prozac.12 However, historians of psychiatry generally date the beginning of the era of humane psychiatric care to 1792, the year William Tuke founded his York Retreat in England and Philippe Pinel allegedly struck the chains from the patients at asylums in Paris.13 For Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the treatment of madness was tied, as it was for Europeans, to questions of rationality and the Age of Reason. Descartes saw consciousness as rational, and insanity as an absence or illness of reason. John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), saw madness as a fault in cognition rather than as a diabolical or humoral condition. Russians, too, at about the same moment, began to recognize that mad people needed to be treated by scientific approach.14 In 1762 Tsar Peter III issued a decree in Russia that ‘mad people were not to be sent to a monastery, but rather to a special house, as was the case in foreign countries.’15 This was a new way of looking at the mad. In the past, the mentally imbalanced were seen as part of the tradition of holy fools, or at any rate fell under the purview of the religious authorities. But by the mid-eighteenth century, even before any psychiatric hospitals had been established, the responsibility for the rational treatment of irrational patients was beginning to shift from the church to medicine, from the arena of superstition to that of science. As Russians attempted to become more rational and more European in all aspects of society, the mad too were to be treated ‘as in foreign countries.’ (In practical terms the point was moot, as at this time the only institutions with the facilities to deal with the mentally ill were monasteries.) Catherine the Great stands as a pivotal figure in the importation of the Western Enlightenment to the Russian empire. Our collection opens with Ilya Vinitsky’s exploration of the definition of melancholy as an ideological and political construct. As he argues in his ‘A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine the Great and the Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Controversy,’ melancholy and its related psychic disturbances (lunacy, misanthropy, suicide) were constructed in the second half of the eighteenth century as Western and secular, as imported diseases with which Russian society needed to struggle. Ultimately the relationship between melancholy and revolution – the ‘French mania,’ as Catherine termed it – caused the Empress to insist upon the ‘mirthful’ nature of both Russia and its ruler. Below, Martin Miller also

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argues that when in 1776 to 1779 Catherine the Great founded the first institutions for the mentally ill – the ‘yellow houses,’ or zheltye doma, as they came to be called – in Novgorod, Moscow, and St Petersburg, she did so precisely as a response to the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. Psychiatry in Russia began to develop significantly later than in Western European countries. The term ‘psychiatry’ itself arrived in Russia through Western medical texts and came into popular use toward the second half of the nineteenth century. Words such as ‘psychic’ and ‘psychiatry’ came into use in parallel with the development of a new field of medical knowledge – the medical study of mental illnesses. According to dictionaries, the concepts of ‘norm’ and ‘normal’ began to spread at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Along with the common definition of usual, everyday, habitual, and not deviating from the norm, a second meaning of these words also arose – that of a normal person, i.e., mentally healthy. However, in Russia the process of the institutionalization of psychiatry as a legitimate branch of medicine continued for over a century, and scientific psychiatry arose only some fifty years after the establishment of lunatic asylums. Books on the topic of mental illnesses appeared as early as the 1730s (see Nevskii and Fedotov). It was a century later, however, that Russian authors began to offer a general introduction to the new science, working to delineate the field of studying and treating mental illness. In 1829, Phillippe Pinel’s A Medical and Philosophical Outline of Mental Illness: Krasnopol’skii’s Translation, with an Addendum of Mattei’s Instruction on Mental Illnesses appeared in St Petersburg, followed by Gromov’s A Short Account of Forensic Medicine, which included a section entitled ‘The forensics of mental illnesses’ (1832). From the end of the 1840s, the publication of special psychiatric guides became the rule (Iudin 457–60), while, beginning in the 1860s, the literature began to focus on more narrow professional issues. According to Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization, the history of madness in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should really be an account not of disease and its treatment but of freedom and control, knowledge and power. Psychiatrists and asylums were tools of repression masquerading as medical progress in the liberal democracies of the nineteenth century.16 But for Russia, the advent of the asylum and the rise of psychiatric care as a separate discipline and profession ensured that the mentally imbalanced had some small recourse, some refuge, from the cold and the tauntings of the populace. Probably a two-

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edged sword, the modernization of the mad in Russia both deprived them of their special, holy status and enabled them to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, and perhaps even treated. The complexities of how the mentally ill were to be defined and treated are discussed by one of Russia’s first Foucauldian scholars, Lia Iangoulova, who here presents her research on the evolution of legal terminology dealing with madness in tsarist Russia. In ‘The Osvidetel’stvovanie and Ispytanie of Insanity: Psychiatry in Tsarist Russia,’ Iangoulova describes a picture of shifting and overlapping vocabulary, as the tsarist government strove to determine which of its citizens were capable of service and which were best confined in lunatic asylums. The attitude toward insanity in Russia underwent significant change following the reforms of the eighteenth century. In Iangoulova’s opinion it was governmental reform rather than the development of scientific knowledge that was the primary determining factor in the formation of Russian psychiatry. Initially, the regime’s attention was directed toward establishing public order. As Iangoulova argues in her chapter, the procedures that were developed to test and ascertain mental illness, osvidetel’stvovanie and ispytanie, served a practical function for the state: determining which citizens were functional and contributing servants of the empire and which offered no benefit, or indeed were disruptive and sabotaging, for the state.17 The Mad in Story and History in Late Imperial Russia In the nineteenth century the rise of specialized medical practitioners, and specialized medical vocabulary, caused holy fools and lunatics to be ‘recategorized’ as pathological. As Harriet Murav has shown in her study of Dostoevsky’s novels, ‘with the rise of medical psychology in the late nineteenth century, what might have been previously understood to be an ascetic practice, or a sign of a charismatic ability, could now be diagnosed as a symptom of disease. The foolishness of the holy fool could be interpreted as abnormality’ (Holy Foolishness 5). Dostoevsky himself was seen as ‘one of us’ by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century psychiatrists,18 and as Daniel Rancour-Laferriere notes, ‘Dostoevsky has received more attention from the psychoanalytically minded critics than has any other Russian writer’ (6). Dostoevsky and his works are central to Russian understanding of modern madmen and madwomen, and our volume demonstrates this centrality. In her gendered consideration of the female iurodivaia, Hel-

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ena Goscilo uses Dostoevsky’s female fools as background for the empowered women of her women-authored texts. Elena Dryzhakova looks at the Doppelgänger phenomenon, comparing Dostoevsky to his predecessors Gogol’, Hoffmann, and Herzen. Martin Miller explores the concept of revolutionary madness, particularly in Dostoevsky’s The Devils, and Andrei Rogachevski, whose chapter focuses on early twenty-first-century revisions of Dostoevsky, nonetheless returns to the era of The Idiot. It was precisely in Dostoevsky’s time that the profession of the psychiatrist was beginning to develop, and conversations about mental instability proliferated on the pages of the journals of the time, including his own journals. When Dostoevsky wrote about the radical revolutionaries of his time, he saw in them dangerous phenomena about which society needed warning. Thus his revolutionaries, especially in The Devils, were portrayed as lunatics. In ‘The Concept of Revolutionary Madness in Russian History,’ Miller traces this idea from Philippe Pinel, through Catherine the Great and Radishchev and Nicholas I and Chaadaev, to the Revolution of 1905. Not long after the famous Nechaev case that inspired The Devils, another writer offered the Russian public a story of his personal experience in mental asylums. Vsevolod Garshin, author of ‘The Red Flower’ (1883), suffered from manic-depression, and, as Robert Wessling shows, Garshin’s mental illness actually became the centre of a personality cult. In her Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia, Laura Engelstein has argued that biological theories explained crime and violence as ‘the products of uncontrollable forces, organic processes in which neither individuality nor culture played the central part.’ It was here that the medical profession saw a role for itself – ‘in the identification and regulation of social deviance’ (126).19 But practising physicians were not the only ones who saw the importance of exploring how doctors and society interacted. Anton Chekhov, probably the most famous of Russia’s writer-doctors, was also concerned about these questions. As Margarita Odesskaya points out, it is ironic that, at the end of the twentieth century, writers and psychiatrists have begun to look at Chekhov himself as a subject of their psychiatric inquiry, in addition to analysing his characters as if they were patients. Here Odesskaya reexamines two fictional works of Chekhov in the context of social psychiatry and the problem of ‘genius and madness,’ so important, she reminds us, for Chekhov’s time at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The institution of psychiatry and its part in Russia’s

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social system were of great concern for Chekhov, and he explored that especially in his story ‘Ward No. 6.’ During the Russo-Japanese War, a new category of mental illness emerged – that of the ‘war neurotic.’ Eventually to be called ‘shell shock,’ this phenomenon facilitated the entrance into psychiatry of psychotherapy, and of the category ‘psychoneurosis,’ the idea that mental illness can have a psychological origin. As Irina Sirotkina suggests here, the political leanings of psychiatrists, who were mostly anti-government before the First World War, led them to treat their patients more kindly than their Western counterparts did. Rather than accusing the sufferers of being malingerers, Russian psychiatrists were more likely to use gentle methods of treatment and to avoid if possible sending the patients back to the front. These tactics remained the norm, Sirotkina argues, until shortly after the end of the Civil War. Mental Illness and Deviancy in Soviet and Post-Soviet Times Psychiatry, like so many other disciplines, became professionalized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part of that process, which I explore in my chapter, ‘Writing about Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887–1907,’ was creating heroes for the narrative of psychiatric care. I consider both the subjects of doctors’ writing – their patients – and the heroes of their narratives – themselves. As Cathy Popkin has also shown in looking closely at medical case histories, ‘late nineteenth-century Russian psychiatric writing documents most tellingly the urgencies of professionalization’ (190).20 For Russian psychiatrists, unlike their European and American counterparts, that professionalization took place in the context of political upheaval and revolution. As a consequence, even before the Soviet Union was founded, Russian psychiatry dealt with the relationship between politics and mental health. After the Bolshevik Revolution, questions of mental illness and socially deviant behaviour were problematized by the image of the New Soviet Man, idealized as ‘strong-willed, optimistic, and collectively inclined,’ to use Kenneth Pinnow’s description. Psychiatrists had embraced the Revolution, believing that the only way to have a healthy populace was to improve social conditions. As Irina Sirotkina has noted, doctors ‘argued that in a well-designed or “healthy” society, psychiatry would not be needed and would be replaced by prophylactics such as mental hygiene ... Socialist Russia was building the very society that would, in principle, create a hygienic environment that

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eliminated the social and economic causes of mental illness’ (Sirotkina, Diagnosing 149–50). The realities were, as always, more complex. The European and Civil Wars had wreaked havoc with mental institutions. Famine, cold, and disease virtually wiped out the patients and staff of mental hospitals: as Sirotkina reports, the number of patients in Russian and Ukrainian asylums by 1923 was one-quarter of the pre-war numbers (149). Life was not much better for those outside the hospitals. In addition to ‘war neuroses,’ psychiatrists began to speak of psychological trauma and an ‘increasing nervousness’ in a population ‘worn out by two wars, famine, and the Revolution’ (154). As conditions began to improve in the country as a whole, psychiatrists and mental health specialists expected that mental illnesses and their related woes, including suicide, would also gradually become a thing of the past. In ‘Lives Out of Balance: The “Possible World” of Soviet Suicide during the 1920s,’ Pinnow explores the reactions of investigators into suicides within the Red Army, arguing that psychiatric explanations gave way to a specific ‘folk psychology’ which explained the suicidal behaviour in more sociologically grounded terms. Suicide in Soviet times, he suggests, was seen partially as a symptom of the ‘transition period’ of the New Economic Policy, but more importantly as the joint responsibility of the individual and society. It was the duty of the collective to engender proper mental health. The diseased individual had another incarnation in early Soviet times – in the sexually pathological criminal. Dan Healey’s look at sex crimes in the early years of Soviet power helps to delineate the role played by forensic psychiatrists. Despite the good intentions of the Bolsheviks to institutionalize the role of the psychiatrist in the courtroom, the territory between mental illness and criminality was not easily negotiated. Interestingly, Healey notes that sexual criminals themselves learned the psychiatric vocabulary and were at the very least suspected of presenting and perhaps even committing their crimes with the idea that the crimes should be blamed on their ‘illness’ rather than their ‘criminality.’ Questions of who might still remain ill in the best of all possible socialist worlds preoccupied health and legal professionals both. In the case of the poet-suicide Sergei Esenin, for example, who hanged himself in 1926, commissar of public health Nikolai Semashko ‘announced that the déclassé Esenin who had taken his life could not be the model for basically healthy Soviet youth’ (Sirotkina, Diagnosing 173; see Ponomareff 154–5). The dreams of Grigorii Segalin to locate ‘the genetic mechanism’ of genius and to create a special branch of ‘aesthetic medicine’ to

14 Angela Brintlinger

deal with creative (and mentally ill) geniuses were never fulfilled, although the brains of outstanding psychiatrists, along with other ‘geniuses,’ were indeed preserved in G.I. Rossolimo’s Neurological Institute (Sirotkina, Diagnosing 161–70). In the early 1970s, geneticist Vladimir Efroimson – who had returned from two terms of hard labour in the 1930s and 1950s – began working on his treatise The Genetics of Genius, about which Yvonne Howell writes in her ‘The Genetics of Genius: V.P. Efroimson and the Biosocial Mechanisms of Higher Intellectual Activity.’ Despite his own suffering at the hands of the state, Efroimson continued to believe in a utopian Soviet future, a place where the ‘normal’ could be led toward ‘genius’ through the scientific study of organic pathologies. In the 1970s, an expectation existed that any Westerner writing about Russian psychiatric treatment would focus on the unethical incarceration of dissidents.21 However, attempts to describe Soviet psychiatric goals retained shades of ideology. For example, West German professor Wolf Lauterbach described rational psychotherapy in Soviet Russia as follows: ‘the “ethic of socialist society and the moral notion of MarxismLeninism” is regarded as the basis for restructuring the patient’s personality. The patient is provided with “new, significant and concrete” aims in life. The therapist helps him to find ways and means to achieve these aims and to adopt the “right attitude to things”’ (63). In a neutral setting, such goals would seem quite admirable. Contemporary definitions of what constitutes ‘mental normality’ also seem appropriate.22 At the same time, one can easily imagine the abuses possible in diagnosing as ‘abnormal’ those who did not accept the ruling ideology of the USSR. In the words of Vladimir Bukovsky: The ruling doctrine asserts that being determines consciousness. As Socialism has been built in the USSR, and Communism is being built, the consciousness of the people must be exclusively Communist ... From where does an opponent of Communism come in a Communist society? Within the confines of Communist doctrine there are only two possible explanations: the cause must lie either in subversive activity directed from abroad – i.e., every dissenter has been bought or recruited by the imperialists; or in mental illness: dissent is just a manifestation of pathological processes in the psyche. (Foreword 14)

Bukovsky further pointed out that Soviet psychiatrists were part of the Soviet system and thus were unable to ‘regard dissent as a normal

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phenomenon generated by the realities of Soviet existence’ – without, of course, becoming dissenters themselves (Bukovskii, Foreword 14–15). Less forgiving of medical officials was Aleksandr Podrabinek, whose book Punitive Medicine included a ‘white list’ of two hundred prisoners of conscience in Soviet psychiatric hospitals and a ‘black list’ of over one hundred doctors and medical personnel who participated in committing people to mental facilities for political reasons. ‘In our opinion,’ writes Podrabinek, ‘the word, even that of a mentally ill person, does not threaten the social order’ (141). But the Soviet authorities thought otherwise. Accusing dissidents of mental inadequacy makes a certain subconscious, a priori sense. Which of us, upon seeing the actions of a person whose motives are not clear to us, has not exclaimed: ‘A madman!’ The fine line between the concept of ‘unusual’ and that of ‘insanity’ was exploited by the psychiatric community. (Podrabinek 8)

Podrabinek emphasizes that in Soviet society ‘abnormality’ was a guarantee of some kind of normality, insisting: ‘These are not only mentally, but morally healthy people who are bringing to our mentally ill society the culture of freedom and democracy, for which they are being incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals’ (10).23 No wonder Sergei Dovlatov would celebrate madness as the norm in his story ‘The Sanctuary’ (1983) – the Soviet norm was dangerous to the mental health of its citizens, so many Soviets began to search for a new norm, an anti-Soviet norm, a mad norm. With scientists, human rights activists, and poets being incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, the values and very definitions of ‘normality’ and ‘madness’ became confused.24 In post-Soviet times, we once again confront the complexities of terminology, the meanings of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal,’ the cultural space of madness and genius and its intersection with medical facts and practices. In the afterword to this volume, Julie V. Brown attempts to wrestle yet again with these issues in a contemporary context. The history of the development and representation of Russian madness and Russian psychiatry continues to be relevant to how mental illness is culturally understood today. As a visit to the internet demonstrates, the term ‘crazy Russians’ turns up tens of thousands of citations; this volume aims to insert a serious and long-overdue note into questions of how madness has been constructed and understood in modern Russian culture.

16 Angela Brintlinger NOTES 1 The first Russian conference on Foucault took place at the European University in St Petersburg in June 2000. See the proceedings in Kharkhordin. Alexander Etkind led a revival of psychoanalytic discussions with his Eros of the Impossible. 2 On these novels, see Brintlinger, ‘The Hero in the Madhouse,’ as well as its bibliography. 3 Ballerina Olga Spesivtseva (1895–1991), whose own mental illness kept her institutionalized for decades, was the subject of Alexei Uchitel’s 1995 film The Mania of Giselle (see Helena Goscilo’s discussion of the film in chapter 13 below.) Spesivtseva’s life was explored on stage in Boris Eifman’s Red Giselle, a historical ballet set in the 1920s, which suggests that the split in her personality paralleled the split in Russian culture following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Popular interest in the theme of mental illness can also be seen in the ten-part film version of Dostoevsky’s Idiot, shown on Russian television in autumn 2003. On contemporary interest in Dostoevsky see also Andrei Rogachevskii, chapter 14 below. In 2005, the University of Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium was entitled ‘The Yellow House of Cinema,’ which examined ‘the themes, visual practices, and cultural politics in recent Russian cinema around issues of social psychosis, dementia, mania, folly, lunacy, aberration, and the absurd’ (http://www.rusfilm.pitt.edu/2005/index.htm). Films included Andrei Konchalovskii’s House of Fools (2002), Pavel Chukhrai’s A Driver for Vera (2004), and Valerii Todorovskii’s My Stepbrother Frankenstein (2004). The symposium directors define the ‘yellow house’ (a Russian synonym for ‘madhouse’) as a ‘sign of ontological and existential disruption within both the individual and the collective psyche.’ Like this volume, their scope is inclusive, considering the ‘yellow house’ both as a locus (‘a demarcated space of disorder and treatment, confinement and refuge’) and as a causus (‘a personal state of mind, a social condition of being, or a political horizon of imposed limitations’). For a full statement and a complete list of films, see their website. 4 See my chapter below (‘Writing about Madness’), as well as Sirotkina’s Diagnosing, Engelstein, and Ljunggren. 5 Pravda, 24 May 1959, cited in Mee 1. There is some evidence that the diagnosis ‘creeping schizophrenia’ was invented in response to Khrushchev’s idea that only a madman could be critical of the socialist system. See Windholz 344.

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6 Incidentally, the PR campaign did not work, and the World Psychiatric Association censured the Soviet psychiatric organization for the use of repressive psychiatric practices. Indeed, the Soviet professional society of psychiatrists was in 1989 only provisionally readmitted to the World Psychiatric Association. See Smith and Oleszczuk 28. 7 For a list of vocabulary relating to insanity, see the opening to Elena Dryzhakova’s chapter. 8 The best comprehensive sources in English on the development of Russian psychiatry in the nineteenth century are Todes, and Brown, ‘The Professionalization of Russian Psychiatry.’ Todes in particular describes the intellectual background from the 1860s onwards, as Russians began to conceive of human beings as animals and their ‘souls’ as physical rather than meta-physical entities. 9 Here I am relying on Brown, ‘Revolution and Psychosis,’ esp. 296–300. For more on Tutyshkin (1868–1937), see A.G. Ianovskii, and Brintlinger, chapter 10, in this volume. 10 Kukushka, as Russians used to call it, was a cult underground film in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. The fictionalized wards I have in mind here include both Pelevin and Makanin, but also the madhouse in Venedikt Erofeev’s play The Steps of the Commander. For the most recent analysis of that play, see Burry. 11 The details of Stoppard’s play, down to the address of the special psychiatric hospital in Leningrad in which his hero is interned, seem to be culled directly from human rights reports of the 1970s, including the samizdat newsletter Chronicle of Current Events. They are in fact based on the memoirs of Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle. See Stoppard, ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Favor’ and ‘Professional Foul.’ 12 Prozac was introduced in 1987. Within five years it had been prescribed to over eight million patients. 13 This was a commonplace in the Russian narrative about psychiatry as well. As N.E. Osipov wrote, ‘the end of the eighteenth century can be considered the beginning of a new psychiatric era’ (407). 14 Brown writes that psychiatrists needed to convince the populace of the status of madness as both an illness and a curable illness. See ‘Social Influences on Psychiatric Theory and Practice.’ 15 Cited in Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks 5 from Kannabikh. Indeed, the question of ‘fools’ had arisen much earlier in the edicts of Tsar Fedor III (1676, 1677) and Peter I (1722, 1723, 1725), mainly in relation to their property and material possessions. 16 The ‘great confinement’ was also simply a way to deal with the poor and

18 Angela Brintlinger

17 18

19 20

21

22

23

homeless; see Doerner. Foucault’s work has special resonance for the Russian case. After all, he was surely working on his book at the very moment when Krushchev made public and official the use of psychiatric institutionalization as a part of totalitarian control in Soviet Russia. Above I rely on the longer, Russian-language variant of Iangoulova’s article for historical background. At the Kiev Congress of psychiatrists in 1905, one of the arguments used in drafting a statement protesting capital punishment was that ‘we might have lost one of our best psychiatrists, Fedor Dostoevsky,’ had his death sentence been carried out in 1849. See especially Healey, and Wessling, below. Popkin continues: ‘The relative newness of the field and its organs ... sparked a concerted effort on the part of late nineteenth-century psychiatrists to establish themselves as practitioners, their discourses as scientific, and their object as legitimate’ (193). Indeed, in the chapter ‘Ethical Questions in Psychiatry’ in his Soviet Psychotherapy, Wolf Lauterbach felt compelled to acknowledge both his readers’ expectations of such a focus and the reason for them: the statement on ethical standards for psychiatry and the ‘abuses currently being practised in the USSR’ that ended the August 1977 general meeting of the World Psychiatric Association. See Lauterbach 35. For a detailed description of events leading to the WPA’s choosing not to adopt such a statement at the 1971 general meeting in Mexico, see Bloch and Reddaway 79–94. Lauterbach quotes from an official definition (see Ushakov), which includes the following: ‘The person feels that his position and place amongst his fellows and their relationships with him are harmonious. He is able to relate harmoniously to others and to himself; he has a critical attitude toward the realities of life; he has the ability to modify his own behavior according to the norms which are valid for the various collectives; he reacts adequately to social realities (i.e. the social environment); he feels responsible for his offspring and the members of his immediate family; he feels that he perceives similar circumstances as similar; he can adapt his behavior to changing circumstances; he can assert himself in the collective (in society) without harming the other members; he can plan out the course of his life and realize it’ (37–8). Boris Segal delineates five reasons for the misuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union: 1) an old tradition of ignoring the rights of the mental patient, related to the lack of basic human rights in the USSR;

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2) the overly broad interpretation of mental illness, paranoid states and schizophrenia; 3) deviations of thought and behavior in a totalitarian society are considered to be signs of either criminality or insanity; 4) highly ranked Soviet psychiatrists behave like bureaucrats and often see carrying out orders as fulfilling their duties; 5) forced hospitalization can humiliate and discredit political dissidents which is more convenient for the authorities than holding political trials. (Boris Segal 280) Segal, a Soviet psychiatrist who emigrated to the US, contributed two articles to the collection Psychiatry and Psychology, one on alcoholism, his specialty, and one on psychiatric incarceration. 24 Nobel Prize–winning author Joseph Brodsky was incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, but not, as Lev Loseff reminds us, during the height of persecution of dissidents. Instead, Brodsky’s first stint in the mental hospital was actually instigated by his friends, who hoped that a diagnosis of mental illness could help him avoid government persecution. His poem ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov,’ which Loseff analyses below, was based on his experiences in mental asylums in 1963 and 1964.

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PART ONE Madness, the State, and Society

Ilya Repin, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581, 1885. The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

The author speaks of Russia, of the Russian people, their ideas, religion, and history with such contempt that it is inconceivable how a Russian could degrade himself to such an extent as to write things of that sort. But the residents of our ancient capital, always known for their clear, common sense and filled with the feeling of the dignity of the Russian nation, have at once realized that such an article could not have been written by a compatriot of theirs fully in possession of a sound mind … It is therefore His Imperial Majesty’s wish that Your Excellency undertake the necessary means to supply M. Cheodaev with medical care and attention. Count A.K. Benkendorf, head of the Third Division, to Governor General of Moscow Prince Golitsyn You told them I was mad. Let me confirm your fears. You’re right. The man who manages to spend one day Breathing that air which you inspire And still preserve his reason, may Emerge unscathed from any fire. Aleksandr Griboedov, Woe from Wit

The sanity or insanity of an individual is not only a medical question, but also an ideological, judicial, social, and existential one. It is inextricably connected to the question of who diagnoses the insanity, as well as how, to what end, under what conditions, and with what ideological, social, economic, or philosophical preconceptions the insanity is diagnosed. In certain cases, it is also a question of how he who has been declared ‘ideologically’ insane answers the diagnosis given by the authorities or society. ‘Insane you have declared me in chorus,’ the smartest character in Aleksandr Griboedov’s famous comedy Woe from Wit (1829) says to the Moscow ‘Old Believers,’ and he immediately and demonstratively accepts the diagnosis as inevitable for a thinker in a society of fools. With the same readiness, political accusations of insanity were accepted by Nikolai Novikov, Petr Chaadaev, Vsevolod Garshin, Leo Tolstoy, and many others who were ‘otherwise-minded’ (whether the ‘ideologically’ insane were, in fact, insane is of no relevance here). In a certain sense, the history of insanity in Russia is the history of the relations between the Russian radical intelligentsia and the conservative elements of society and government. In this section are placed articles devoted to ideological, political, and philosophical interpretations of insanity in Russian culture of the eigh-

24 Part One

teenth through twentieth centuries. In ‘A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine the Great and the Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Controversy,’ Ilya Vinitsky examines melancholy (an eighteenthcentury synonym for insanity) as an ideological concept reflecting the country’s understanding of ethical and emotional order. At the centre of attention is the anti-melancholic criticism by Catherine the Great – the enlightened Felitsa, who wanted to serve for her subjects as an embodiment of benign government control of destructive passions. In this context, the ‘melancholic’ was a natural enemy of the secular reform that she hoped to execute in the name of general well-being and happiness for her citizens. In her chapter, ‘The Osvidetel’stvovanie and Ispytanie of Insanity: Psychiatry in Tsarist Russia,’ Lia Iangoulova shows how Russian psychiatric discourse was elaborated and how the government in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tested insanity. This technical language or terminology, in Iangoulova’s opinion, answered to the state not only of the medical field at that time, but also of the government and society. The political history of madness in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia demonstrates that insanity was considered as a ‘spiritual disease’ or ‘moral corruption’ that threatened not only the sick man but all of society as well. Elena Dryzhakova’s chapter, ‘Madness as an Act of Defence of Personality in Dostoevsky’s The Double,’ is devoted to the historico-literary roots of that novella. In her opinion, in The Double Dostoevsky transfers the question of insanity to an existential plane. Robert Wessling’s chapter, ‘Vsevolod Garshin, the Russian Intelligentsia, and Fan Hysteria,’ is dedicated to one of the most curious episodes in the history of Russian insanity – the cult of the writer Garshin (1855–88). This cult is examined by the author as a social mania that characterizes the mental and psychological dominants of the Russian intelligentsia of the 1880s. Lev Loseff, in ‘On Hostile Ground: Madness and Madhouse in Joseph Brodsky’s “Gorbunov and Gorchakov,”’ suggests a metaphysical interpretation of this epic poem of the Nobel laureate, which takes place in an insane asylum, or, rather, within the brain of the narrator, who is locked in a psychiatric prison in Leningrad. Besides his discussion of the biographical background of the epic, Loseff offers an analysis of the ‘fearful symmetry’ of the work and its symbolic Christological implications.

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

... a more rational philosophy invites us to spread flowers upon the way of life, to dispel melancholy and banish terrors, to connect our interest with that of our fellow travellers, and by gaiety and lawful pleasures, to divert our attention from difficulties and accidents, to which we are often exposed; it teaches us that, to travel agreeably, we should abstain from what might be injurious to ourselves, and carefully shun what might render us odious to our associates. Baron d’Holbach, Le bon sens My body shall be laid out in a white dress, with a golden crown upon my head, on which my name shall stand. Mourning shall be worn for half a year but no longer; the less the better. After the first six weeks, all popular amusements shall be permitted again. After the burial, betrothals shall be again allowed, weddings, and music. Catherine the Great, ‘Last Will and Testament,’ Memoirs

In this chapter I investigate the origins and cultural meaning of Catherine the Great’s passionate condemnation of melancholy. I consider this issue within the contexts of eighteenth-century medical theory, the Russian Enlightenment, and the empress’s own ‘scenario of power’ (see Wortman). Following Wolf Lepenies’s seminal study on melancholy in Western society, I place a special emphasis on the relationships ‘between the reality of rulership and the modeling of affects’ (1) in the Russian Age of Reason. In other words, I will discuss melancholy as an ideological and political construct; one which appropriated traditional psychiatric, physiological, and moral interpretations of the disease of black bile (a common synonym for insanity in the eighteenth century). In the first

26 Ilya Vinitsky

sections of the chapter I will set out upon a brief journey to the age when melancholy made its first appearance in Russia and became one of the most pressing ideological issues, associated with political and moral disorder. Then I will discuss Catherine’s anti-melancholy campaign and its cultural implications and consequences. In the final section I will show how Catherine’s opponents appropriated and transformed her quasi-psychiatric rhetoric in their struggle against the Empress’s own political and moral principles. New Disease In his famous Anatomy of Melancholy, What It Is, With All the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, And Several Cures Of It (1621), Robert Burton (1577– 1640) asserted: ‘In Muscovy, where they live in stoves and hot-houses all winter long, come seldom or little abroad, [chess-play] ... is very necessary [to avoid melancholy], and therefore in those parts much used’ (96). This assertion partly explains the outstanding success of Russian chess-players in the following centuries, but the point is that the Muscovites of whom Burton wrote never suspected that they had been struggling against melancholy. The main paradox of the Russian history of melancholy is that there was no melancholy in Russia before the eighteenth century – that is, there was no cultural tradition of rationalization and representation of man’s mental, bodily, or emotional life that stood behind the word, whereas in the West this tradition had been cultivated by physicians, philosophers, preachers, artists, poets, and politicians for two thousand years. ‘Russian melancholy’ was born in the first secular age of Russian culture. Years before it became an ‘aesthetic object,’ a favourite literary theme and fashionable emotion, it was discussed in a variety of nonfictional medical and moralistic narratives about the temperament and nature of man, mental illnesses, and abnormal behaviour. Almost all these texts were translations or adaptations of secondary French, German, or English sources (no classical sources, no Ficino or Burton were known in Russia). In a great number of treatises and articles, melancholy was described as a bodily or mental illness, a foppish mask, or as one of the deadly sins – the ‘midday demon’ of acedia. The latter interpretation corresponded with the traditional Orthodox vision of spiritual boredom and despondency. However, the very term ‘melancholy’ (or hypochondria) was new, Western, and secular, with certain physiological and psychological implications alien to the Orthodox vision.1

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What united Russian authors of the first seven decades of the eighteenth century was the perception of melancholy as a dangerous disease which could lead its victim to madness or suicide. Commonplace reflections on melancholy were that ‘our mirthful people’ did not suffer that disease before and that it came to us from abroad, namely from the West (see e.g., Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia 235). Since melancholy was treated as an alien concept, there were at least three main consequences of this theory in Russia – pride in the Russian people’s innate rationalism and mirthful disposition, fear of the corruptive effect of melancholy on Russia’s national Self, and strong interest in bizarre manifestations of this alien malady. But what was the nature of this disease? Was it an illness of the body, the soul, or the spirit? The course of therapy depended on the answer to this question.2 Physicians, moralists, preachers, and writers suggested various cures. As early as the 1730s the first medical treatises on melancholy and hypochondria appeared in Russia (see Nevskii and Fedotov 39). Here is a typical definition of this malady in A.T. Bolotov’s treatise on melancholy: Melancholy disease is usually understood under the general name of boredom or the pain of heart, and, for women, under the name of uterus. People possessed by this disease are often prone to sadness, are fearful of everything, but are not able to explain the cause of their condition. (27: 235)

The list of main causes of this disease include ‘severe strain and exhaustion of emotions,’ ‘vexations, distresses, and sadness,’ ‘solitude and the lack of mirth,’ ‘strong and enduring passions, especially love.’ ‘The soul of the hypochondriac,’ we read in this treatise, ‘is burdened with horror mixed with sorrow and unhealthy imagination, often followed by a dissolute cheerfulness and flippancy ... Different and often contradictory passions, opinions, and premonitions torture the unfortunate like hellish Furies’ (27: 21; 21: 394, 397, 386). The major symptoms of this hellish disease included morbid superstitions and extreme piousness. The traditional remedies against melancholy, as stressed in some works, were sanity, diet, good liquor, good friends, sports and games (especially billiards), merry company, and cheerful jokes. Laughter was treated as the best healer. The traditional figure of a laughing philosopher (the so-called mask of the ‘laughing Democritus’) occupied a peculiar place in the Russian eighteenthcentury Theatre of Melancholy. In the Age of Reason this figure repre-

28 Ilya Vinitsky

sented a rationalistic desire to get rid of morbid and stupid longing with the help of optimistic philosophy and laughter. The Laughing Democritus, or Doctor Merriman, was a wise philosopher who used his healthy humour as a means of moral and social therapy.3 The purpose of medical narratives on melancholic disease was not only to instruct readers on how to prevent and cure melancholy, but also to entertain them. These texts often included tales of melancholic delusions – of people who thought they were God, or wolves,4 or that they were made of butter, brick, or glass,5 or of a man who was cured from his ‘dread of flooding the whole world when he urinated by being told that the village was on fire, and that he would be a public benefactor’: ‘he was brought to a flaming stack of hay and was asked to extinguish this big fire by releasing some of his urine, and then with great surprise he realized how little [urine] was in him’ (Bolotov 27: 43). (I guess the village burned down.) This example goes back to Andreas Laurentius’s famous story about ‘one Sienos Gentleman, who had resolved with himself not to pisse’ in a fear to flood ‘his towne’ (du Laurens 52).6 In the beginning of the nineteenth century it was used as an example of melancholic follies for the definition of melancholy by Nikolai Ianovskii (Novyi slovotolkovatel’ 735). It is interesting that in some stories about melancholy eccentrics their fancies were treated as – in their specific way – logical and grand (compare the noble fear of the melancholy gentleman to flood the whole world with his urine).7 Insanity or disease of the imagination became one of the most popular themes in the second half of the eighteenth century. Particularly significant was the perception of this disease as a dynamic process that included several stages and resulted in complete madness: ‘As it [melancholy] increases and turns chronic, it becomes a disease that can confuse the reason, and it is now called an eccentricity, and it often results in insanity’ (Ianovskii, Novyi slovotolkovatel’ 735). The destructive process, caused in one’s body and mind by unbridled black bile, imminently led a man to mental and physical collapse. Ultimately, the man became dangerous for himself, his family, and society. Having been non-accountable for his acts, he could not remain at large any longer. In the late 1770s and early 1780s, the first Russian madhouses were founded (with the Obukhovskaia hospital in St Petersburg opened in 1782).8 ‘A central function of these madhouses,’ Julie Vail Brown argues, ‘was the protection of society from potentially dangerous individuals, as is evident from the government’s instructions to those who would manage them: “It is

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incumbent upon the Department of Public Welfare to insure that the building chosen is sufficiently large and sturdy in all respects, so that escape from it will be impossible”’ (‘Psychiatrists and the State’ 268). The era of the ‘Great Confinement’ (as Michel Foucault called it) had begun in Russia. Moral Corruption and Imaginary Illness Melancholy was also discussed in the eighteenth century as a ‘spiritual disease’ or ‘moral corruption’ that threatened not only the melancholy man but all of society as well. The symptoms of the malady were an individual’s ‘dark thoughts,’ and dissatisfaction with himself, with family authority, with political authority, and with the entire world. As early as 1718, a prominent politician and ideologist of Peter’s reforms, Feofan Prokopovich, wrote about the kind of people who were possessed by gloomy melancholy: there are people (and may God prevent there being many of them), who are either possessed by a secret demon or oppressed by melancholia, and who have such distorted reasoning, that everything wonderful, gay, great, and splendid, as well as righteous and correct and not impious, seems to them sinful and foul. For example: they prefer bad weather to fine; they welcome sad news over good; they do not like happiness itself and I do not know how they think of themselves, but about others they think this: ‘if they see someone healthy and with good conduct – then, of course, he is not holy; they would wish everyone deformed, benighted, hunchbacked, and bad and would actually like them this way.’ Such people the ancient Greeks called misanthropes, that is, people haters. (79–80)

This passage sounds like a free translation of a certain invective against ‘religious melancholy’ of Puritans from the famous English Spectator by Addison and Steele for 1712: ... there are many Persons, who, by a natural Unchearfulness of Heart, mistaken Notions of Piety, or Weakness of Understanding, love to indulge this uncomfortable Way of Life, and give up themselves a Prey to Grief and Melancholy ... Sombrius is one of these Sons of Sorrow. He thinks himself obliged in Duty to be sad and disconsolate. He looks on a sudden fit of Laughter, as a Breach of his Baptismal Vow. An innocent Jest startles him like Blasphemy. Tell him of one who is advanced to Title of Honor, he lifts

30 Ilya Vinitsky up his Hands and Eyes; describe a Publick Ceremony, he shakes his Head; shew him a gay Equipage, he blesses himself. All the little Ornaments of Life are Pomps and Vanities. Mirth is wanton, and Wit profane. He is scandalized at youth for being lively, and at Childhood for being playful. He sits at a Christening, or a Marriage-Feast, as at a Funeral; sighs at the Conclusion of a merry story; and grows devout when the Rest of the company grow pleasant. (Gregory Smith 63)

The Spectator claimed that the ‘true Spirit of Religion cheers, as well as composes the Soul: it ... fills the Mind with a perpetual Serenity, uninterrupted Cheerfulness, and an habitual Inclination to please others, as well as to be pleased in itself’ (64). Prokopovich’s ‘misanthrope’ represents the well-known figure of a ‘malcontent.’9 In accordance with the Western literary tradition, this type was associated by Feofan with Timon of Athens – ‘the embodiment of melancholy cynicism and misanthropy’ (Babb 94). Symptomatically, Prokopovich uses the notion of Timon’s melancholy as a political charge: in the quoted passage he is attacking his ideological foes Stefan Yavorskii and Bishop Dosifei – the pillars of anti-Petrine ecclesiastical opposition. In this context, the ‘misanthrope’ means a natural enemy of the secular Reform that is executed in the name of general well-being and happiness, as expressed in Samuel Pufendorf’s Natural Law.10 Finally, melancholy was treated in the eighteenth century as a false, ‘imaginative’ illness imported from gallant France with the first assemblies and ‘the art of amorous longing.’ The melancholy lover, a sensitive and ridiculous fop, was a hero of numerous satires and comedies. As early as 1708, this kind of melancholy was mocked in one of the first comedies on the Russian stage, Dragyia smeianyia (Les Précieuses Ridicules) from Molière. A coquettish Magdalyna says: It is necessary that there be one fitting suitor, versed in the art of amorous longing, posing as young, smooth spoken, and patient. And that he see in church, or in some passing, or at a public ceremony a face that fans the flame of love in him; or that he be brought in forcibly from his father and that he leave his home with great difficulty and melancholy. (Tikhonravov 80)

The ‘wise’ authors called this gallant melancholy unnatural and stupid eccentricity. This class of melancholy was often associated with senseless journeys abroad and apish imitations of the French love etiquette by

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naïve Russian travellers. Love melancholy became the traditional feature of the comic type of ‘petit maître.’ It might have been considered not only childish, but also unpatriotic and wicked: it ‘is often just a fashionable word for concealing some spiritual weakness and bad disposition, as for example many hypochondriacs are called that only because they have a strange and stubborn disposition and a head full of nonsensical thoughts’ (Bolotov 21: 386). The Face of Melancholy The Enlightenment and Melancholy (black bile) are incompatible already in their etymology: light and darkness. As M.H. Abrams writes, ‘[t]he belief that the application of reason was rapidly dissipating the darkness of superstition, prejudice, and barbarity ... opened the prospect of progress toward a life in this world of universal peace and happiness’ (75). Logically, the struggle against ‘dry and cold’ melancholy disorder was one of the main goals of that age. Nothing could seem more dangerous, ridiculous, and disgusting for a rational person than the unbridled melancholic way of thinking and treating affairs. Indeed, eighteenthcentury Russian authors imagined Melancholy as an old ugly woman with a crazy gaze and ‘poisonous breath.’ She is dry and cold and is always accompanied by swarms of ‘BOREDOMS, which are very fetid hags of extremely great age’ (Trediakovskii 51). In another representative allegorical portrait of melancholy, she embodies the fears of the Age of Reason: ‘a woman with a hideous face,’ ‘in a black robe,’ ‘her skin is all in wrinkles, her eyes deeply embedded in her head, and her face was a pale, dead colour. Her eyes were full of fear and a habitual ferocity; and her hands held whips and scorpions.’ She urges a poor weak man to leave the social world and to end his days in a river of ‘Despair: Run away with me, mortal man, useful to no one, away from the bustle of their hypocritical world, and know that pleasure is not the lot of man. Man is created on earth in order to suffer sadness and poverty. Flee the temptations of youth and common pleasures. Devote your lonely hours here to sadness and lamentation. Every joy insults the heavens’ (Sochineniia i perevody 526–36; italics mine). The name of this ‘melancholy monster,’ we read in the article I am citing from, is Superstition, ‘the daughter of Dissatisfaction and the mother of Fear.’ The young and cheerful goddess Piety, ‘the daughter of Wisdom and Love’ and ‘the mother of Bliss, Hope, and Joy,’ makes the demon leave the poor man and explains to him that the true charity is to

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live in society, not to be idle, and to love people. This is the clash between these two allegorical female figures – ‘loathed Melancholy’ and cheerful ‘Euphrosyne,’ in Milton’s terms,11 – that is crucial for our understanding of Catherine’s anti-melancholic attacks. Felitsa As is known, Catherine the Great (née Sophia of Anhalt Zerbst) disliked melancholics from the bottom of her heart. As Yuri Lotman justly noted, in her lexicon the very word ‘melancholic’ was offensive (‘Russo’ 65). Like her enlightened pen-pal Voltaire, under the term ‘melancholy eccentrics’ the empress understood the ‘whole tribe of scribblers, malcontents, fools, cowards, gluttons, drunkards, misers, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, and hypocrites’ (Candide 168–9). ‘I am deposed by nature to be cheerful and ingenuous,’ she wrote to Senac de Meilhan at end of her life, ‘but I have lived too long in the world not to know that there are bitter natures which do not love cheerfulness and that not everyone’s character can endure truth and candor’ (Memoirs 326). A mere psychological interpretation of her negative attitude toward melancholics is too simple. In fact, her declared cheerfulness was a peculiar cultural mask chosen by Catherine in her struggle for the ideological values and the political regime she protected and personified. This was the mask of an enlightened philosopher who epitomized the combination ‘of gaiety, reason, and pleasure’ (Voltaire, Dictionnaire 390). In her anti-melancholic critique of the 1760–90s, Catherine borrowed arguments and examples from the actual cultural arsenal of her epoch, ranging from English satirists’ and French philosophes’ reflections on mélancholie religieuse (Diderot 308) to commonplace medical and literary beliefs. The traditional views on melancholy as a mental disease, moral corruption, or pretentious guise for a bad character formed an ideological and rhetorical basis for Catherine’s portrayals of those ‘bitter natures.’ She also inherited the luminaries’ perception of melancholy as a driving force of religious fanaticism – this ‘sickness of religion which affects the brain,’ in Voltaire’s words. However, unlike other proponents of the theory of the maladie dangereuse, she could not tolerate melancholy men either as an enlightened rationalist or as an absolute monarch, ‘the personification of happiness, who captivates the individual nobleman, a “goddess of love,”’ Divine Felitsa (Wortman 143). In her formative 6 July 1762 Manifesto, Catherine portrayed the reign of her deposed husband as the period of darkness and mindless cruelty

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caused by the unbridled passions of her almost insane predecessor.12 The new empress saved the nation ‘from despondency and insult’ and, therefore, restored a mental and emotional balance in the state. Her ascension to the throne was presented in the Manifesto as the beginning of a new age of public happiness and historical optimism. As Richard Wortman convincingly shows in his chapter ‘The Return of Astraea and the Demonstration of Happiness,’ it was Catherine’s declared love for her subjects that ‘implied dispositions that motivated the external displays of joy and enthusiasm.’ ‘It was ruled by humane feelings, if not institutional guarantees,’ he adds (Wortman 113). It is true that the ‘emotional diapason’ introduced by Catherine’s humane reign was much broader and much more sophisticated than it had been during Elizabeth’s period. However, its unprecedented complexity and diversity (cf. Derzhavin’s glorious ‘Felitsa’) required a new state policy concerning the emotional regulation and ‘modeling of affects’ of the subjects (Lepenies 67). In her famous Instruction of 1767, Catherine stated that ‘every honest Man in the Community is, or will be, desirous of seeing his native Country as the very Summit of Happiness, Glory, Safety, and Tranquility’ (Documents 215). She clarified that ‘[i]t is the greatest Happiness for a man to be so circumstanced, that, if his Passions should prompt him to be mischievous, he should still think more for his Interest not to give Way to them’ (Documents 219). In an important section on education, she emphasized the vital necessity for parents to break their children ‘of all perverse and forward Humours’ (Documents 272). Her vision of the ideal state, as presented, for instance, in her operatic drama The Early Reign of Oleg (1790), exploits the theme of public joy initialized, authorized, and embodied by a monarch: ‘In this capital [Constantinople], with so renowned a guest, only happy celebrations shall occur, joyous exclamations, endless games, singing, dancing, merriment and gala feasts’ (cited in Wortman 138). Her contemporaries realized that profanation of gloomy persons was an important ingredient of Catherine’s ideological program. Thus, in an ode, composed as early as 1763, Mikhail Lomonosov opposed Catherine to those ‘gloomy Druids,’ ‘beast-like superstitious men’ who ‘respond with grave howling,’ and portrayed the empress as a beloved and enlightened goddess whose ‘joyful face shines’ (Lomonosov 181–2; italics mine). Who were these beast-like fanatics? In the very beginning of her reign, she apparently saw them in ‘superstitious’ opponents of secularization, those fierce defenders of the church’s spiritual and economical indepen-

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dence from the state, like Metropolitan Arsenii. But unlike Peter’s time, that ecclesiastical opposition was weak and did not last long. It is culturally intriguing that ‘new melancholics’ of her reign came from within a secular world she had created – the newborn Russian intelligentsia. The melancholy man appears a persona non grata both in Catherine’s social Utopia and at her lovable and cheerful court – an earthly reincarnation of this Utopia.13 The question is how to unveil this enemy and protect her empire against him. The solemn duty and mission of the monarch were to serve her nation as an embodiment of emotional balance (hence Catherine’s famous self-control) and also to restrain the passions and ‘perverse and forward’ humours of her subjects by means of wise legislation and moral instruction. Characteristically, she chose the written word (journalism and drama) as a major weapon in her combat against the ‘melancholics’ of her time. Let us try to reconstruct the development of the anti-melancholic theme in Catherine’s work. ‘Bitter Natures’ In Catherine’s satirical articles of the 1760s and 1770s, the melancholy person is portrayed as a malcontent, a grumbler, a crank, a misanthrope, or a foppish fool who criticizes Catherine and tries to impose on her his suggestions about how to rule the country and to improve everything by means of unrealistic social projects that have been born in an imagination spoiled by the black bile. He (or she, as in the case of quarrelsome Princess Dashkova) ‘is likely to be a trouble-maker’ (Babb 76) and deserves public derision. Catherine always stresses that she does not want to wield power against these bitter eccentrics, since neither laws nor religion can cure the infected. In this regard, she follows Voltaire’s wise advice that ‘[t]here is no other remedy for this epidemic illness than the spirit of free thought, which, spreading little by little, finally softens men’s customs, and prevents the renewal of the disease’ (Dictionnaire). Here is a typical description of ‘melancholic disease’ by Catherine (1769): There is a sort of fever that in the bygone times used to be mortal ... The newest way of its treatment ... is to neglect it and not to use any medicine but laughter. This disease is characterized by the following paroxysms. The individual begins to fall under the spell of the boredom and melancholy that are born of inactivity and reading books. He proceeds to complain about everything around him and eventually about the order of the uni-

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verse itself ... The patient becomes enamoured with the idea of building castles in the air ... Even the government itself, no matter how zealous its efforts, becomes completely unacceptable to him. In the end he will offer his advice and work for the general good only according to the dictates of his own idea. (Vsiakaia vsiachina 149: 404–5; italics mine)14

Further in the article follows a list of different kinds of grumblings and ravings, inherent in melancholy ‘fever’: ‘One complained that there was no justice, for he had met several denouncers’; ‘others were not happy that no defence treaty was being concluded with the Chinese,’ etc. Characteristically, Catherine speaks of a group of melancholic ‘sectarians,’15 rather than a single melancholic malcontent. These ‘melancholic circles’ in her satires reveal certain social and ideological features: they imply groups of ambitious and pretentious Russian intellectuals who are ‘unwilling to lead a useful life’ (Gleason 156) – the products of Peter III’s and Catherine’s ‘liberation’ of the Russian nobility. Moreover, in her satirical articles and early comedies, Catherine locates such weird gatherings of grumbling ‘melancholics’ in Moscow houses. In her vision, this is a peculiar Moscow malady, characteristic of resigned nobles with a morbid sense of neglected intellectual, political, or military talents.16 Drawing from the rationalistic tradition, Catherine considered melancholic thoughts the most foolish superstition in the world. In her modernized and Russianized version of Addison’s essay on superstitious people, Catherine ridiculed numerous melancholic ‘superstitions’ and ‘ravings’ and concluded: ‘If enlightenment labours to diminish troubles in life through reason and a clear understanding of things; one can say, that, on the other hand, fools seek nothing more than to multiply the cares of life through lack of knowledge and ignorance’ (Vsiakaia vsiachina 6: 21; italics mine). In her comedies of the 1780s, Catherine portrayed the Martinists (i.e., the Russian followers of the prominent French mystic Claude de Saint Martin) as the most boring and superstitious people. She disliked them for their gloomy (in her vision) imagination and obscure mysticism. In a comedy The Seduced One (Obol’shchennyi) (1785), Catherine portrays melancholic behaviour in such a way: ‘He avoids what seems to us good, merry and pleasant; from people and deeds in equal measure. If in his life someone moves away from universally accepted rules, then he approaches a dangerous imagination’ (Sochineniia Ekateriny II 301). In her vision, a good and pious subject should be joyful and obedient. He/she should live in society and strive for happiness. ‘What is opposed to common reason and rules of correct thinking?’ we read in Catherine’s

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satirical Catechism of an Absurd Society. ‘They are chimeras, apparitions, and frenzies’ (Sochineniia Imperatritsy 444). Therefore a melancholy person who loves solitude and grieves without any reasonable cause is suspicious and absolutely useless to his family and to society as a whole. Catherine shared the popular rationalistic idea that ‘striving for solitude’ was ‘the most general symptom of melancholy,’ and that ‘society seemed to be made for times of health, vivacity, and amusement; solitude, by contrast, seemed to be the natural haven for the infirm, the grieved, and the stricken’ (cited in Lepenies 64); however, echoing Dr K. Zimmermann’s influential narrative on solitude, she permitted a minor dose of sweet melancholy in her private life (Filosoficheskaia 125), since this sort of melancholy was a temporary state rather than a permanent painful worldview possessed by imaginary horrors.17 It is quite understandable now why, in her eyes, to be melancholy meant to be (at least) physically and morally corrupted. Thus, for example, in the late 1760s Catherine accused her zealous moral opponent Nikolai Novikov of melancholy. In her response to Gospodin Pravdol’ubov’s (Novikov’s nickname) critical comments on her account, she publicly advised him to get treatment ‘so that the black vapors and bile [chernye pary i zhelch’] not appear even on the paper he touches ... His melancholy is not annoying for us; but the very fact that we prefer laughing to crying is unbearable for him’ (cf. ‘Timon of Athens’ in Prokopovich’s invective) (Vsiakaia vsiachina 66: 174–5). In 1790 she ‘diagnosed’ the critical pathos of Aleksandr Radishchev, the author of Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, as a severe melancholy disease caused by his bitter temper, unbounded ambitions, and destructive foreign influences: Has a pessimistic temperament and sees everything in its blackest aspect, therefore is a man with a somber, bilious constitution ... was born with unbridled ambitions; aspiring to the highest station, he has so far failed to reach it, and so has everywhere given vent to his spleen against the established order and produced this particular theory, culled though it is from various halfbaked sages of this century, such as Rousseau, the Abbé Raynal, and persons similar to that hypochondriac. (Cited in Lang 186–7, and Startsev 374; italics mine)

For Catherine, these ‘half-baked sages of this century’ are Rousseau, the Abbé Raynal, and other ‘persons similar to that hypochondriac’ (cited in Lang 187).

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Following tradition, she considered melancholy a disease of sick imagination and a Western disorder, poisoning weak Russian souls. It is not an accident that among the patients of the first St Petersburg mad asylum (the Obukhovskaya hospital) were two freemasons V.Ya. Kolokol’nikov and M.I. Nevzorov (Lopukhin 63). Both young scholars had just returned from abroad (commonplace melancholy travellers in the Western tradition) and both were diagnosed as hypochondriacs.18 Since the time of Catherine the Great this medical (psychiatric) diagnosis has been used by the Russian authorities as a simple and effective way to discredit and/or isolate their political and ideological opponents, including some of the Decembrists, Count Dmitriev-Mamonov, Pyotr Chaadaev, and Leo Tolstoy. To conclude, for Catherine, melancholy was a psychological, mental, moral, and social disorder inherent in a certain group of subjects who spoke of a general ‘corruption of morals in Russia,’ had a sense of neglected intellectual superiority, and were most prone to Western ideological influences – namely, aristocratic intellectuals, the Russian protointelligentsia. The melancholic delusions and quixotic enthusiasm of those men were portrayed by the Empress as the direct result of the dangerous mental and physical disease that had both internal (a bitter temperament) and external (social, ideological, or biographical) causes. In a word, she turned mélancolie religieuse, denounced by Western philosophers, into a political diagnosis. The critically minded intellectual replaced the religious fanatic (either Catholic or Puritan) of the Western tradition. Moreover, in Catherine’s excoriation of critics of her glorious reign we already see such standard characteristics of the members of the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century as dissatisfaction with the existing political order, ‘loss of reality,’ ‘idle speculation, noncommittal daydreaming, and rampant imagination’ (Lepenies 143–4). In a way, the empress had shaped the image of a Russian intelligent in her writings long before this image appeared in Russian literature. It is also historically intriguing that Catherine’s symptoms of ‘melancholy disease’ prefigure Nicholas I’s vision of Chaadaev’s ‘political lunacy,’ as well as the notorious criteria of ‘the reformist delusion’ used by Soviet authorities in the 1960s and 1970s against dissenters: ‘paranoid delusion of reforming society or re-organization of the state apparatus,’ ‘uncritical attitude towards his abnormal condition,’ ‘opinions have moralizing character,’ ‘over-estimation of his own personality,’ and ‘poor adaptation to the social environment’ (Bloch and Reddaway 251–2). This rhetoric is used by absolutist regimes in order to preserve ‘eternal’ stability of a regime that ‘secretes’ permanent optimism as a kind of singular ‘state humour.’

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The Melancholy World It is essential for our discussion to understand that Catherine’s vision of melancholic danger changed with time. Her ascension to power was presented as the end of the ‘gloomy’ reign of her mentally ill husband and the beginning of a happy golden age. In this ideological perspective, melancholy was regarded as stupid, eccentric, and anachronistic, since there was no socio-historical base for this ‘discontented’ emotion. However, ‘melancholics’ appeared and claimed their right to criticize her deeds and principles. The political game began. In the 1760s the empress treated them with humour; in the 1770s, following the Pugachev uprising, the satiric vision of melancholy prevailed in her writings; in the 1780s and 1790s melancholy raised a panicked fear in her mind. The targets of her anti-melancholic satire also changed: superstitious people, grumblers, and fops in the 1760s; her stubborn critics (malcontents) like Novikov in the 1770s (she called him ‘improperly-minded-and-spiritedacting’ [neudobo-razumo-i-dukho-deiatel’nyi]); and political fanatics (in her views) in the 1780s and 1790s. These gloomy people, she believed, were eager to betray her in the interests of her disliked son Paul – a classic malcontent figure, whose frustrated ambitions, as well as unbalanced character, were evident.19 At the end of her life Catherine spoke about a conspiracy of melancholics who threatened not only her mirthful reign but the entire world as well.20 In a word, although Catherine always treated melancholy as a corruptive disease, the degree of its danger increased with time and the means employed against the malady changed from humoristic portrayal and satirical derision of the ‘sick person’ to his denunciation, confinement, or exile. In the late period of her enlightened reign, to be a melancholy man meant to be a demonic rebel. In the Western tradition, the malcontent figure was closely associated with ‘criminal violence and intrigue,’ as represented in numerous dramatic villains (Babb 84–96; in Russian drama we may find these melancholy villains in Sumarokov’s tragedies). The concept of the whole nation poisoned by black bile is also very old (Burton). It is no accident that Catherine interpreted the bloody French Revolution as an epidemic of melancholic malady – the ‘French mania.’ Jane Kromm writes that British ‘political prints from 1792 through 1799 tended to construe revolutionary acts and sensibilities as mindless and anarchic, and consequently as such they were thought akin to madness’ (187). In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke argued that revolutions resulted in acts that were violent and subversive, provoked by

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‘turbulent, discontented men’ who ‘profess principles of extremes’: ‘I am seriously to felicitate a madman who has escaped from the restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty’ (cited in Kromm 187). In anti-revolutionary allegorical personifications the French nation was portrayed as a loathed Madwoman. In the age of European turmoil, Catherine clearly understood the mortal threat of rebellious ‘bile’ for her reign. Paradoxically enough, her fear of melancholy persons, her obsessive vision of the modern world poisoned by black bile, her suspicious belief in a plot of melancholy fanatics – all of these features may be interpreted (in her own terms) as obvious symptoms of melancholic disease. What was, then, the cause for her melancholic fear of melancholy? Apparently, like most anti-melancholic critics since Democritus, she wrote on melancholy ‘by being busy to avoid’ (Burton) and to suppress her own increasing sadness caused by a vision of life, men, and history as tragically different from the ideal she believed in and protected, by the impossibility of ignoring death and decay even in her courtly Arcadia,21 by her anxiety about the future of her dynasty, the fear of assassination and treason, and by her own physical decline. Ultimately, her joyful and glorious ‘scenario of power’ appeared an intellectual and emotional drama for her. There is also a historical and social logic in this failure. As Lepenies argues, ‘[t]he institutions that dispelled melancholy continued to do so in the interests of the rulers; but they became progressively more ineffective with the increasing diffuseness of the emotions they were intended to regulate. There was no longer a closed and dominant culture with defined centers (such as the absolute court) from which ennui could be held at bay ... With the dissolution of such ‘melancholic centers,’ melancholy proceeded to infuse those people who were meant to ban it’ (Lepenies 71). Including the very source of autocratic power, we may add. Symptomatically, Russia’s new tsars, Paul I and Alexander I, were ‘melancholics’ (each in his own fashion, of course).22 New Melancholics In the 1770s and 1780s the ‘moral and spiritual climate’ in Russia changed radically. ‘A general weariness, sickness, and anguish,’ dissatisfaction both with rationalistic values and with Catherine’s regime as the whole, as Father G. Florovsky puts it, distinguished the intellectual elite of the time (from Prince Shcherbatov to Alexander Radishchev) (Florovsky 149). This epoch is characterized by an intensive moral quest

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by Russian intellectuals for a new system of values which were radically opposed to the officially protected optimistic philosophy symbolized by Catherine’s court. In these years the different attitude toward melancholy marked a watershed between two irreconcilable worldviews. We already know what Catherine meant when she called her critics ‘melancholics.’ However, did those ‘moral idealists’ (Gleason) accused of melancholy by the Empress consider themselves melancholy? As usually happens with offensive ideological labels in history, the title was eagerly accepted and reinterpreted by Catherine’s defiant opponents.23 Thus, Novikov responded to her charge of melancholic neudobo-razumo-i-dukhodeiatel’nosti with the following witty passage:24 [J]ust the word ‘Improperly-minded-and-spirited-acting’ is dearer to me than anything on earth and it encompasses in itself all the virtues listed above simultaneously and to an extreme degree. Besides, it is far more laudatory for me to be the head of a special garden of all Petersburg hypochondriacs than simply a feigned, or what is the same thing, a simple hypochondriac. (Novikov 138–41; italics mine)

The satirist described his ‘melancholy career’ as a sequence of promotions: first, ‘the rank of hypochondriac,’ then, participation in meetings of members of the ‘society’ of ‘hypochondriacs and hypochondrines,’ and finally his promotion to the supreme ‘degree of strangest thoughts and sensations’ – ‘improperly-minded-and-spirited-activity.’ In a way, Catherine gave a name and impetus to an intellectual and literary trend that was destined to play a significant role in Russian culture. Indeed, melancholy was chosen by Russian moral and social thinkers as a spiritual banner for the new ‘philosophy of faith and feeling’ they propagated.25 For them the official joyful attitude toward the world was absolutely false and wicked. The melancholic mood, on the other hand, was sublime, true, and pious. The optimistic ideology of Catherine’s Enlightenment called a man to live in society, among people, to avoid solitude. The pious philosophy of sadness – ‘a science never taught in our universities,’ as Alexei Kutuzov, a translator of Edward Young’s melancholy Bible The Complaint, or Night Thoughts, noted (Iung 280) – makes him run away from the vanity of the world. In Catherine the Great’s system of values mirth was considered healthy and natural, and melancholy morbid and foolish. In the philosophy of sadness, earthly joy was denigrated and melancholy treated as a useful and wise mood.26

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In enlightened society it was natural to avoid thoughts of death. Elizaveta Petrovna prohibited anyone to come to her court in black, and Catherine the Great forbade anyone to carry the deceased by the windows of her palace (Gol’tsev 119); she also insisted in her will that the mourning period upon her death should be brief (Memoirs 327). Instead, Kutuzov claimed that thoughts of death, the dark mournful imagination, were helpful and urgent. A melancholy man was an exile from Catherine’s Utopia. In the philosophy of sadness he was an exemplary citizen. Truly a mystic, Kutuzov clearly realized the dangers of melancholy (the medieval acedia), but associated melancholic pain with the idea of spiritual suffering. In this regard he followed Jakob Boehme and other mystics who had taught that the holiest souls became darkened and melancholy, since ‘“God often allows this to happen so that they might be tested and strive for the noble conqueror’s crown.” Melancholy pain is the only way to liberate “the inner man.” It is necessary to fall ill in order to be cured. A “furious Combat with Melancholy Thoughts” is the most sublime and crucial event in the history of one’s soul’ (Bohme 15). Melancholy is the real cross of a seeking man. If the man withstands, he reaches a state of pure joy, associated with mystical union with God. In Kutuzov’s Masonic terminology he becomes a spiritual knight. Thus, the melancholic temperament appears to be most important and valuable for salvation. It is creative, rather than destructive. This perception of melancholy influenced the Romantic conception of the man of genius.27 In their attempts to promote a true melancholic vision of this world, proponents of melancholy denied the theory that this state of mind was not inherent in the Russian people. Thus, Kutuzov, who even signed his letters with the nickname ‘Chondra,’ argued that sadness and melancholy belonged to the best virtues of Russian men.28 He passionately condemned some unnamed writers whose cheerful works (in the true spirit of Catherine’s program) did not provide their fellow citizens with any moral help: ‘Young wrote for English people, who are extremely glum and inclined toward melancholia. Whereas we are writing [say these authors] for our fellow countrymen, who never concern themselves with such nonsense. Stern, gloomy, pensive and lachrymose Young never would have found his fortune with us. But if he had written a silly comedy and had called it B. or P. that would have been another matter’ (Iung 242). This ‘denigration of jolly fellows’ was polemically aimed at the traditional ‘denigration of melancholy people’ by Catherine and the

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rationalists. Attacks on the ‘mirthful philosophy’ by zealous melancholics were assaults on the Empress herself as the personification of the enlightened Joy and Happiness of her subjects. Ultimately, in their works Kutuzov and his brotherly writers created a new image of melancholy (or, to be specific, revived an old Renaissance icon) – a beautiful Goddess plunged into deep sadness. She loves a man, instructs him, reveals his inner self to him, and brings unspeakable delights of sublime imagination and solemn contemplation to him. This Melancholy – ‘tsaritsa prevysprennikh myslei’ (queen of the loftiest ideas), the Masonic Sophia, rather than the earthly Sophia of Anhalt Zerbst – was that ‘sage and holy’ ‘heavenly Muse’ who inspired Russian thinkers and authors of the coming Romantic age.

NOTES 1 In Orlov-Polikarpov’s eighteenth-century Trilingual Lexicon the word ‘melancholy’ was translated as chernozhelchie (‘blackbiledness’) (Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII veka). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some Russian authors preferred to use the word zadumchivost’ (‘thoughtfulness’) as a complete equivalent for the Western ‘melancholy.’ Although both words meant the same thing, there was a certain ‘patriotic’ impulse for this usage: our thoughtfulness vs their melancholy. Later on, the notion of ‘Russian Chondra’ was devised to name a specific ‘Russian malady’ motivated by native social conditions. There is nothing strange in this belief, since, as is known, ‘what the French call la maladie anglaise the English refer to as “French boredom” ’ (Lepenies 1). 2 Thus, for example, the alchemists saw the best remedy against melancholy in ‘a certain spirit of emeralds, one ray of which dispels restlessness, dissatisfaction, and melancholy’ (Istoricheskie, geneologicheskie i geograficheskie primechaniia v Vedomost’akh 25, 140). 3 See characteristic titles of eighteenth-century Russian books and journals: Smeiushchiis’a Demokrit, ili pole chestnykh uveselenii s poruganiem melankholii; Delo ot bezdel’ia, ili priiatnaia zabava, razhdaiushchaia ulybku na chele ugr’umykh; Prokhladnye chasy, ili apteka vrachuiushchaia ot unyniia, sostoiashchaia iz medikamentov stariny i novizny; Melankholicheskie vechera, ili Sobranie veselykh i nravouchitel’nykh povestei; Otrada v skuke, etc. 4 This kind of melancholy, known as lycanthropy, was used by French luminaries as an extreme case of unbridled imagination, close to fanaticism. See Encyclopedia. Selections 233–4.

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5 Interestingly enough, a Renaissance story of an eccentric who claimed he was made of glass echoed as late as in Leo Tolstoy (in his oral tales about madmen, rendered by his son Sergei) and Marina Tsvetaeva (in her brilliant essay ‘Two Forest Kings,’ 1933). 6 This story was always considered particularly representative of the melancholic disorder. Tests of urine played an important role in medical examinations of melancholics (see the notorious madness of King George). There were also stories about men who thought they were urinals. See Babb 43. 7 See, for example, N. Karamzin’s description of Bedlam in his Letters of a Russian Traveller (1792; July 1790 letter). See Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika 341–3. 8 On the history of Obukhovskaya hospital see Nechaev. 9 On the malcontent types in Western melancholy tradition, see Babb 73–101. 10 On the clash between rationalist optimism and baroque pessimism in early eighteenth century Russia see Lotman’s insightful article ‘Ob ode, vybrannoi iz Iova.’ 11 On the history of Russian reception of Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ see Vinitskii 125–68. 12 Much later, she expanded on the theme of her husband’s alleged madness: ‘Peter III had no greater enemy than himself; all his actions bordered on insanity. Besides this, whatever aroused the sympathy of other people moved him to anger. He took pleasure in beating animals and men, and was not only insensible to their tears and cries but enraged by them ... By ascending the throne, Empress Catherine saved the empire, herself, and her son from the hands of a madman who was almost raving’ (Memoirs 278–9; italics mine). A tyrannical and wicked nature, abnormal behaviour, senseless cruelty, dislike for pleasant emotions, unruly feelings – all these features are common for the portrayal of a melancholic eccentric in the Western tradition (Babb 88–90). 13 Wolf Lepenies justly notes that ‘[t]he precept of joy is an integral part of the court.’ Hence the court had ‘to ban mournfulness, for in the court – that is, “in the world” – even the emotions were regulated’ (67). In the eighteenth century, ‘“happiness,” in official rhetoric, expressed the eudaemonistic ethic of the enlightenment. By promising the felicity of her subjects, the Russian empress defined herself as a European monarch’ (Wortman 89). 14 See also Gleason 156. 15 As Gleason argues, in this article she is attacking the Fonvizin circle. In the empress’s vision, Fonvizin, Novikov, and their colleagues were ‘quixotic figures whose suggestions for the moral reform of society were to be dismissed as the well-meaning but ineffectual activities of superficial men’ (156).

44 Ilya Vinitsky 16 See numerous echoes of the theme of ‘discontented Muscovites’ in subsequent periods: P.A. Vyazemsky, A.S. Pushkin, A.S. Griboedov, P. Ya. Chaadaev, etc. In eighteenth-century cultural mythology, Moscow as an abandoned capital of Russia, the ‘dowager in purple’ (porfironosnaia vdova) of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, served as a symbolic setting associated with melancholy of a malcontent type: loss of significance, frustrated ambitions, stagnation, mournfulness, the spirit of opposition, inability to change anything, etc. 17 It is also true that she had close associates who were subject to melancholic paroxysms. She definitely suffered from Potemkin’s attacks of hypochondria. Yet it is clear that this hypochondria had nothing in common with the ‘political malady’ she devised. It was merely a human weakness, tolerable in a friend. 18 I do not discuss here whether they were really mentally ill. Serkov argues that both of them were led to insanity by harsh interrogation. 19 Grand Prince Paul’s mental condition was discussed by numerous contemporaries. I.M. Dolgorukov wrote that his ‘judgment was darkened, [his] heart filled with bile and the spirit of wrath’ (cited in Ragsdale 107). 20 The association between the malcontent figure and treachery is deeply rooted in the Western tradition. In Elizabethan England, the malcontent was treated as a person with an inclination for treachery and sedition, always eager to join a conspiracy against the state (Babb 76, 82–3). 21 Catherine confessed that she had suffered paroxysms of black melancholy in her youth, but she had always found the moral and physical strength to recover (see Kliuchevskii 43–6). However, the death of her most beloved favourites, Lanskoi in 1784 and Potemkin in 1791, led her to long and morbid periods of longing (de Madariaga 355, 564). 22 On Paul I’s ‘madness’ see Ragsdale. 23 I discuss the issue of Catherine’s opponents’ appropriation and transformation of her rhetoric of melancholia in more detail in my book Utekhi melankholii. 24 This is the beginning of a long tradition in Russian freethinking. Chaadaev, declared insane by Nicholas I, accepted the label and wrote his Apology of a Madman. Leo Tolstoy replied to official accusations of insanity with his ‘Memoirs of a Madman.’ I argue that a religious mode of thought requires embracing such pseudo-psychiatric diagnoses. The early Christians, for example, revelled in the honour of being condemned as fools and idiots by their rationalistic, pagan opponents. 25 See the profound analysis of the ‘philosophy of feeling and faith’ in Kozhevnikov.

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26 On Edward Young’s gloomy melancholy see Sickels 27–34, 131–40. 27 It is significant that Russian culture did not know the Renaissance tradition of rationalizing and representing the so-called divine melancholy inherent in intellectuals, poets, and lovers. Therefore, Masonic glorification of melancholy was the first attempt to introduce this tradition to Russia. 28 On Aleksei Mikhailovich Kutuzov see Barskov, Tarasov, and Kutuzov.

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2 The Osvidetel’stvovanie and Ispytanie of Insanity: Psychiatry in Tsarist Russia lia iangoulova

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Russian society began to acknowledge the social status of psychiatrists, and with this a new term entered the Russian language – ‘psychiatric evaluation.’ Two other terms were subsumed under the actual definition of psychiatric evaluation – osvidetel’stvovanie (‘examination’) and ispytanie (‘testing’). These discrete procedures are crucial to an understanding of the psychiatric and legal discourse of the time. This chapter will delve deeper into the history of psychiatric evaluation, a central element of the institution of psychiatry. Through a survey of the historical evolution of medical and administrative practices of recognition and identification of insanity in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Russia, we will be able to follow the birth and development of the science of mental illnesses – psychiatry. Psychiatric Evaluation The Russian Departments of Public Welfare (Prikazy obshchestvennogo prizreniia) oversaw a number of essentially similar provincial insane asylums in various parts of Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century. One such asylum had opened in Kazan’ in 1810 – the Kazan’ Public Welfare Asylum for Lunatics (subsequently turned over to the jurisdiction of the zemstvo). Interestingly, however, in 1869 another institution for the mentally ill opened in Kazan’ – the Kazan’ District Clinic, also known as the Kazan’ Regional Asylum. The existence of these two institutions simultaneously in one city was a unique historical phenomenon, the chronological overlapping of two separate systems of care for the mentally ill. Indeed, as we shall see, for almost twenty years the institutions were able to work in a complementary fashion.

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The Kazan’ Public Welfare Asylum for Lunatics, like all such institutions in Russia, belonged to the department of public welfare and was administered by a steward. An almshouse and an orphanage also fell within the purview of the municipal departments of public welfare. These institutions shared one physician, and as a rule he would visit not more than once a week. The conditions in asylums were little different from those in prisons and public hospitals. Indeed, people were often housed in lunatic asylums to serve criminal sentences. For example, on 5 July 1832 a serf named Pavel Aleksandrov was housed in the insane asylum after being convicted ‘by a Kazan’ court of conscience for having beheaded his wife Avdotia during a bout of insanity. By this court’s verdict and by resolution of his Grace the Archbishop of Kazan’ and Sviyaga, he was sentenced for this deed to a lunatic asylum, to be discharged after a public church penance of one year.’ In 1865, the Department of Public Welfare was eliminated, and in time lunatic asylums were placed under the jurisdiction of the zemstvos. Under the zemstvos, the number of patients in asylums steadily increased. According to descriptions which have reached us, sparse means existed for hospital support; the supervising staff could not meet the demands; and there were no physicians. The situation was not much improved by expanding the asylum building in Kazan’ (1875) and renting an additional building (1884). Being sent to a zemstvo insane asylum was considered to be virtually a ‘death sentence.’ With the opening of the Kazan’ Regional Asylum in 1869,1 the zemstvo lunatic asylum was designated for chronic patients – the ‘incurable.’ However, even this limited financial burden was too much for the zemstvo, and in 1887 the zemstvo lunatic asylum finally closed. All ‘incurables’ were transferred to the Kazan’ Regional Asylum. The Kazan’ Regional Asylum was one of the most modern and advanced state hospitals of its time, a psychiatrist’s dream.2 Nonetheless, in the practice of psychiatric evaluation at this institution, two rather outdated terms continued to be used: osvidetel’stvovanie and ispytanie. By this time the term ‘psychiatric evaluation’ had already come into wide usage in Russia. The question arises: why did the Kazan’ clinic, advanced in all respects, choose to use these two archaic terms, osvidetel’stvovanie and ispytanie, to describe psychiatric evaluation? If we consider that psychiatric evaluation was a basic practice, ensuring the legitimization of psychiatry as a medical institution, an analysis of how it developed can help us understand certain peculiarities of the history of Russian psychiatry.

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The Kazan’ Regional Asylum was created, first of all, for the ‘medical treatment of people afflicted by mental illnesses,’ primarily those with the potential for recovery. Second, it was created for ‘testing, by the order of state institutions, those people whose mental capacities were in question.’ Third, it was created for practical studies both for medical and law students of Kazan’ University and for doctors sent by the Ministry of Internal Affairs to study mental illnesses.3 In its own way this was a unique institution, advocating both humanistic principles and scientific progress. Clearly these words, which are now a part of the general lexicon of the Russian language, osvidetel’stvovanie and ispytanie, may have had entirely other meanings for the students and doctors of the Kazan’ Regional Asylum. Below I will conduct an analysis of these words to clarify just what procedures were taking place at the Kazan’ clinic and other institutions for the mentally ill during the second half of the nineteenth century. Osvidetel’stvovanie (Examination) In 1876 the procedure for osvidetel’stvovanie was strictly formalized by Russian legislation, as follows: ‘An osvidetel’stvovanie [of people suffering from mental derangement] consists of the strict scrutiny of answers to questions regarding ordinary circumstances and the home life of those under study. These questions as well as their answers are to be taken down in writing in the document compiled for the case.’4 Forensic psychiatric examination required an unambiguous answer from physicians: ‘The court presents us with only one question: was this person, at the given time, afflicted by mental derangement? The answer to this question can only be affirmative or negative’ (Botkin 4). As a rule, an osvidetel’stvovanie was accomplished in strict adherence to existing chancellery and bureaucratic canons. But the role of the psychiatrist during a late nineteenth-century osvidetel’stvovanie was ambiguous. Psychiatry was a new science in Russia, and a psychiatrist’s status as the sole and most authoritative expert in the field of mental illnesses had only begun to take hold (Brown ‘Professionalization of Russian Psychiatry’; ‘Psychiatrists’; ‘Social Influences’). By the 1880s the field of psychiatry had, of course, achieved a certain standing, but since the ‘victory’ was imperceptible and recent, psychiatrists acutely sensed a continual need to reaffirm their status. A psychiatrist of the nineteenth century found himself in the rather ambiguous position of a scientist/administrator.

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Psychiatric views continued to change, thus opening the door to numerous outside objections and throwing diagnoses into continual doubt. In addition, existing legislation did nothing to support the psychiatrist’s expertise (the presence of a psychiatrist at an osvidetel’stvovanie was not obligatory; moreover, the psychiatrist’s opinion during an osvidetel’stvovanie could be completely ignored). The practice of osvidetel’stvovanie as a means of establishing the absence or presence of traits or qualities, including those of insanity, was a fairly ancient Russian practice. Words such as smotr (review, inspection), osmotr (examination, inspection), svidetel’stvo (evidence, testimony), and osvidetel’stvovanie (examination, inspection), by all accounts, were often used as synonyms in the context of the present topic. Osmotret’ (to examine), and both smotr and dosmotr (inspection) of something or someone were an indispensable part of Russian administrative practice and consisted of two aspects: a visual, situational examination of a subject or person and the writing down of those observations. The osvidetel’stvovanie of the nobility was an organic part of the general policy of attempting to register and monitor each person capable of working or entering state service. In the long run, the Senate osvidetel’stvovanie of the nobility became a regular and strictly regimented procedure which combined medical examination with the practical function of a census of the male population. As a law of 1723 had it, ‘the Senate must ask about their home life, knowing how an intelligent person would answer, and if the nobleman cannot answer a question but rather starts to talk about something else, then it will be possible to identify foolishness.’5 Thus osvidetel’stvovanie was a specific practice within the framework of a general policy of reforms, one which could identify the insane, or ‘fools.’ This practice of osvidetel’stvovanie of ‘fools’ was fixed by legislation. In Peter’s laws, insanity was seen as a potential but fully tangible and apparent danger threatening the welfare of the state (through evasion of service, the ‘bad legacy’ created through marriages with ‘fools,’ and other consequences which were undesirable for the state, including the division of estates among heirs and the subsequent weakening of estates). Before Peter III’s decree on the creation of dollgauzy (from the German Tollhaus) in Russia, there was no consistent state policy toward ‘fools.’ The existing acts related to insanity were not separated into their own category, but rather insanity ranked with other problems that in one way or another hindered the functioning of the administration. Suspicion of forgetfulness, confusion, madness, and so on arose only in the

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context of obviously absurd behaviour, and only after the commission of the most serious crimes of the time – an attempt on the tsar’s life or murder. The case ‘of the decision to bring retired Captain Efimovich to trial after he slaughtered his wife while in a mad state’6 was so important that it entered into legislation, and a thorough investigation was carried out into the circumstances of the captain’s ‘forgetfulness’ and ‘insanity.’ It seems that his insanity was obvious to the investigators (that is to say ‘evident,’ ‘visible,’ ‘demonstrated’), and his ‘forgetfulness’ (‘memory lapses,’ ‘distraction’ [Slovar’ tserkovno-slavianskogo 2]) during the course of the crime were confirmed by all interrogated witnesses. Captain Efimovich was sent to Smolensk, where he was kept in a monastery. ‘A teacher of rhetoric was appointed to “admonish” him, and he did not see in him a premeditated murderer.’ Here we see that the mechanism of osvidetel’stvovanie consisted of two essential parts: clearly demonstrable behaviour completely lacking in common sense, and the necessary agreement of eyewitnesses to this mad behaviour. In the nineteenth century, the nature of osvidetel’stvovanie began to change, taking on a more formal character. In 1815 a Senate decree was issued ‘with an explanation of the Government Council’s opinion on the osvidetel’stvovanie of the insane,’7 where for the first time the procedure of osvidetel’stvovanie was transferred from the Senate to the Medical Board. The law of 1815 introduced into practice two forms of osvidetel’stvovanie, which laid the foundation for a legislative definition of psychiatric evaluation. The personal interview (ochnoe osvidetel’stvovanie) consisted of an individual osvidetel’stvovanie in the Senate of nobles who had been insane from birth. By 1835 this personal osvidetel’stvovanie was no longer practised in the Senate. The second form, review by record (zaochnoe osvidetel’stvovanie), continued throughout virtually the entire nineteenth century and consisted of examining documents put together by the Medical Board or the special office (Osoboe Prisutstvie) concerning persons suspected of suffering from deranged mental faculties. From 1835 on, the practice of osvidetel’stvovanie was limited to this examination of administrative documents and written testimonies (‘osvidetel’stvovanie on the basis of written evidence’). The actual right to decide cases confirming the lunacy of a person, and the subsequent guardianship as a result of the confirmation, were left to the Senate, while the right to personal osvidetel’stvovanie passed completely to the Medical Boards of provincial cities.This right of osvidetel’stvovanie was given to combined commissions consisting of representatives of the administration and physicians. The osvidetel’stvovanie rarely happened in

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the asylums themselves; rather the procedure took place in a formal administrative setting, the ‘Council for osvidetel’stvovanie.’ Since the participation of psychiatrists was not required in the osvidetel’stvovanie procedure, and indeed was a rarity during the first half of the nineteenth century, the Council was guided not by medical knowledge, but by legislative definitions and regulations. As we see, osvidetel’stvovanie became the primary legal practice of the Russian government apparatus for establishing the fact of insanity. Since the concept of insanity as a medical issue appeared only half a century later, and no consistent legislative reaction was worked out, the necessity of recognition and special understanding of insanity was realized through a symbolic clash between the pragmatic principle of administrative/ social life and religious life. What should be done? How should one deal with the insane? This conflict was reflected in the methods for protecting the insane and for guarding society from possible harm ‘that might occur from the insane.’ The osvidetel’stvovanie of the insane was a practice that had originated in the administrative practice of smotry (medical, religious, utilitarian, and military examinations) even before the time of Peter – a practice that literally quantified certain qualities, properties, specific traits, and the ability or inability to carry out certain functions. The Senate’s osvidetel’stvovanie, osmotr, and smotr consisted of individualized, visual evaluation, a specific, political look at an object, with a view toward the pragmatics of everyday life. Questions ‘about any conditions at home’ were not directed toward inner qualities or the assessment of mental abilities, but served to reveal a person’s ability to act rationally in daily life and to demonstrate political loyalty, to preserve and increase currently held property, and to fulfil state duties. It was within the framework of this policy that the procedure of the osvidetel’stvovanie of the insane was formulated. This procedure became the official Senate administrative procedure from 1772 on (as a part of the general examination of male persons) and continued in this form throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ispytanie (Interrogating – or Torturing?) The practice of ispytanie has broad cultural and historical connotations, since before this practice became a direct part of psychiatric evaluation, it had occurred in completely different social contexts. In the eighteenth century, ispytanie was not employed as a procedure

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to recognize insanity; for these purposes osvidetel’stvovanie was used instead. In the legal domain, ispytanie was synonymous with the investigative process – questioning, inquiring, and searching for crime witnesses (‘Tainaia’). This is why the practice of ispytanie had all the characteristics of an investigation of the eighteenth century – interrogation under torture. But during the course of the investigative practice of inquiry, the question of madness tended to come up, mainly when the suspected criminal’s delirium became so obvious that the usual methods of investigation (including torture) lost their applicability, being utterly ineffectual with the insane. The insane and people with a deranged psyche often came under political observation, ‘but they found themselves there not because they were insane, but because they had the misfortune to be delirious on political or “indecent” topics. Also [under observation] were impertinent blasphemers who found themselves in a state of “frenzy or violent lunacy”’ (Anisimov 382). Despite the incoherence of their words, they were considered competent, their testimony had full legal force, and their evidence was used in further ‘inquiries,’ confrontations, and tortures. The fact of insanity was established through inquiry (the collection of witness depositions and examinations), and all evidence was seriously and carefully recorded. If a criminal was violent, then he was held under arrest, in expectation that he would ‘come to his senses’ and give testimony at that time. Thus the practice of ispytanie was first an investigative practice, included in the legal system of seeking the truth, and torture was an essential part of this practice. Only in the nineteenth century did the procedure of psychiatric ispytanie appear in legislation relating to the mentally ill, although evidence of the practice of ispytanie can be found in decrees from the mideighteenth century in connection with sending the insane to monasteries and maintaining them there. Legislation designating ispytanie as a crucial part of the psychiatric procedure to identify insanity appeared only in 1835, and while ispytanie of the insane did not occur in medical practice, it was used for state criminals. Psychiatric examinations to investigate incidences of somnambulism, suicide attempts, and attacks of delirium leading to unconsciousness began to be used in cases when it was necessary to determine if a person was able to function or if he was in a state of total madness. This occurred only when it was not possible to assess the person through the official procedure of osvidetel’stvovanie in the Senate, the Council, or the Physicians’ Board. However, the first Russian psychiatrists demanded that ispytanie be introduced as a proce-

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dure for osvidetel’stvovanie of civil affairs, and thus in the nineteenth century ispytanie of insanity was introduced as an addition to the established practice of osvidetel’stvovanie. By the end of the eighteenth century the focus of attention had shifted from the body of the subject and his ability to function to his inner world, the condition and state of his mind. A competent expert on this question had appeared – since there was now a science of the mind, psychiatry – and ispytanie became the prerogative of that professional, the psychiatrist. In 1835 a law was passed to that effect,8 with the characteristic title ‘Regulations concerning svidetel’stvovanie and ispytanie of those who in fits of insanity have committed murder or made an attempt on their own or the life of another; to be submitted to svidetel’stvovanie and ispytanie at a Physicians’ Board’ (Pravila). These regulations were distributed to Physicians’ Boards. This was the law published as ‘Opinion of the State Council published on March 20,’ 1835 ‘concerning murder during an episode of insanity.’ For the first time in Russian legislation, the regulations of 1835 designated a special status for psychiatric examination as a scientific practice, inseparable in principle from its administrative function. Now there was a means to recognize insanity: the sole means of ‘ensuring the validity of mental disturbance’ was the strict monitoring of the patient during ‘his paroxysm or fit itself.’ A procedure to enable differentiation between true insanity and pretended insanity was needed in order to determine the intentionality of a crime and the necessity of suitable criminal punishment: All of this must be investigated thoroughly, especially so that those who intentionally committed a crime might not be tempted to pretend in order to avoid legal punishment ... Feigned insanity is revealed through the abovementioned police investigation and strict medical observation of all symptoms, as well as through conducting certain kinds of ispytanie, utterly harmless for the health over the course of three months in a lunatic asylum, a hospital, or another location. [italics mine]

The commission was to make certain that the person was actually ‘afflicted by insanity, and not some momentary mental disturbance, or some illness accompanied by delirium, or a lunacy that is only short-lived.’ Under Old Russian law it was primarily criminals who were examined (that is to say, tortured): ‘If someone is caught red-handed, either try him in court, or do an inquiry. If during the inquiry he is deemed an evil man, then torture him. If he is deemed a good man during the inquiry,

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then the court will decide the case’ (Code of Laws, 1550; cited in Pakhman 145). The eighteenth-century procedure of pytanie-ispytyvanie was notorious for ascertaining the truth, often through inflicting pain. Thus when this legislator of the early nineteenth century mentioned the ispytanie of criminals for insanity, he made sure to add a proviso that the ispytanie was to be harmless. Times had changed, and torture was seen as a horrific anachronism, replaced by police inquiry. Closely regulated legislation had taken the place of arbitrary rule. Written files, official seals, and documents had taken the place of ripped nostrils. However, it seems that for simple bureaucrats the words ‘by ispytanie, utterly harmless for the health’ (or worse yet, ‘harmless ispytanie’ ) to discern simulated insanity were not exactly comprehensible. How was it possible to pytat’-ispytyvat’ without cutting the subject into pieces? How, and on what, should influence be exerted so that the truth, especially the truth of insanity, would come out? An innocent proviso of the legislation, ‘by ispytanie, harmless for the health,’ confirms our assumption that ispytanie and pytka are used as interchangeable concepts, and that the practice of legal ispytanie entailed a procedure of elucidating the truth by means of the symbolic (or physical) dismembering of a subject – through torture, causing real suffering (more likely physical than moral). Insanity and its subject appear as two hypostases. On the one hand, insanity revealed itself during criminal investigation (and this demanded that the whole spectrum of investigative methods be used). On the other hand, the mental state of an insane person was the object of scientific research (ispytanie), which required, in the interest of science, a more symbolic dissection of the mind. Gradually, the practice of ispytanie of insanity took on its own meaning. It was unequivocally psychiatrists who set this process in motion. One might expect that the words osvidetel’stvovanie and ispytanie – since both terms described the practice of seeking the truth about insanity – were used as synonyms in nineteenth-century Russian psychiatry. However, that is not quite the case. The ‘regulations’ clearly show that at the beginning stage of psychiatric examination in Russia, the procedure of ispytanie had principal differences from the procedure of osvidetel’stvovanie, both in content and as a process. On one hand there was the single, onetime observation of the examining commission (svidetel’stvuiushchaia komissiia) and the flat procedure of ‘question-answer.’ On the other hand, there was the protracted, regular observation by a doctor and the systematic inquiry (which required incarceration of the suspect and in this way legitimized psychiatrists’ activity). Moreover, the procedure of

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ispytanie always preceded osvidetel’stvovanie. Ispytanie complemented osvidetel’stvovanie in such a way that together they looked very much like psychiatric examination in the modern sense of the word. With the advent of the procedure ispytanie, a doctor (at first any doctor, and subsequently a psychiatrist) received the official status of an expert, a professional, which gave doctors influence over the authorities’ policy on the phenomenon of insanity. In this way the procedures of osvidetel’stvovanie and ispytanie were united into a single institution of insanity verification, to be conducted by state organs and psychiatric experts. Osvidetel’stvovanie emerged primarily as an administrative procedure of literal evidence, the personal attestations from members of the commission (the Council) on the presence or absence of insanity. Ispytanie – formerly a practice of police inquiry – was farmed out to psychiatrists who introduced scientific method into the practice. From the administrative authorities, not qualified to identify insanity, the responsibility for testimonial opinion shifted to the authorities of medical science, who were armed with scientific tools for determining the truth. Along with the process of medicalizing insanity, i.e., when certain forms of behaviour began to be associated with understanding medical illness, the criteria for truth also changed somewhat. In the Regulations of 1835, ispytanie had been introduced as a search for invisible qualities, the internal characteristics of a person. Ispytanie of the corpus delicti, over the course of which insanity became manifest, was replaced by the pragmatics of suspicion: since it was assumed that a normal person could not commit a crime, virtually all criminals fell under suspicion of having confused mental faculties. If insanity was hidden, then it must be revealed. This is where it became necessary to conduct an investigation, or more precisely, an ispytanie. How a subject was to be examined (ispytyvat’ ) for insanity was not entirely clear, but it was understood that in order to do so, the criminal had to be locked up in an insane asylum, where over the course of time the insanity (or simulated insanity) would become manifest. Over the course of the nineteenth century the investigative procedure had undergone a series of significant changes. Torture had fallen out of fashion, but the new methods of inquiry did not always give results. Through the mid-nineteenth century, ispytanie represented a kind of middle ground between segregation, investigation, and scientific observation (more of a general medical than a psychiatric nature). With time, the idea began to take root that insanity was an illness, that it was hidden

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and needed to be revealed, and that special professional methods existed for that purpose. As professional psychiatrists emerged, ispytanie took on a professional quality as well. From the observation of strange, complex, and out-of-the-ordinary cases, ispytanie gradually began to turn into a new procedure – that of psychiatric examination. Psychiatry was conceptualized as a science of that human essence hidden from the naked eye, or more precisely as a science of the illness of an invisible essence – the human mind or soul (dusha). Thus it can be argued that the very procedure of ispytanie helped to legitimize psychiatry, its theories, functions, and practices, and was thereby vital to psychiatry itself. Various forms of ‘abnormal’ behaviour, which in written descriptions fell into the category of ‘not sensible’ (ne-umnost’ ), were built into the traditional culture as specific and individual phenomena, neither related nor correlated with each other (for example, such phenomena as ‘idiot,’ ‘madcap,’ ‘God’s fool’). These concepts were not meant to define some universal values hidden behind external qualities, but rather served to describe and characterize actual observed and contextualized behavioural phenomena. The semantics of these phenomena were defined by their pragmatics – the meaning of the various behavioural and communicative phenomena emerged from the practical context of their appearance and function. The behaviour designated by the terms ‘disturbed,’ ‘possessed,’ ‘dumb,’ ‘insane,’ and so forth was originally perceived in a completely different context – that of folk culture – from how scientific psychiatry came to perceive it.9 Those who originally identified insanity in Russia as distinct from traditional cultural phenomena construed osvidetel’stvovanie and ispytanie as covering a rather limited spectrum of phenomena. In the documents of Peter I, ‘fools’ were presented not as patients so much as useless government subjects. This category (along with the ‘stupid’ and the ‘simple’) signified a person’s obvious pragmatic ineffectualness in everyday life. Such categories as ‘insane,’ ‘frenzied,’ or ‘dumbfounded’ emerged during the process of identifying ‘obscenities’ in the context of tsarist investigations and pointed to the breakdown of speech and behavioural systems (this may be the explanation for why this category was selected by the legislation of 1815 as primary, and in particular it illuminates the oral practice of establishing insanity by asking questions about life at home).10 Other phenomena of the time were evaluated by the church or the church and secular powers together and should be considered a completely separate category. This kind of

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‘madmen’ included the possessed, God’s fools, and simpletons, as well as those who were weak-minded from birth. Psychiatry introduced the unifying concept of ‘mental illness’ to traditional cultural phenomena, which allowed the new science to restructure the traditional field of ‘insanity’ and redefine it in new, scientific categories. From evaluations of the external attributes of abnormal behaviour, the gaze moved to internal properties. ‘Mental illness’ became not a private phenomenon, an unexpected breakdown in communication, but rather a universal phenomenon, most often hidden and thereby extremely dangerous. The general rhetoricization of insanity reflected the legitimization process of the psychiatric institution as a whole. Traditional phenomena were reinterpreted in new terms which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century – psychiatric terms – and they were given new scientific names. This process, however, was not unambiguous. Traditional categories also influenced the perception of psychiatric illness in nineteenth-century Russia, introducing a specific cultural context to the universal pan-European perception of insanity. An educated person of the second half of the nineteenth century could more or less confidently distinguish between normal and abnormal behaviour. The popularizing work of psychiatrists bore fruit, and psychiatric categories became part of popular vocabulary among the educated strata of the population. Utilizing the popular psychiatric knowledge that they mastered in their everyday observations of daily life, including hysterics, holy fools, or criminals (such as arsonists, murderers, suicides), the average Russian learned to successfully redefine situations and get used to the fact that a hysterical woman (klikusha) could be either an ordinary hysterical woman (isterichka) or a psychopath (psikhopatka); a classic holy fool (iurodivyi) was not an otherworldly person demonstrating some kind of Godly truth with his unusual actions, but was simply a dangerous madman (a patient) who was in need of special care; and a criminal was most likely a degenerate needing immediate isolation, to avoid the danger of bringing degenerate or illequipped descendants into the world. In the new system unifying political and administrative power, scientific knowledge, and social mores, there was no place for such phenomena as magically induced illness (porcha) or feats of Christian service. Instead, concepts of psychiatric illness, widespread psychoses, and degeneration sprang up and became part of the Russian cultural vocabulary.11 Translated by Barbara Poston

58 Lia Iangoulova NOTES 1 The National Archive of the Tartarstan Republic. The quotation in the preceding paragraph is from fond 115, op. 1, 1832–3, p. 161, list 220. The Kazan’ Regional Lunatic Asylum was subsequently named The Blessed Mother’s Kazan’ Regional Clinic for All Afflicted. 2 As Julie V. Brown notes, from the start psychiatrists were involved in all aspects of planning and designing the Kazan’ Regional Asylum, including its architectural design. Its first director, A. Iu. Freze, had written a monograph on asylum construction. See Brown, ‘Social Influences’ 28. 3 The National Archive of the Tartarstan Republic, fond 326, op. 1, file 115. Letter to His Excellency Governor of Kazan’, 1879, 30. 4 Polnoe sobranie zakonov, vol. 3, 1876, chapter 2, p. 373. 5 Polnoe sobranie zakonov, vol. 7, no. 4385, 6 December 1723. At about this same time Peter prohibited sending ‘the insane as if dumb’ to monasteries (Polnoe sobranie zakonov, vol. 7, no. 4296, 5 September 1723) and laid the responsibility of building hospitals on the main town council (Polnoe sobranie zakonov, vol. 6, no. 3708, January 1721). However, in practice this decree was never carried out; monasteries were the only places more or less prepared to keep the insane. 6 Polnoe sobranie zakonov, vol. 20, no. 14539, 17 November 1776. 7 Polnoe sobranie zakonov, vol. 33, no. 25876, 8 June 1815. 8 Polnoe sobranie zakonov, vol. 10, no. 7872, 18 February 1835. 9 And they continue to be portrayed in this way. See Helena Goscilo’s contemporary examples later in this volume of the iurodivaia as ‘crazy creatrix.’ 10 A good illustration of this point is provided by the patients at the Kazan’ Regional Asylum. In a province where more than half of the population was non-Russian-speaking, only 1 per cent of the patients were from ethnic groups other than Russian. Language (and possibly cultural context – anthropologists might call the behaviour of a shaman frenzied or hysterical, but they cannot deem him insane) was the main reason for declaring a formerly normal person to be insane, and certainly the reason for treating him medically. 11 Harriet Murav comes to a similar conclusion in her Holy Foolishness (see 41).

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3 Madness as an Act of Defence of Personality in Dostoevsky’s The Double elena dryzhakova

When one describes a person’s character in Russian, madness is generally denoted by the word ‘insanity’ (sumasshestvie). However, a great many synonyms exist to describe the afflicted person: broken, diminished, mentally ill, abnormal, crazy, psychopathic, half-there, damaged.1 More colourful to the Russian ear are terms such as idiot, maniac, cretin, debile. The traditional Russian words ‘touched’ and ‘blessed’ have a sympathetic feel to them. And finally there are an enormous number of metaphorical synonyms: cracked, clinked, maddened, nuts, and so on, down to the highly contemporary ‘his roof’s gone.’2 In the Russian language, the notion of insanity stretches from the psychopathological aspect to the metaphorical. For example, one can go mad from love (in earnest or for display), one can go mad over the songs of some singer, from fear, and so on. Naturally, in world literature we find reflected the whole gamut of human insanity: from the clinical condition to pure pretence. Putting aside the medical and theatrical aspects of the issue of insanity, in the present article we will attempt to define a social and humanitarian aspect. Here, we can consider our main criterion to be a man’s appropriate or inappropriate attitude toward the world around him (time, space, and people – including himself). Thus when Nikolai Gogol’ wanted to write his diary of a madman, he endowed his hero with a distorted perception of time, objects, animals, and self. This story, a Gogolian grotesque, chronicled the movement toward a complete destruction of consciousness. In other of Gogol’s literary works, maniacs, madmen, visionaries, and the possessed are only partly mad and demonstrate only certain psychological shifts of consciousness. In such situations it is virtually impossible to demarcate the border between normal and abnor-

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mal behaviour. The young Fedor Dostoevsky explored the humanitarian aspect of insanity in his second novel, The Double, a work with which he himself was ultimately dissatisfied, but which clearly identifies the nexus between Dostoevsky’s own musings on the nature of madness and his early literary influences, including Gogol’ and, more importantly for us here, E.T.A. Hoffmann. World literature has often considered the idea that if the sane and the mad were to trade places, little in society would actually change. In the mid-1840s Dostoevsky was not the only Russian writer thinking about madness. Alexander Herzen published his very successful work ‘From the Works of Dr Krupov. About the Mentally Ill Generally and the Epidemic Numbers of Such in Particular’ in 1847. Here Herzen claimed, with irony, that ‘officially patented madmen are in essence no less intelligent and no more damaged than everyone else, they are only more unusual, more likely to be lost in concentration, more independent, original, even, it might be said, closer to genius.’ Herzen’s character Krupov describes familial madness (spousal relationships), bureaucratic (empty work and distorted requirements), and, finally, historical madness – its chronological shape from ancient times to the present day provides a basis from which to consider history as the ‘autobiography of a madman’ (Gertsen 251, 264). It should be noted here that Herzen does not make so-called social distinctions – all are mad: rich and poor, masters and servants, the powerful of this world and the wretched. Herzen’s Dr Krupov identifies the circumstance which he terms madness and which he considers to be a constant state of being: instead of true perceptions and aspirations concerning the surrounding world, a person suffers from imaginary ones. Like that of the favourite author of his youth, Hoffmann, Herzen’s irony allows him to speak about the superiority of the imaginary over the real without any tragic notes, and even with a certain authorial condescension.3 ‘Dr Krupov’ was published only at the end of 1847. For about a year before that, the manuscript was in the hands of Vissarion Belinsky. Certainly some people had the opportunity to read it. But Dostoevsky had begun The Double earlier, in the summer of 1845, almost immediately after finishing Poor Folk, and he finished it before the publication of his first novel in Notes of the Fatherland in January of 1846, so we will not suggest any influence of Herzen’s Krupov on that novella. As is well known, both Dostoevsky himself and those in Belinsky’s circle liked the first chapters of The Double, but the author experienced significant difficulties in completing the work and finally came to the conclusion that he

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had ‘ruined the thing’ which might have become a ‘masterpiece’ (28.1: 116, 120).4 In the early 1860s, Dostoevsky had aspirations of reworking The Double, but he was unable to do so. Only in 1866 did he greatly condense and rework a few scenes: he removed the detailed subheadings (in the style of Hoffmann: ‘about how ...’), and he changed the title. Instead of The Double: The Adventures of Mister Goliadkin, in 1866 it became The Double: A Petersburg Poema. Since after the appearance of Poor Folk, the myth that ‘a new Gogol’ had appeared’ had begun to circulate among literary aficionados, The Double was perceived by contemporaries and later by critics and scholars in light of Gogolian traditions. The generation of the 1840s was, as they say, hooked on Gogol’. Suffice it to say that even during Pushkin’s lifetime Belinsky granted Gogol’ first place among writers and, despite some changes in his views, he continued to consider him the pinnacle of Russian literature. It was less often and a bit later (in connection with ‘The Landlady’) that contemporaries connected Dostoevsky with Hoffmann, translations of whose works continued to appear in Russian journals throughout the 1840s.5 Hoffmann’s work had been well known to Dostoevsky since 1838 through the first collection of Hoffmann in Russian (eight volumes, 1836) and because of the German edition of The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr (Lebensansichten des Katers Murr [1820–2]) (Gofman, Serapionovy). Hoffmann’s ‘secretive people, sinister guests, fantasizers and madmen’ interested Dostoevsky greatly. He turned his attention in particular to the character of Alban (from ‘The Hypnotist’).6 It was precisely in connection with this extreme character that a strange thought about madness arose in the consciousness of the seventeen-year-old Dostoevsky. In August of 1838, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother: ‘I have a project: to become mad. Let people become enraged, let them heal me, let them make me normal ... If you have read all of Hoffmann, then you will probably remember the character of Alban. How do you like him? It is terrifying to see a person who has the incomprehensible in his power, a person who doesn’t know what he should do, who plays with a toy that is God’ (28.1: 51). Up to this point Dostoevsky had only sharpened his quill for letters to his father and brother. Nevertheless, after having read a great deal of Hoffmann, he formulates two intriguing ideas in this tirade – at once so very youthful and so filled with bravado. The first of these ideas is that a person can ‘become’ insane, act insane: ‘let people perceive it as such,’ he writes (this, moreover, is also an idea of Hamlet’s, about whom

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Dostoevsky writes with sympathy in this very letter). The second thought is that there are strong personalities who play with good and evil, competing in this with God himself. This second idea will take Dostoevsky in the direction of his ideological masterpieces, and although the first idea never finds its development as such, it will nevertheless have an effect upon many of Dostoevsky’s characters. In the intricate and fantastical peripeteia of Hoffmann’s works, Dostoevsky found a sharply interesting combination of the normal and the insane, of dreams and realities; more importantly, he also found in Hoffmann the incompatibility of each character with established societal norms. If with Hoffmann’s characters the individual shifts of consciousness are psychological, and with Gogol’s social, then in Dostoevsky’s early works it is the human aspect that is very important, i.e., I and those around me. In Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk (1844–5), there are no madmen. There are neither maniacs, nor possessed, nor fantasizers. All these will appear a bit later. There are, of course, according to the author’s later definition, ‘fantastical titular councillors’ (19: 71). And this despite the fact that Poor Folk is an epistolary love novel. Dostoevsky wrote this novel ‘along the lines of Eugenie Grandet’ (28.1: 100), certainly in reaction to Balzac, although the form, the plot, and the characters have nothing in common with Balzac. There is a similar minor key in the recreation of simple, daily human relations; there is a desire to show how we ourselves, independently from the social system, cause one another pain. Although he may have named the novel ‘Poor Folk’ only toward the very end of working on it, it was precisely the broad humanitarian aspect of this problem that Dostoevsky was emphasizing: they are not poor because they ‘don’t have ten kopecks and their bare fingers are exposed,’ but because problems rain down on them7 (like poor Makar), because people mutually offend one another, albeit unintentionally. Makar lives in the real world surrounding him in an active manner – he keenly perceives all its happenings, he reads and thinks about what he’s read, he discusses social justice, he is kind, shy, and diligent in his work, he secretly dreams of requited love ... and still many other human feelings are revealed in him by the author. Among them is one which is important to Dostoevsky and so should be noted: ambition (ambitsiia). In Dostoevsky’s first novel this word is mentioned no less than eight times: ‘my ambition means more to me than anything else ... I demeaned myself and lost some of my ambition ... My reputation, my ambition – all is lost’ (1: 79). And: ‘You are an honest, noble, and

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ambitious person’; ‘I hid that shame of mine in my pocket, now there is no shame here, no ambition’ (1: 65, 67, 79, 80, 95). Makar reasons a lot and in great detail regarding all of this and, in doing so, proves his right to ambition. For Makar, ambition means both self-respect and a reputation among those around him. It was for this reason that Makar didn’t like Gogol’s story ‘The Overcoat’ very much and, after reading it, ‘his spirit fell, he began to consider himself somehow improper ... They, my enemies, said that even my figure is improper and they despised me; well, I also began to despise myself; they said that I was dim-witted, and I too actually thought that I am dim-witted.’ However, in defending his ambition, the hero of Dostoevsky’s first novel assures both Varen’ka and the reader that ‘I am a person of heart and intelligence’ (1: 82). In the cited context, the notion of ambition appears as a kind of symbol designating a relation between a person and his surrounding reality. Devushkin’s ambition, which he talks about so much, denotes his concern with how other people perceive him.8 The issue is by no means psychopathological or socially hierarchical; it has in all times and places been a fully human one. This is an issue not belonging to politics and financial interests, one not disruptive of a normal consciousness and worldview, and might be termed a humanitarian one. Thus, in Poor Folk, Dostoevsky uses the word ‘ambition’ to signify an entirely normal selfconsciousness, fully worthy of sympathy. According to Vladimir Dal’ (whose dictionary dates from approximately this time period, the 1840s), the word ‘ambition’ meant first and foremost a ‘sense of honour, nobility’ and, secondarily, ‘self-love, haughtiness, arrogance, a demand for external signs of respect and honour.’ Dal’ believed the word to have come from the French ambitieux, which according to late nineteenth-century dictionaries meant primarily honourloving9 and power-hungry. One hundred years later, Max Fasmar, in his Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language, defined ‘ambition’ as an intense form of honour-loving and referred to its use in early eighteenthcentury Russian texts. Fasmar believed this word to have entered the Russian language through the Polish ambicja, which, in turn, came from the Latin ambitio. In Latin (according to preserved texts), the word had a negative connotation: obsequiousness, careerism, taking a roundabout and crooked path to power and glory (Dvoretskii). In Pushkin’s known works, the word ‘ambition’ is met with only once, in an 1825 letter to Vyazemsky: ‘I think you already received my answer to Telegraf ’s proposition. If they need my poems, then send them whatever you like (except Onegin), but if it is merely my name as a collabora-

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tor that they want, then out of noble pride, i.e. from ambition, I cannot agree: Telegraf is a decent and honest person – but a liar and an ignoramus. The lies and ignorance of the journal are shared by its publishers, and I do not intend to join in’ (Pushkin, PSS 13: 185). As we see, for Pushkin ambition is equivalent to noble pride, which calls for cautious behaviour with those outside one’s own circle. In their numerous works about the ‘poor bureaucrat,’ the writers of the so-called ‘natural school’ provide a comic slant to their descriptions of the characters’ appearance and psychology, as well as to their work and love conflicts. The authors of such works were making ironic fun of the ambitions of these titular counsellors.10 In Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, Makar’s ‘ambition’ is a normal human feeling of self-worth, with nothing particularly comic about it. Here lies the novelty of Dostoevsky’s humanitarian position – a novelty that brought him such sudden literary glory. Certainly Belinsky’s praises for that ‘artistic truth’ which revealed the ‘terrible reality’ of the ‘unhappy bureaucrat’s’ abject situation had an effect upon Dostoevsky (25: 30). It was from these same notions that in 1845 he came up with the idea for his second novel. Dostoevsky began to write about the adventures of Mr Goliadkin during a trip to see his older brother Mikhail in Revel in June of 1845. Certainly the two brothers discussed its design, at the centre of which was precisely a character, a type. It was not by accident that Dostoevsky continued to call the work Goliadkin in his letters to his brother, even after its publication as The Double. However strange it may seem, there was also something personal in this rather unsympathetic character. After parting from his brother, Dostoevsky felt a kind of odd ‘melancholy’ and ‘loneliness,’ a dread of the future: ‘What awaits me in the future? I am now a real Goliadkin! ... I don’t know what will become of me, I know only that now I am tormented.’ It is as if Dostoevsky deflects this anxiety of his, this fear of the surrounding real world, into the character he has planned: ‘Goliadkin was derived from my spleen’ (28.1: 112). Dostoevsky’s ‘spleen,’ however, disappeared very quickly upon his return from Revel. The months of his rapid fame had begun: ‘half of Petersburg is already talking about Poor Folk ... Everyone views me as a miracle,’ he reported to his brother. It is worth noting that in the daze of this real triumph Dostoevsky apparently fell into something absurdly Goliadkinesque: it seemed to him that famous men of letters (Vladimir Odoevsky, Vladimir Sollogub, Ivan Turgenev, and others) had all ‘fallen in love with him’ and were all begging him to ‘gratify them with a visit.’ ‘I

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cannot even open my mouth without everyone repeating that Dostoevsky said this, Dostoevsky wants to do that.’ Kraevsky even ‘asked most humbly to borrow five hundred rubles’ from him (28.1: 115–16). And so it went. In such hypertrophic rapture over the heights of his early fame, Dostoevsky continued work on his second novel. The main character was developed in the former key: ‘he is now on his own for the time being, no problem, none at all, but perhaps, if that’s how it is, then he could too, why not, whyever not? After all, he’s the same as everyone else, true, he’s only average, but really the same as everyone.’ Certainly, a comic character was planned and, in fact, as we learn from Dostoevsky’s letters, the author was angry with him because ‘he doesn’t want to move forward – he’s a terrible scoundrel ... There is no way he’ll agree to end his career before the middle of November. He has already explained himself to his excellency and very likely is ready to resign’ (28.1: 113). It is apparent from the cited text that the work on the story was moving with difficulty, yet the character-type had taken shape clearly enough, even stylistically (through repetition), and the majority of the story – to judge by plot – had already been written (‘he’d already explained himself to his excellency’). Dostoevsky would need three more months to finish Goliadkin. Up until the publication of the work, Dostoevsky was sure that he had written a ‘masterpiece, ten times better than Poor Folk’ (28.1: 118), but immediately after its publication and critical reviews, he admitted to his brother that he had ‘ruined the thing’ (28.1: 120). What happened? After all, Goliadkin’s character in the story was drawn just as he had been planned: he wants to be ‘like everyone else,’ but at the same time ‘on his own.’ It is precisely on this point that Goliadkin defends his character. It is unclear from where and at what stage of work Dostoevsky came up with the idea of doubling. Possibly, Dostoevsky thought up this turn some time after he conceived of the character, and that was the source of all the difficulties. One thing is certain: it was while there was no double (in the first five chapters) that Belinsky and those in his circle liked the story. Belinsky understood and interpreted Goliadkin’s ambition in the same vein as he had with Poor Folk: ‘Mister Goliadkin was one of those sensitive people addicted to ambition [Belinsky’s italics], who are often found in the lower and middle levels of our society. It seems to him that words, glances, and gestures are offensive, that intrigues are being plotted against him everywhere and that schemes are being hatched. This is all the more amusing because neither his condition, rank, mind, nor abilities could by any

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means stir up envy in anyone.’ Belinsky interpreted Devushkin’s character in similar tones and, in doing so, justly noted that in Poor Folk ‘the tragic element deeply penetrates the whole novel’; however, the reader finds Goliadkin’s ambitions to be even ‘more amusing’ (Belinskii 9: 563). With The Double, Dostoevsky certainly took a step toward Gogol’. Many details attest to this. The connection to ‘The Overcoat’ and to ‘Diary of a Madman’ is deliberately emphasized. It is as if Dostoevsky is teasing the reader with Gogolian phrases: ‘allow me to ask you ... before whom you are standing,’ ‘Masters Bassavriukov,’ ‘overcoat, overcoat, overcoat, overcoat of my friend’ (1: 217). But, it would seem, having taken the plot’s very same social line (a petty bureaucrat allows himself to fall in love with his boss’s daughter), Dostoevsky completely changes the interpretation of the imaginary conflict. First of all, there is no real social inequality. Goliadkin belongs to the same circle as Klara’s family. He is not poor, although of course modest, and he even has some degree of intelligence; he is certainly not a schemer, but is rather good-natured; he is not too vain or envious; he is no sycophant, rascal, or Faublas;11 he is not really humiliated by anyone and has a normal sense of self-worth (after all, he did not marry the oneeyed German girl). He is, however, unattractive and shy and, up until the start of his illness, afraid of the world (‘on his own’). His attitude toward people (a humanitarian issue) is made clear even in the first chapters of the story: he wants to be like everyone else (typical conformity). He receives, however, an offensive and insulting blow (if perhaps a deserved one, keeping in mind his physical attributes), and it is from this insult that the abnormal irritations of his self-love (i.e., his ambition) stem. He is ‘anxious’ about his fate, in his own way rebels, and begins to reinvent himself; consequently in his eyes the surrounding world too becomes more and more distorted. But the situation develops in this way only in the revised edition of The Double (1866). In 1846, when Dostoevsky was only beginning to devise the plot, the following (subsequently excluded) paragraph could be found in the first chapter: Let us take note here, however, of one of Mr Goliadkin’s minor peculiarities. The fact is that, at times, he very much liked to make certain romantic plans regarding himself; he liked sometimes to make himself the hero of the most elaborate novel, to involve himself mentally in various intrigues

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and predicaments, and to extricate himself at last from all these troubles with honour, overcoming all obstacles, vanquishing complications, and taking leave of his enemies with magnanimity. (1: 335)

It may be that at first Dostoevsky had not planned on having the plot move toward an abnormal distortion of Goliadkin’s consciousness on the grounds of stifled ambition. Right up until the fifth chapter, while Dostoevsky still considered the work to be a ‘masterpiece,’ Goliadkin appears more as a comic adventurer than as someone who has lost his mind (hiring coaches, asking the price of purchases, appearing at the home of Berendeev without an invitation). After the disgraceful banishment from Berendeev’s house, Goliadkin was shocked, ‘was dying, disappearing ... was running without looking back, as if fleeing a pursuer or some more terrible calamity.’ And at this moment it ‘seemed’ to him that a person appeared, one whom he came to consider his double ‘in every way’ (1: 139–43). The theme of doubling changed the entire course of the work. Beginning with the sixth chapter, Dostoevsky noticeably turns the plot toward Goliadkin’s insanity. At first the hero himself senses it as he experiences anxiety and fears (‘am I not sleeping, is this not a dream?’), and he reasons with himself, at times losing track both of ‘sense and memory.’ It is with sympathy that his colleagues send him to the doctor, and here we see the remains of a rational explanation for the events (‘all bureaucrats resemble one another,’ he’s ‘a new arrival,’ ‘he has the same surname, or perhaps is my namesake’). Goliadkin’s abnormal self-consciousness (‘I am on my own,’ ‘I don’t want to know anyone,’ ‘I am no schemer and am proud of this,’ etc.) increases and, defending his reputation, he uses the word that had been so important to Dostoevsky in Devushkin’s discourse: ‘ambition.’ Like Devushkin, Goliadkin is very afraid of being ‘disgraced,’ of losing his ambition. Both of Dostoevsky’s heroes nonetheless think that in their position the best thing to do is to resign themselves, to submit to circumstances. Makar accepts his lot almost submissively, while Goliadkin, theoretically at least, decides to protest, ‘protest with all his strength, all of his ability.’ ‘He could not in any way allow himself to be offended, much less used like a rag.’ For all this he himself understands that it is actually possible to turn him into a ‘rag,’ even ‘without resistance and with impunity.’ But, he insists, this ‘rag [would be] base and dirty, but it would not be a simple rag, but rather a rag with ambition, an animated rag, with feelings, at the very least with dumb ambition’ (1: 168).

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The entire plot of The Double, the gradual growth of Goliadkin’s insanity, builds upon the desire to hold on to this ambition no matter what. No one actually tries to displace Goliadkin socially, that is to say to occupy his place at work or in society (until, of course, those around him become certain of the pathological abnormality of his behaviour). Goliadkin Jr, the newly hired bureaucrat, whom Mister Goliadkin mistakes as his double, is characterized in the hero’s delirious fantasy as a ‘godless and perfidious immoral imposter.’ In a discussion with himself, Goliadkin begs his superiors to defend his ‘ambition, honour, and name’ from this person, a titular councillor like himself, in whom he sees not ‘his brother,’ as the hero of ‘The Overcoat’ would have wished, but ‘a scoundrel and a depraved man’ (1: 168). This increasingly complex theme of doubling changed not so much the direction of the narration (the worsening condition of insanity) as the tone, the author’s accents, and the whole artistic colouring. Rather than remaining a comical grotesque reminiscent of Gogol’, the story is taken over by the powerful and fantastic world of the absurd – a world distorted by the illness of pathological consciousness. And here, certainly, lies the noticeable influence of Hoffmann’s maniacs. In the mid-1840s several new translations of Hoffmann’s works appeared. Notes of the Fatherland included a translation of ‘Little Zaches’ in the sixth issue of 1844, and in that same year a separate publication of ‘Princess Brambilla’ was issued (Gofman, ‘Printsessa Brambilla’). Certainly Dostoevsky read both these novellas. That Hoffmann had an influence on Dostoevsky’s work on The Double in 1845 is no surprise. Apollon Grigor’iev was one of the first of his contemporaries to notice this. He wrote: ‘Upon reading “The Double” it occurred to us that if the author continues along this path, he is fated to play the role in our literature that Hoffmann plays in German literature ... Dostoevsky has delved so deeply into his analysis of bureaucratic life that dull, everyday reality begins to resemble for him a form of delusion close to insanity’ (30). However, Belinsky did not make note of Hoffmann’s influence in ‘The Double,’ and wrote about it – with some irony – only after the appearance of ‘The Landlady’: ‘It only seemed to us that the author wanted to try and reconcile Marlinsky with Hoffmann’ (Belinskii 10: 351). In ‘Princess Brambilla,’ the fates of the two lovers are formed in the interstices of daydreams, play, and reality. The actor Giglio imagines himself to be an Assyrian prince with whom the princess Brambilla has fallen in love. Searching for the princess at a carnival, he suddenly sees her dancing with ‘a clownish fellow who was dressed like Giglio to the

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last detail and who was indeed, as to height, posture, and so forth, his second self ... [t]he sight of his dancing double turned Giglio to stone’ (‘Princess Brambilla’ 172). Experiencing a spiritual intoxication caused by some unnerving and eccentric notions about his self, Giglio imagines that it is he who is dancing with the princess, but another Self stood opposite him, and dancing and leaping in exactly the same way and making just such faces as he did, kept dealing him blows through the air with his wooden broadsword. Brambilla had vanished. Aha! thought Giglio, none but my Self is to blame for my not seeing my fiancee, the princess. I cannot see through my Self, and my accursed Self is trying to attack me with a dangerous weapon, but I shall play and dance it to death; only then will I be myself and the princess be mine! (175)

Following this scene is either a dream, a continued fantasy, or a carnivalistic game. Then everything diffuses in the hero’s consciousness. He found himself in the Pistoja Palace and ‘collapsed on the floor from shock as his Self, enveloped as in mist, suddenly stepped toward him.’ However, Giglio understands that ‘what he had taken for his double was his image reflected in a dark wall mirror’ (197). At this point, Giglio begins to sober up from fantastic ambition. Rushing to his room, he tears the carnival costume of a prince from his body and recognizes that he has been losing his mind, ‘struggling with his Self, but that mad monster lay bodiless.’ Now he curses his lunacy and joyfully embraces again ‘his dear, sweet Self’ (210). In Hoffmann, everything ends happily – the hero returns to the real world and finds real love with a simple girl. But despite the difference in the conclusion and general tone, there is undoubtedly a certain similarity in the very fact of Dostoevsky’s and Hoffmann’s ‘portrait of doubling.’12 With the above-mentioned examples in mind, it is worth considering this similarity in more concrete terms and adding several more. For instance, in both works the double appears as the hero’s alter ego, the love intrigue precedes that appearance, and the author interprets the entire extremely confusing story as a ‘strange madness,’ leading to the disintegration of the personality and even to the episode with the mirror (1: 148, 174). However, in Hoffmann the author himself attempts to help his ‘gracious reader’ sort out this fantastic ‘capriccio’: the guilt lies with ‘chronic dualism.’ Hoffmann’s Russian translator of 1844 (whom Dostoevsky read) rendered Hoffmann’s rather complicated explanations of the

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meaning of ‘chronic dualism’ very simply: it is ‘that odd madness in which one’s own I quarrels with himself.’ While working on The Double, Dostoevsky was unaware of the complexity of Hoffmann’s original, but he understood the German writer’s idea rather profoundly. However, he portrayed the ‘dangerous illness of doubling’ not as an ‘odd madness,’ but instead as a distorted form of ambition and a timid – and doomed to failure – attempt at defence of personality in a pitiless and unjust world, where the strong of this world treat a man like a ‘dirty old rag.’ Hence the tragic end in Dostoevsky’s story, so different from Hoffmann’s. Without question Dostoevsky uses other Hoffmannesque motifs in The Double as well.13 One can also see these Hoffmann-like situations in some of the details of the relations between Goliadkin, Sr and Goliadkin, Jr. Like the situation in ‘Little Zaches,’ in which Zaches appropriates the laurels of both the poet Sbiocca and the violinist Sbiocca, Goliadkin’s double appropriates the real Goliadkin’s official papers and eats his pies. It is also worth noting once again that in the early edition of The Double each chapter title had a subheading (between six and ten lines) that enumerated the events of that chapter. This device, uncharacteristic of Dostoevsky’s later works and edited out of this work in 1866, was clearly borrowed from Hoffmann: both novellas appearing in Russia in 1844 (‘Little Zaches’ and ‘Princess Brambilla’) had similar subheadings. Thus, two sources – Gogol’ (the clerical tale) and Hoffmann (the fantastical capriccio) – were intertwined in Dostoevsky’s creative consciousness when he worked on The Adventures of Mr Goliadkin. The first four chapters are entirely realistic and were liked for that reason by the supporters of the ‘natural school.’ Beginning with the fifth chapter, the Hoffmannesque motif of doubling, or ‘chronic dualism,’ almost exclusively drives the plot. While Dostoevsky’s contemporaries did not expect this, it was precisely this motif that fascinated Dostoevsky. He was interested in madness as an act of self-consciousness, of ‘self-creation,’ as a ‘preoccupation’ with one’s fate, and as a conflicted perception of a world which seems strange and hostile. From this came Goliadkin’s absurd reactions and revolt, leading him to his downfall. Today we call this kind of self-consciousness ‘existential.’14 In The Double, as in Poor Folk, the main subject of Dostoevsky’s artistic exploration was by no means social evil and, even less so, social solidarity; rather, it was existential loneliness and the heightened feeling of ambition connected to it. This feeling can take on distorted forms and lead to spiritual catastrophe.

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It should be noted that the young Dostoevsky, although he himself experienced some existential fears in 1845–6, was creatively unable to manage this complex artistic task. Comparing the text of The Double in Notes of the Fatherland with its 1866 publication, it is clear that Dostoevsky began to flounder after the eighth chapter, after Goliadkin has a dream in which the real and the virtual intersect one another. He began to develop more thoroughly the storyline of the ‘one-eyed German girl,’ whom Goliadkin had supposedly promised to marry. Here too we have the correspondence between Vakhrameev and Goliadkin. This storyline was not successfully developed and Dostoevsky squelched it in 1866, taking almost everything related to it out of the text (and thus shortening the work by almost a third). Hastily finishing The Double in January of 1846 just before its publication, Dostoevsky rather unexpectedly changed the narrative tone, from the partly Hoffmann-like ironic one to an ultra-tragic one, more in the spirit of Radcliffe: Like a nightmare, anguish pressed on Mister Goliadkin, Sr’s chest. He became terrified ... Utterly exhausted, in anguish, in agony, timid, crushed, he leaned against the shoulder of the silent Krestian Ivanovich ... Then suddenly in horror he recoiled from him and pressed himself into the far corner of the carriage. His hair stood on end. Cold sweat ran down his temples ... He could already feel someone’s approaching touch, someone’s hot breath on his face, someone’s hands stretched over him and ready to grab him ... Slowly, anxiously, he closed his eyes. Numb, he was waiting for something terrible – waiting, he was already feeling, sensing, and, finally ... But here, dear readers, ends the story of the adventures of Mister Goliadkin. (1: 431)

It is clear that in the early edition Dostoevsky was describing Goliadkin’s death, and that is why he changed the whole tone of the narration. The story ended tragically, with all the inherent humanism of such a finale. It recalls, of course, Gogol’s final tragic paragraph from ‘Diary of a Madman,’ if we leave out the contrasting last phrase about the pimple under the nose of the Algerian Dei. In the 1866 edition, the novel ends with Goliadkin’s being put in an insane asylum (‘government lodgings,’ to use Krestian Ivanovich’s expression). The doctor’s comic tirade and Goliadkin’s poignant and shy attempt to establish himself again (I ..., I, well, I’m all right) conclude

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the work in a different key from the tragic, humane chord of Dostoevsky’s early version. It is as if Gogol’s funny ‘pimple’ appeared and, recalling Dostoevsky’s ingenious predecessor who knew how to laugh at everyone, changed the key of the work ... But this solidarity of a sort with Gogol’ came only twenty years later. In 1845–6 it took Dostoevsky three months to finish ‘Goliadkin.’ Before its appearance in Notes of the Fatherland, Dostoevsky was convinced that he had written a ‘masterpiece, one ten times better than Poor Folk,’ but immediately following its publication, after the critical reviews, he confessed to his brother that he had ‘ruined the thing.’ Again, what happened? After all, Goliadkin’s character in the story was portrayed according to plan. In coming up with the idea for his second novel, Dostoevsky was building on the 1840s model, à la Gogol’, of a ‘story of a poor bureaucrat’ (see Tseitlin). However, while he was working on the story, in place of Gogol’s comic grotesque it was Hoffmann’s maniacal consciousness that took precedence – a consciousness that led the hero to a distorted perception of the world, toward madness and the disintegration of his personality. In 1846, by his own admission, Dostoevsky was unable to cope with his task. And neither could he later. Many years following this, in 1877, after repeated attempts at revision, already aware of his status as an acknowledged master, he wrote the following about The Double : ‘This novel was not successful, but its idea was fairly bright, and I never conducted a more serious idea into literature. But the form of the novel did not at all work out’ (26: 65). And so Dostoevsky felt that he had not found the ‘form’ for his ‘serious’ and ‘bright’ idea, but the idea itself, as well as the discovered character type, seemed to him to be of the utmost importance. In 1859, intending to revise The Double, Dostoevsky wrote his brother that, ‘this emendation ... will become a new novel. They will finally see what The Double really is ... Why should I waste this superb idea and this supreme type, so socially valuable – which I was the first to discover and proclaim?’ (28.1: 340) The idea of doubling borrowed from Hoffmann – his ‘chronic dualism’ – led to the creation of the first Russian existentialist conflict, which Dostoevsky intuitively discovered and which, one way or another, he ‘conducted’ throughout all of his subsequent creative work. Translated by Ona Renner-Fahey

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NOTES 1 In Russian pomeshannyi, umalishennyi, dushevnobol’noi, nenormal’nyi, bezumnyi, psikhopat, poloumnyi, povrezhdennyi. 2 As with all colloquialisms, there are no exact equivalents in English. The Russian expressions here include: idiot, maniak, kretin, debil; iurodivyi, blazhennyi; tronutyi, choknutyi, rekhnuvshiisia, spiativshii; krysha poekhala. 3 Herzen wrote one of the first Russian articles about Hoffmann in Teleskop 10 (1836): 62–80. 4 Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Dostoevsky in this chapter are to Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30-i t. Subsequent references to this edition are by volume and page number. 5 At the end of the nineteenth century, when Hoffmann suddenly became very popular, many Russian academicians (A. Kirpichnikov, S. Rodzevich, L. Grossman, and others), wrote about the Hoffmannesque elements in Dostoevsky. (See the summary by Botnikova.) Some of them even noted that the very title of Dostoevsky’s work The Double came from Hoffmann’s work of the same name (L. Grossman 108). Hoffmann’s title, however, is not The Double, but Doubles, and this is important because the plot centres on the comparison of two people, of two stepbrothers. Moreover, Dostoevsky could not have been familiar with Hoffmann’s Doubles, since it did not appear in any of his published collections – it was published only in the almanac Freistunden in 1822, to which Dostoevsky did not have access. The most pertinent Western works on this topic are Passage, The Russian Hoffmanists, and Reber 51–61. 6 Published in Nadezhdin’s collection, chapter 5. 7 The original Russian uses the proverb vse shishki valiatsia. 8 Victor Terras trivializes this concept somewhat by ‘modernizing’ it to ‘status crazy’ (The Young Dostoevsky 114). 9 The Russian word chestoliubie simply means ‘ambition.’ Here I have preserved the highly literal ‘honour-loving’ in order to differentiate it from the Latin ‘ambition’ (ORF). As is fairly common, the two words, one from a native Russian root and one from a foreign root, have over time taken on distinctive meanings in the Russian language. 10 The plots, situations, and conflicts of such stories are described in Tseitlin. See also Vinogradov 311–28. 11 Faublas was the frivolous hero of Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrais’s novel Les amours du chevalier du Faublas (1787–90). 12 See Botnikova’s commentary in Gofman, Sobranie sochinenii 3: 543.

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13 Unfortunately, I have been unable to consult the Russian translation of 1844 – the one which Dostoevsky read. Modern translators (such as in Gofman, Sobranie sochinenii) prefer to use the word ‘double’ (dvoinik) for the original ‘mein zweyter Ich.’ Hoffmann himself used the word ‘doppelgänger’ only twice: in the episode with the mirror and in Abbot Chiari’s conversation with the impresario about ‘chronic dualism.’ Nonetheless, variations on the theme of doubling appear throughout ‘Princess Brambilla.’ 14 As Terras notes, ‘The most unqualified praise of The Double has come from representatives of the medical profession, who almost unanimously give the young Dostoevsky credit for having been far ahead of his time as a student of the pathological states of the human mind’ (The Young Dostoevsky 21). Further he argues that ‘the travesty of the Doppelgänger theme unveils the travesty of existence, tantamount to non-existence’ (66).

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4 Vsevolod Garshin, the Russian Intelligentsia, and Fan Hysteria robert d. wessling

In spring 1886, when the writer Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin appeared on a St Petersburg stage at a public reading, a scene of mass hysteria erupted. In one account, a memoirist recalls that Garshin was greeted with twenty minutes of unruly ovation: ‘many people stood up in the orchestra and box seats; they were banging their chairs against the floor, ladies were rapping their fans. The banging and shouting did not die down for twenty minutes’ (Bibikov 353). Only when the uproarious enthusiasm had finally settled down was Garshin able to pronounce just two words – the title of his most famous story ‘The Red Flower’ (‘Krasnyi tsvetok,’ 1883) – when the theatre was again seized with an outburst of seemingly interminable applause: ‘and for a long time the ecstatic crowd did not allow him to start reading’ (Bibikov 353). While this scene may present a garden-variety description of exuberant literary fandom, it exists in a larger context of fashionable mental illness consuming the Russian intelligentsia in the 1880s. This interest is apparent in the content of the story that Garshin subsequently read to the audience, ‘The Red Flower,’ in which the hero carries out an insane act of heroism while he is a patient in a mental asylum. The story was all the more poignant as Garshin had based it, in part, on his personal experience in mental asylums, where he had been committed in 1872 and 1880 after acute bouts of mania. Garshin probably suffered from a manic-depressive or bipolar disorder, and his admirers made special note of his psychiatric illness, envisioning their ecstatic fandom as the popular emulation of celebrity pathology. As one memoirist put it, Garshin was ‘the very man for whom we have all gone crazy’ (Garin 30). The theories of nervous degeneration and psychiatric epidemics, like mass hysteria, were disseminated in campaign-like fashion in the intelligentsia’s ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ journals of the 1880s and provided the

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underpinning for larger cultural assumptions about Garshin fandom as a pathological mass phenomenon.1 Garshin’s fans, comprising predominantly the intelligentsia generation that reached adulthood in the 1880s, belonged to the so-called sick or nervous generation, pathologically sensitive to their social environment, be it to the rapid pace of social transformation following Alexander II’s Great Reforms or to the stupefying bezvremen’e, or stagnation, of Alexander III’s police state.2 The social construction of this intelligentsia generation fixed psychiatric distress as their unavoidable, permanent affliction and provided a rationale for the choice of Garshin as their mental illness hero. Garshin’s lifelong struggle with mental illness played a central role in the image fashioning that transformed the writer into a literary celebrity and the adored object of a popular personality cult. After Garshin committed suicide during a bout of acute depression on 24 March 1888, three important sources documenting the Garshin cult were published: V.S. Bibikov’s memoiristic ‘Vsevolod Garshin’ in his Stories (Rasskazy, 1888) and two commemorative anthologies in 1889 entitled The Red Flower, a literary collection in memory of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (Krasnyi tsvetok, literaturnyi sbornik v pamiat’ Vsevoloda Mikhailovicha Garshina [Al’bov et al.]) and In Memory of V.M. Garshin, a collection of fiction (Pamiati V.M. Garshina, khudozhestvenno-literaturnyi sbornik [Abramov et al.]). These sources provide valuable evidence of the kind of fashioning Garshin’s popular image underwent in memoirs, biographies, speeches, poems, and short stories by the writer’s family, friends, associates, and fans. The sources, moreover, reflect the intense popular interest of educated mass readers in the latest psychiatric theories about mental maladies like hysteria, neurasthenia, mania, and depression. Existing studies devoted to Garshin treat mental illness as a biographical fact in the writer’s life and a theme of his literary production.3 Irina Sirotkina takes another tack in her Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930, examining the analyses that professional psychiatrists made of Garshin’s life and work (129–34). In the present chapter I will examine a third aspect of the question: the aesthetic approaches to mental illness that constitute the popular idiom of the Garshin cult.4 Popularized theories of mental illness combined with the literary aesthetics of the 1880s to create a uniquely pre-decadent illness image for Garshin, to generate codes of behaviour for his associates and fans, and to promote pathological approaches to literary processes, like reading, writing, and recitation. Garshin ultimately emerged as an imagined source of mass psychogenic contagion.

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Mania, Depression, and Garshin’s Body Image The image of Garshin as a sublime nervous degenerate was promoted in publishing ventures devoted to preserving his memory and embellishing his reputation. In such texts, the Garshin cult observed the Romantic harmony between the writer’s pleasing exterior aspect and the inner beauty of his spiritual agony.5 The Garshin cult’s interest in a spiritual connection between bodily illness and literary art is an example of the return to favour of Romantic culture among the Russian intelligentsia in the 1880s. Romantic culture spiritualized mania as a condition of divine madness afflicting poet prophets during the furious moments of creative inspiration. Depression, meanwhile, suggested an ethereal state of bittersweet melancholia conducive to artful reflection.6 In the following example, a memoirist notes the enhancements that bipolar mood swings imprinted on Garshin’s body: ‘When he spoke, especially about a topic that greatly interested him, his gaze enlivened, his eyes burned with a fire testifying to an inner work, an energy. But when the conversation ended and a general silence ensued, Vsevolod Mikhailovich’s glance suddenly became unusually pensive, assuming the imprint of a quiet melancholia marked by a meek, kindly expression’ (Reiegardt 56). The neo-Romantic mindset of the memoirist leads him to infer a sublime suffering responsible for the attractive bodily appearance, alternately displaying the signs of fiery inspiration and reticent melancholia. In such descriptions, Garshin’s mental illness is associated with a superior artistic spirit rather than with a psychiatric condition. Stylized descriptions of this type, moreover, brought a neo-Romantic body semiotics to an interpretation of Garshin’s mental suffering and emphasized the artful manner in which the body organized and conveyed a visible expression of sublime spirituality. The body and soul correspond to one another seamlessly because mental illness was thought to be a glamorous enhancement of both the artistic temperament and the exterior body. Such Romantic mythologies had fallen into ill repute by the late 1850s and 1860s as the Russian intelligentsia increasingly embraced positivist realism as their defining ideology.7 So when the Garshin cult considered the connection between mental health and literary image, they often employed a mixed idiom of Romantic spirituality and psychiatric positivism. Garshin’s soma was a central concern in discussions of his spiritual suffering and artistic inspiration. His spirit was found enfleshed in his nervous system, and the literary text became an unmediated expression

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of his nervous physiology. This mixed cultural idiom, it should be added, helped to prepare the cultural terrain for Russian Decadence in the 1890s.8 One memoirist, a certain N.V. Reiegardt, voiced confusion about whether mental illness and spiritual anguish were not two distinct entities, each causing different effects on Garshin’s youthful body: ‘They say that eyes are the mirror of the soul. In that case, did his gaze reflect the poetic soul later revealed in the creative endeavour of his original artistic works, or did it reflect an embryo of that mental illness which led him to an early, tragic end?’ (Reiegardt 59). Here, the memoirist is uncertain which body semiotics to employ: spiritual Romanticism or psychiatric positivism. The positivist approach to mental suffering was rooted in psychiatric medicine: the exterior body served as a text on which symptoms could be read and interpreted to uncover an underlying medical truth, a diagnosable disease.9 This second approach stressed the visible symptoms that aesthetically disfigured the body, rather than causing its aesthetic enhancement. The symptoms, moreover, expressed an unobservable medical process taking place inside the body. Garshin’s first biographer, the writer and critic Iakov Vasil’evich Abramov, distinguished carefully between the Romantic suffering caused by Garshin’s artistic imagination and the positivist suffering caused by his mental illness: ‘An impaired imagination played a significant role in his illness, but the extent to which he really suffered is indicated best of all by his yellowed, drawn face, his thinness, and the complete inability to do anything while he suffered from illness’ (‘Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin’ 60). This description of Garshin’s unflatteringly worn-out look was rooted in psychiatric ideas about body wasting and general debility caused by nervous exhaustion – psychiatric ideas which had taken hold in Russia in the 1880s. In this account, moreover, the degenerating body exterior offers a visualization of a mental disease simultaneously degenerating the writer’s nervous system. For the Garshin cult, literary and psychiatric body semiotics were sometimes made distinct, though more commonly they operated in tandem, simultaneously, or interchangeably. Take, for example, Garshin’s friend, the zoologist V.A. Fausek, who, while recalling Garshin’s soul gripped with Romantic melancholy (toska), also notes the aesthetically displeasing effects that this state produced on Garshin’s body: ‘His soul was oppressed by continual melancholy [toska]. He also changed physically: his face got drawn, his voice weak and sickly, and his gait sluggish. He walked with his head hung despondently, and it seemed that even walking had become an unpleasant and sickly labour for him’ (Fausek

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85). The debilitated picture of Garshin’s depression seems aesthetically inconsistent with the Romantic elegance implied by the term ‘melancholy’ (toska). Fausek’s description, however, corresponds to a general trend of the Garshin cult that found sublime meaning in an aesthetics of bodily debilitation and degeneration. An extreme example of this trend is found in Fausek’s memoir when he describes the combination of horror and awe that the morbid spectacle of Garshin’s body produced in observers immediately after the writer’s release in 1880 from Dr A. Ia. Frey’s psychiatric clinic in St Petersburg: ‘people who saw him at this time said that he made a horrible impression: he was a living corpse, a moral corpse’ (Fausek 93). Garshin’s decadent body image held significance beyond his individual case of mental illness because as the most popular prose writer of his generation he was understood as an exemplary case of a common nervous illness. Moreover, the particular body image that his fans nurtured, whether Romantic, positivist, or decadent, shaped the particular codes of a Garshin fan’s conduct. Fandom and the Codes of Psychiatric Friendship Memoiristic and fictionalized accounts of Garshin often cast him as an alluring male hysteric or a sublime neo-Romantic androgyne whose beauty had been enhanced by illness. Illness, in fact, provided the pretext for an interactive image of the popular writer. Garshin’s talent, good looks, celebrity, and, most importantly, vulnerability in illness inspired a variety of sentimental fantasies of shared intimacy. The Garshin cult generated codes of friendship and fandom befitting the personal interaction with Garshin, the writer and the psychiatric patient.10 Some members of the Garshin cult imagined their interaction with the sick writer in terms that were decidedly neo-Romantic. In his sentimental memoir describing his friendship with the writer, Fausek recalls the neo-Romantic atmosphere of the sickroom in Garshin’s family home near Kharkov where Garshin recuperated from a battle wound sustained in the Russo-Turkish War: The period of recuperation was a happy and joyous time; his wound healed well ... When his bandages were changed and his wound washed, he groaned from pain and acted capriciously ... Young men and ladies continually crowded into the Garshin home, and Vsevolod Mikhailovich was seldom alone. Long evenings passed by in furious discussions, jokes, and laughter. (Fausek 79–80)

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The boisterous laughter and subdued eroticism of Garshin’s sickroom replicate the atmosphere of the lively literary salons for young people (kruzhok iunostei) at which Garshin had played the role of the ‘spirit of the group’ (dusha obshchestva). It is precisely the social institutions of the sickroom and the literary salon that merged in the minds of the Garshin cult to form a unique environment where the friendship codes of neoRomantic sentimentality became a scripted group performance with a specially revered place for the writer patient. To achieve the dual image of Garshin as the great writer and vulnerable patient, the cult manufactured a litany of idealizing epithets. On the one hand, compound epithets, as used in the graveside speech by the minor prose writer Anatolii Ivanovich Leman, portrayed Garshin’s unimpeachable spirituality in a style befitting a cult of personality. Leman praised Garshin’s ‘extraordinarily luminous, highly moral personality’ (neobyknovenno-svetlaia, vysokonravstvennaia lichnost’ ). In this spirit, Leman bestowed on Garshin a catalogue of descriptive adjectives that further idealized his humane personality: ‘magnanimous, stern with himself, merciful with others, resolutely honest, steadfast, always prepared to help not in word, but in deed’ (Al’bov et al. section 1: 9). These epithets presented an image of Garshin as an earthly incarnation of a spiritual deity to be worshipped and emulated. On the other hand, the Garshin cult sang the praises of the writer’s vulnerabilities, calling him ‘weak,’ ‘soft,’ ‘sensitive,’ ‘feminine,’ ‘nervous’ (slabyi, miagkii, chuvstvitel’nyi, zhenstvennyi, nervnyi). Such qualities were not meant to criticize the writer; on the contrary, they attested to the ways in which psychiatric illness had further enhanced his exalted personality. The sickly and effeminized image of Garshin drew its inspiration, in part, from the sublime tradition of the Romantic androgyne. It also drew on hagiographic traditions spiritualizing the bodily suffering of Christian saints. One memoirist, for example, evoked both traditions simultaneously when he caught the look of a female saint in Garshin’s eyes: ‘A similar gaze I have encountered among exceedingly unhappy people who never complain about their fate, especially among those women whose common lot it is to bear the burdensome cross of life’ (Reiegardt 56). Garshin’s more pragmatic friends, relatives, and associates were not content merely to witness the writer’s psychiatric sufferings with awed detachment. Nor did they find the lively social atmosphere of the literary salon therapeutically appropriate to the psychiatric patient recuperating from the stress and strain of literary life. One of the most striking examples is Garshin’s maternal uncle, the businessman V.S. Akimov, who

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transformed his estate at Efimovka near the Black Sea into a makeshift nervous sanatorium to ensure his nephew’s complete recuperation from his illness. From the winter of 1880 until the spring of 1882, Akimov prescribed Garshin an ‘isolationist cure’ with a carefully scheduled routine of daily exercise, healthful meals, and light family social engagements (Henry 127–8). Akimov personally supervised all the details of Garshin’s life and was especially careful to prohibit him from writing, except for a translation from the French, which he justified as therapeutic. Akimov played the role of both chief doctor and caring nurse in the virtual sanatorium, meticulously scheduling Garshin’s activities by the hour, monitoring the signs of his health, and providing beneficent distraction with his conversation and friendship. The positivist codes of friendship appropriate to a personal relationship with a manicdepressive writer were imbued with the optimistic spirit of humanely administered therapy. After Garshin’s suicide in 1888, however, a pessimistic note capped off the descriptions of such well-intentioned medical interventions. Akimov, for example, ended his short memoir, written in the month after Garshin’s death, with a tearful lament on the futility of his medical efforts: ‘Thus, my attempt to help a relative and favourite person, and perhaps to preserve a great talent for society, ended unsuccessfully’ (16). Countering such pessimism, Anton Chekhov’s short story ‘An Attack of Nerves’ (‘Pripadok,’ 1888) offers a fictional realization of a common fantasy of the Garshin cult: to save the psychiatric patient from his life-threatening illness by applying an effective therapy. Chekhov first published ‘An Attack of Nerves’ in 1889, in the commemorative volume In Memory of V.M. Garshin (Abramov et al.), a context which prompts the interpretation of the story’s hero Grigorii Vasil’ev as Garshin’s fictionalized double. The medically trained Chekhov offered a condensed characterization of Vasil’ev rendered with the classic features of hysteria – acute sensitivity, an unconscious somatization of others’ pain, and a proclivity for frenetic ecstasy: ‘As a good actor can reflect another person’s movements and voice, so can Vasil’ev reflect another person’s pain in his soul. Seeing another’s tears, he sobs. Near a sick person, he himself becomes ill and groans in pain ... Another person’s pain irritates him, excites him, and leads him into an ecstatic state’ (7: 216–17). Each of these hysterical traits is organically linked to Vasil’ev’s appealing personality; he is a humane, talented, and earnest intelligent stricken by a highly developed social conscience. Vasil’ev undergoes a ‘nervous attack,’ an inspired vision of rescuing Moscow’s prostitutes by preaching the social evils of prostitution on the streets outside the brothels. This

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maniacal burst of excitement is quickly subdued by a depressed paralysis of the will; Vasil’ev loses faith in his exultant plan and immerses himself in suicidal thoughts. The ending of the story portrays the active scripts of positivist friendship appropriate to dealing with such a psychiatric patient: the medical student Mayer insists on taking his friend Vasil’ev to a psychiatrist’s office where he is cured of his mental disorder with prescribed doses of morphine and potassium bromide. In its context within the volume published in the aftermath of Garshin’s suicide, the story’s happy ending seems ironic. Perhaps more to the point, though, Chekhov reinvokes the lingering positivist fantasy, common of the Garshin cult, of turning back time to save the writer with efficacious psychiatric therapy. The appealing personality of the intelligentsia male hysteric, as it was sketched by Chekhov in ‘An Attack of Nerves,’ aroused positivist passions of rational therapeutic intervention. In the context of his literary celebrity, however, Garshin was a beautiful androgyne who induced symptoms of hysteria among star-struck fans: nerve-induced paralysis, constricted breathing, and an effortless susceptibility to hypnosis. Garshin was well known for his good looks, the kind of looks that made ladies swoon. Even men called him an ‘ideal of beauty’ (ideal krasoty), making references to his comely figure, long dreamy eyelashes, and alluringly attractive facial features. Garshin was endowed with the standard features of male beauty as they had been represented in the early nineteenth-century Russian tradition of Romantic portraiture: a ruddy complexion, wispy black hair, and large dark eyes. Garshin’s beauty, in which stunning good looks combined elegantly with sublime suffering, elicited a strained pathological response from many of his fans. When Bibikov, perhaps the principal fan of the Garshin cult, first met the writer in Kiev in 1884, he claims that his encounter with the spectacle of Garshin’s stunning beauty caused a paralysing effect on his body. He had trouble breathing and gasped for air when he first heard that Garshin was in the house. After shaking Garshin’s hand, Bibikov was completely paralysed, unable to answer the writer’s simple friendly questions (Bibikov 349–50). Similarly, another male fan, a certain D. Garin, recalls his body being seized by an inexplicable feeling that reduced him to speechlessness when he first met Garshin. This same fan, moreover, recalls the hypnotic effect that Garshin’s musical voice exerted over him: ‘Garshin’s voice had an enchanting effect on me, just like the harmonious sounds of a harp’ (Garin 30). Both Bibikov and Garin imagined their first interaction with the celebrity writer Garshin in the popular idiom of fan hysteria.

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In his memoir, Bibikov presents many examples of Garshin’s physical allure among his fans. These accounts rely on the subtext of the heightened sexuality of hysterics and the popular attraction for the theatricalized presence of the celebrity hysteric. Garshin’s androgynous persona, for example, emboldened female fans to pursue the sexy celebrity. Bibikov recalls walking with Garshin in Volkovo Cemetery in St Petersburg when a young woman unceremoniously approached Garshin. The blushing young lady described by Bibikov serves as an emblem of the female fan stalking Garshin in pursuit of an erotic encounter (Bibikov 356–7). Other ritualized displays of public passion were recorded by Bibikov as well, including the frenetic applause, collective groans, and ceaseless whispering that met Garshin in public places. Male fans often tried to realize their desires for homosocial contact with the writer: ‘[A] certain student came up to Vsevolod Mikhailovich, and behind him a whole crowd of others. The first asked permission on behalf of all his comrades to drink to Garshin’s health. Glasses of beer were raised up, exclamations resounded. They wanted to take Garshin into their arms and swing him, and he barely escaped this unexpected ovation’ (357). At literary evenings, however, Garshin allowed his body to be raised overhead in the arms of the crowd. The hysteria-coded behaviour of Garshin’s fans evoked the stern rebuke of the writer’s friends and associates, who drew a careful distinction between the behaviour codes of friendship and fandom. Friends were distinguished by their selfless desire to improve the writer’s illness, whereas fans hounded him in an effort to satisfy their own selfish desires, often at the expense of Garshin’s fragile health. Garshin’s biographer Abramov probably had the novice writer Bibikov in mind when he wrote the following disparaging footnote: ‘After Garshin’s death, several of these “beginning writers” hurriedly characterized themselves as close friends of the deceased and published their “recollections” about him in the organs of the thin press. It is not surprising that people who had been with Garshin only a few times and had taken advantage of his patience and kindness, could in their “recollections” only offer their own fantasies, often in this activity attaining an astonishing degree of virtuosity’ (Abramov 63). Abramov separates the hygienic activities of the inner circle of the Garshin cult from the deleterious activities of the outer circle of his fans. In doing so, he distinguished between the codes of friendship and the codes of hysterical fandom surrounding Garshin’s psychiatric image.

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Embodying the Garshin Text In his memoir, Bibikov recalls how fans conjured up Garshin’s physical image during group readings of his texts. On the one hand, this neoRomantic practice existed in the context of fashionable spiritualism that enthralled Russian society in the 1880s, but, on the other, it also addressed an aesthetic principle central to the Garshin cult: the instilled presence in the literary text of the author’s body and psychiatric illness. In 1884 Bibikov participated in a literary circle comprising predominantly female college students who met daily to read and discuss the latest literary publications of a variety of up-and-coming Russian intelligentsia writers. Of all the writers, Garshin was their decided favorite: ‘[A] special love, reaching the point of worship, surrounded the name Garshin’ (Bibikov 349). An aura of cultish veneration permeated their meetings, at which participants took turns reading Garshin’s short stories aloud. The group believed that by reciting Garshin’s texts, they summoned his spiritual and bodily presence among them, as if by incantation. After such readings, the group discussed the image that the articulation of text had produced in their minds. When Bibikov first met Garshin in 1884, he was struck by the accuracy of the group’s shared vision of Garshin’s physical body: ‘[W]hen I saw the graceful, broad-shouldered Vsevolod Mikhailovich, I could tell at first sight that his countenance had been stricken by a unique sadness, characteristic of Garshin alone and expressed in his marvellous black eyes ... It seemed to me that this was exactly how I had imagined him and how everyone imagines him who hasn’t seen him yet but has read his stories’ (350). The belief of being able to accurately predict Garshin’s looks based upon a reading of his text became less common after Garshin images were more widely distributed and accessible: his portrait was painted by the renowned peredvizhnik Il’ya Repin in 1884, and his mass-produced photograph became a common item in the literary albums of young intelligentsia readers. Nonetheless, Bibikov’s literary circle demonstrates the important aesthetic principles of Garshin’s written words possessing a spiritual power and his body being transubstantiated during readings of his text. The obvious subtext of Christian spirituality informing this approach to Garshin’s texts was made overt in a speech by the writer Aleksandr I. Ertel’, published in 1889 (Ertel’ 45). Ertel’ revealed the influence of the subjective sociology of Russian Populism, moreover, when he argued for the transubstantiation not of the author’s flesh but of the author’s lichnost’ (personality or subjectivity).

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The Garshin cult’s reading practices predated Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892), a work of psychiatric positivism which demonstrated how to perform diagnoses of European writers on the basis of the symptomladen evidence found in their literary texts. Nordau’s critical practice rested on a number of assumptions about literary production: writing is a bodily process subject to medical norms of health and illness, literary style mimetically encodes an author’s psychiatric condition, and psychiatric epidemics are made evident in and facilitated by contemporary literature. When Nordau’s famous tract appeared in Russia, it arrived in a cultural terrain well prepared for its psychiatric arguments about literary production and reception. In the 1880s, Garshin’s creative process was already the subject of much discussion addressing the larger question of how the authorial body inscribed itself into the text during the act of writing. Members of the Garshin cult often promoted the view that the writer’s creative process was a bodily process of simulated disease: ‘[E]very time Garshin was writing a new piece, he experienced it as if it were a disease’ (Pavlovskii 20). Garshin’s friend Fausek, moreover, recalls the author’s writing as a limited attack of mania, an intense moment when creative ideas stirring in Garshin’s head flew from his pen in a frenzied, almost chaotic manner: ‘He didn’t spend a long time writing his stories; usually he wrote them rapidly, covering small, disorderly scraps of paper with his tiny handwriting. When he sat down to write, usually the entire story had already been prepared in his head’ (Fausek 96). In 1884, during a productive period of creative activity that included work on the story ‘Nadezhda Nikolaevna,’ Garshin wrote his friend V.M. Latkin enthusiastically that he had been enduring ‘a rather acute fit of writing’ (dovol’no ostryi pripadok pisan’ia) (Abramov 53). The psychiatric metaphor Garshin employed here can be tied to Romantic notions which encoded the mania fit as a productive psychiatric state enhancing artistic production. On other occasions, however, both Garshin and his associates took a degenerationalist view of the creative process. The source of these views can be found in nervous pathologies which blamed concentrated intellectual labour, like reading and writing, for the high incidence of nervous diseases among intellectuals. Fausek, for instance, faulted the maniacal creative process for exhausting Garshin’s body: ‘Literary work wore him out too much, it strained his nerves so much that he couldn’t do it very often’ (Fausek 96). In a letter to his friend V.N. Afanas’ev on 31 December 1881, Garshin voices a similar concern, fearing the grave psychiatric toll that writing would exact on his body:

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‘[W]hat I wrote in actual fact I wrote with my unfortunate nerves, and that every letter cost me drops of blood is true and wouldn’t be an exaggeration. Writing right now would mean to start an old story all over again: in three or four years, perhaps, I would wind up again in the mental hospital’ (Abramov et al. 40). In this way, Garshin helped promote the definitive bodily connection between his textual production and psychiatric health. The text was produced on an anvil of pain and laid bare the degenerating nerves of its author. Several memoirists envisioned Garshin’s creative process as a form of hysteria. In 1859, the French psychiatrist Pierre Briquet published his influential study of hysteria, Traité de l’Hystèrie, in which he defined the condition, in part, as a psychiatric ailment that caused the body to mimic the symptoms of other diseases (Goetz et al. 176). This common diagnosis was the subtext of discussions about the creative process of the Russian literary intelligentsia, whose social role it was to express compassion for the illness, suffering, and pain of others. In the story ‘An Attack of Nerves,’ mentioned above, Chekhov’s narrator describes intelligentsia compassion as a form of hysteria that he defines as a humane actor’s talent in which the body involuntarily mimics another person’s pain. Similarly, the Populist critic I.Ia. Pavlovskii argued that the imaginary suffering of Garshin’s fictionalized characters produced identical sensations within the writer’s body: ‘While writing, he neither invented things nor amused himself, but was present at the sufferings which he considered real. Garshin, with his frazzled nerves, couldn’t see another person’s sufferings without suffering himself’ (Pavlovskii 20). Hysterical coding put Garshin’s unconsciously imitative body at the very centre of a creative process in which the intelligentsia’s traditional feelings of social compassion became a symptom of a heroic psychiatric disease. Additionally, the heroism and self-sacrifice of Garshin’s pathological creative process were reinforced by Christ-like images which cast it as ‘a cup of suffering’ inducing the agony of Russia’s collective pain. Such an approach was rooted in the widely held view that hysteria was commonly suffered by religious fanatics. The Populist writer Gleb Uspenskii evoked these terms when he deified Garshin as a psychiatric martyr in his article ‘The Death of V.M. Garshin’ (‘Smert’ V.M. Garshina,’ 1889). Writing in the language both of the Populist social body and the Christian passion play, Uspenskii argued that Garshin’s creative process caused him to suffer each and every sore (iazva) afflicting contemporary Russian society. Moreover, Uspenskii envisioned Garshin’s texts as the place where the collective suffering of Russia attained its authentic embodiment. In

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doing so, Garshin’s texts, like Christ’s body, came to represent an allinclusive sacrifice: ‘In his short stories ... sometimes in several lines, absolutely the entire contents of our life is exhausted, that is, the conditions of life in which Garshin and all of his readers had to live’ (Uspenskii 156). Both hysteria and Christ’s sacrifice provided important cultural sources with which the Garshin cult developed approaches to the bodily presence instilled in Garshin’s texts. Importantly, these approaches emphasized the collective universality, rather than the individual anomaly, of the psychiatric body encoded in the text. The subjective lyrical voice of Garshin’s prose prompted interactive reading in which readers imagined they were engaged in an intimate conversation with Garshin’s narrator about shared concerns, common aches and pains, and a mutual illness. As it could be intuited and interpreted in the subjective voice of his narrator, Garshin’s psychiatric disorder offered an identity and a diagnosis that the reader could apply to his or her own experience. The increasing identification with Garshin’s pathological image generated anxieties about his texts’ ability to infect the reader with a psychiatric disease. In 1882, a reviewer in Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski ) worried that an involuntary simulation of Garshin’s illness would afflict the Russian reader’s body during the act of reading his text: ‘While reading his stories, you involuntarily fall into the same nervous mood under the influence of which the stories were written. The impressions which were in fact experienced by the writer also act on the nerves of the public in a similar fashion’ (Nikoladze 36). The reviewer’s discourse of literary infection surrounding Garshin’s texts predates Lev Tolstoy’s famous use of it in his treatise ‘What Is Art?’ (‘Chto takoe iskusstvo?’ 1898). It also reflects an important context of the heightened interest in psychiatric medicine of hypnotism, somnambulism, the unconscious mechanisms of crowd behaviour, and psychiatric epidemics – issues also addressed in a series of articles by the Russian Populist critic Nikolai Mikhailovsky, beginning with his ‘Heroes and the Crowd’ (‘Geroi i tolpa’) in 1882.11 These sources created a context in which Garshin’s illness could be construed as a public health threat, and his literary texts the vectors of an intelligentsia disease of mass hysteria. This anxiety about literary hysteria, moreover, originates in a broader psychiatric concern about reading and writing as potentially harmful bodily processes. If mass hysteria could be induced through the literary voice of bodyladen texts like Garshin’s, its effects would be felt in widely dispersed arenas of reading: in the home study, the public library, or the amateur

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literary salons organized and attended by young intelligentsia enthusiasts. A much more sensational spectacle of mass hysteria requires a large group crowded in a single place, like the theatres in which Garshin performed his public readings. Physical presence submitted his body to general inspection and interpretation, dramatic reading put an embodied voice to his literary style, and renowned celebrity attracted an assembly of fans seeking a ritualistic enactment of their passionate friendship for Garshin. Bibikov’s memoiristic account of Garshin, after he had finished reading his story ‘The Red Flower’ to a group assembled in a theatre in 1884, draws together the themes of Garshin’s hysterical cult of personality, the writer’s sublimely suffering body, the embodied text, and celebrity friendship: Garshin was summoned for a countless number of curtain calls, and as if it were today I see him happy and proud with his success: he walks across the stage to his table and without bowing looks at the arms and the white handkerchiefs stretched out toward him and listens to the continuous drawn-out cry of the thousand-person crowd repeating his resounding last name in various keys. I went backstage and found him there ruddy, excited, with burning eyes. We greeted each other with a kiss, and as a gift he gave me the copy of his second book from which he had read his story that evening. (Bibikov 354)

Accounts of the social practices of the Garshin cult, like Bibikov’s, are embroiled in popularized medical contexts that add a layer of psychiatric meaning to the experience of Russian literary fandom in the 1880s.

NOTES 1 For a short discussion on the Russian Populists writing about mass psychology in the ‘thick journals,’ see Vucinich 35–6. A discussion of the journalistic discourse of psychiatric epidemic in Russia in the 1860s–80s can be found in Paperno, Suicide 75–7. 2 The critical discourse of the ‘sick generation’ of the 1880s reached its fruition in a little-known study of Russian literary history (Novopolin). 3 See Bialyi, Henry, Yarwood, and many articles in Henry et al. 4 The rhetoric of fandom has been the productive topic of research primarily on twentieth-century subcultures. See Harris and Alexander. On mass

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hysteria and popular viewership in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in France, see Gordon. The Romantic mythologies of disease are treated in Sontag. Discussions of the Romantic approach to manic depression may be found in Burwick; Hershman and Lieb; and Jamison. The aesthetics of Russian positivist realism receive extensive treatment in Paperno, Chernyshevsky. On Russian Decadent aesthetics, see Joan Delaney Grossman. The positivist medical approach to the body is explored in Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. Russian semiotic scholarship has produced studies on the Romantic and positivist codes of behaviour. See Ginzburg, and Paperno, Chernyshevsky. Mikhailovsky anticipated Gabriel de Tarde’s theory of imitation. See Walicki 264.

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5 On Hostile Ground: Madness and Madhouse in Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ lev loseff

As he grew older, the poet Joseph Brodsky became increasingly inclined to disavow his prolific youthful period, but ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ remained an exception. Even in the late 1980s Brodsky called this long poem ‘an extremely serious work’ (Volkov 292). The years in which the poem was created were, arguably, the most dramatic in the author’s life: imprisonment, trial by a kangaroo court, exile, a close friend’s betrayal, break-up with a beloved woman, a suicide attempt, reunion with the beloved and an attempt to start a family, the birth of a son, and then the final break-up.1 The amassed psychological pressure of these experiences and the resulting changes in the author’s personality make up the biographical substratum of ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov,’ and the very work on the poem enters into the poem’s content as a genuine effort at taking charge of one’s own life: in the penultimate stanza of canto III the author’s alter ego prays to God to grant him – as ‘the sum of these convulsive thoughts and days’ – an ability to change: And leave the fraction of me left behind to triumph over silence ...

Brodsky felt that the piling up of misfortunes had jarred him to the brink of madness and that giving expression to two voices struggling to preserve sanity would be cathartic. Biographical Background Two stints at mental institutions formed the experience underlying ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov.’ At the very end of 1963, Brodsky was taken

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for observation to Kashchenko psychiatric clinic in Moscow, popularly known as ‘Kanatchikova dacha,’ and spent several days there. He began his annus mirabilis, 1964, at Kashchenko. The second hospitalization took place a few weeks later: on 13 February he was arrested in Leningrad and on 18 February the Dzerzhinsky District Court sent him for psychiatric evaluation to ‘Priazhka,’ Psychiatric Hospital No. 2. There he stayed for about three weeks between 18 February and 13 March. Ever attuned to the cultural connotations in the topography of St Petersburg, Brodsky remembered that nondescript embankment of the muddy Priazhka River, which was the last address of Alexandr Blok. In a clear reference to Blok’s ‘dying’ Harlequin, who cried, ‘I am bleeding cranberry juice’ (‘Balaganchik’ 19), Gorbunov compares his rushing blood to cranberry syrup (canto II, stanza 4). Cold, crowdedness, lack of fresh air, meagre and unappetizing meals, camaraderie and the gallows humour of patients, rude and even brutal treatment by doctors and nurses, antediluvian methods of psychiatry aimed at the patient’s ‘recantation’ of his delusions – all these prison-like attributes of a Soviet mental asylum are realistically, sometimes grotesquely, described in the poem. And yet neither of Brodsky’s sojourns at psychiatric clinics was intended as punishment. It was not for a few more years that the Soviet government would make incarcerating dissidents in mental institutions a regular practice (Bloch and Reddaway 258–79). On the contrary, the first, Moscow, stint was arranged by a group of the poet’s friends in hope that a diagnosis of mental disorder would save him from persecution. Dr M.Iu. Iarmush, a Moscow psychiatrist who in the 1960s knew the Ardov family and Brodsky, recollects: At that time there was a couple in Moscow, Susanna Rapaport and Vladimir Finkel’shtein, husband and wife, both psychiatrists. Vladimir was director of a mental outpatient clinic [dispanser]. Moreover, Susanna loved literature and hosted a sort of salon. So when it was decided that Brodsky should be sheltered from persecution in an asylum, somebody sought the help of this couple. I recall a sort of a conference in Ordynka.2 Akhmatova, Brodsky himself, Nina Antonovna, Finkel’shtein with his wife, and I were present. It was Finkel’shtein, as the director of a mental outpatient clinic, who undertook the task of placing Joseph in the Kashchenko clinic. I remember going to visit him there ... Brodsky was taking a walk in a sort of a corral for patients. He approached the fence and told me: ‘I will really go mad here, get me out of this place immediately.’ I went to E.O. ... the

92 Lev Loseff deputy director of the clinic, whom I knew. I told him: ‘It’s really bad for Brodsky to be here. He is not a KGB “protégé”; let me take him away.’ E.O. agreed. Brodsky was discharged, we called a taxi and left.3

It seems that, despite Brodsky’s hasty retreat from Kashchenko, the sympathetic doctors delivered the required diagnosis. One finds in Akhmatova’s diary, around the end of January or beginning of February 1964, a draft of a letter to some influential person, most likely A.A. Surkov,4 where she uses Brodsky’s now certified ‘illness’ while soliciting this person’s help in saving the young poet from persecution: ‘I hasten to inform you that Joseph Brodsky has been discharged from Kanatchikova Dacha ... with the diagnosis of schizoid psychopathy and that a psychiatrist who saw him last month confirms that his condition had worsened significantly as a result of the harassment to which he had been subjected in Leningrad’ (Zapisnye 421). The second stay at a clinic was not only longer but also harsher. When in 1987 a journalist asked, ‘Which moment of your life in the USSR was the hardest?’ Brodsky replied: ‘The psychiatric prison in Leningrad. They gave me ghastly tranquillizer shots. They would wake me up in the middle of the night, dip me in the icy bath, then wrap me tight in a wet sheet and put me next to a heat radiator. While drying, the sheet would more and more tightly cut into my body’ (Brodskii, Bol’shaia 279).5 The ‘Priazhka’ psychiatrists were examining not only the poet but his poetry as well. Vladimir Maramzin, who studied the Brodsky manuscripts that were returned to the author after expert examination, noticed that in the poem ‘One day he sees that frozen in the doorway ... ’ (SIB 1: 173– 5) a psychiatrist boldly set off these two lines: ‘in the not so distant time, with dark or blond hair, / my spirit will appear, one in two persons.’ To that Maramzin comments: ‘Evidently, this was supposed to prove that [Brodsky suffered] a split personality’ (Brodskii, MS 1: 372) According to one memoirist, a few years later, in 1972, when the authorities were considering exiling Brodsky abroad, they sought an expert opinion on the poet’s mental health. A.V. Snezhnevsky, director of the Institute of Psychiatry in Moscow and the main proponent of the infamous ‘paranoid reformist delusion’ diagnosis which allowed locking up dissidents in mental institutions indefinitely (Bloch and Reddaway 251), diagnosed Brodsky, without examining him personally, as schizophrenic, and concluded: ‘[Brodsky] is not a valuable person at all and may be let go’ (Lupandin). The official expert opinion reported to the court in March of 1964 was, however, that ‘some psychopathic characteristics are present

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but he is able to work’ (Gordin 152), which cleared the way for trying Brodsky as a ‘social parasite.’ Perhaps one should not consider ‘psychopathic characteristics’ a trumped-up diagnosis on a par with Snezhnevsky’s ‘schizophrenia.’ Heightened emotionality is a common trait among artistically gifted people. It could be qualified as psychopathology, although some psychiatrists prefer other terms, such as ‘accentuated personality’ (see Leonhard). Brodsky knew that his psyche was unusually vulnerable and used to repeat jokingly, after one of his favourite writers, Ryunosuke Akutagawa: ‘I got no convictions. All I got is nerves.’ His other favourite phrase at moments of stress was ‘my psyche is running low’ (psikhika saditsia). The winter of 1964 was an extremely stressful period in his life and the loss of the woman he loved was for him at the time far more tragic than the threat of imprisonment. Soon after being released from Kashchenko he attempted suicide by cutting his veins (Chukovskaia 141). During his stays in these institutions Brodsky, unlike psychiatrically imprisoned dissidents after him, could not draw moral support from a firm knowledge that he was sane and his commitment to the nuthouse was a form of punishment. Sometimes he would seriously doubt his sanity. The splitting of personality as a result of a severe psychological trauma as described by Akhmatova was certainly on his mind. Akhmatova wrote in ‘Requiem’: Madness has already overshadowed One half of my soul with its wing. It makes me drink fiery wine And it lures me to the black valley. And I understood that I Should surrender to it, When I was listening to my own Delirium as to a stranger’s. (27)

In a sense, ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ was a great auto-therapeutic project: preventing descent to the ‘black valley’ of delusional voices by imagining two voices as two characters in a poem and letting them speak for themselves. The Poem: Locus, Symmetry, Dialogue, the Sacral A cold and malodorous hospital room appears as a ‘hostile environment’ but, truly, the action of ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ takes place in the

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narrator’s mind or, more accurately speaking, in his brain. Throughout his oeuvre Brodsky structures his poetic persona in such a way that brain often replaces the conventional heart of the past. Comparison of the data from concordances to Brodsky’s, Mandelshtam’s, and Pushkin’s poetic works is telling:6 Brodsky uses brain 72 times and heart 102 times in his poetic works; Mandelshtam refers to the brain 6 times and the heart 50 times; Pushkin also uses the word brain 6 times, but all of these are in jest. In marked contrast, he refers to the heart 468 times. Brodsky’s modern view of the brain as the seat of identity is also evident in the way he was preparing himself for his first open-heart surgery: ‘I was almost having a dialogue with myself. I told myself: “Well, yes, certainly, it’s the heart. But it isn’t the brain after all, is it? It isn’t the brain!” As soon as I thought that, I was greatly relieved, and I got through it somehow’ (Volkov 183). It seems that ‘a dialogue with myself’ is a proper description of ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov,’ too. By no means is it a symptom of a schizophrenic personality, and the two collocutors do not represent hallucinatory ‘voices’ as some critics have suggested (see Proffer), but a dialogue between two selves: the emotional imaginative fearing self and the reasoning logical fearless self. Such a division of the poet’s identity corresponds to the division of functions between the right and left hemispheres of the human brain. As V.V. Ivanov explains, both hemispheres play a role in artistic creation: ‘In all especially profound fields of creativity, be it mathematics or music, the highest achievements are mainly connected with the intuitive imagination of the right hemisphere but for their realization, primarily verbal but also through any other set of discrete units [functioning] as words in natural language, one needs the capacity of the left, speech-creating, hemisphere’ (Ivanov, ‘Khudozhestvennoe’ 12). Some critics of the poem complain that it is not always easy to know to whom a particular statement belongs (Proffer 345; Steckler 283; MacFadyen, ‘Joseph Brodsky’ 143), but it is hardly true, since Gorbunov’s and Gorchakov’s remarks strictly alternate and the author helps the reader keep track by strategically injecting in each canto’s dialogue a name or using such phrases assigned to Gorchakov alone as ‘So what’d you dream of?’ and ‘Had supper?’ More important, the two voices are very distinct. From the outset of the poem personal traits attributed to Gorbunov correspond primarily to the left-hemisphere functions while Gorchakov’s belong to the right hemisphere. Gorbunov with his ‘pro-

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saic’ surname (from Russian gorbun, ‘hunchback’) incessantly construes logically complex and verbally elaborate propositions, such as a discourse on doubleness in canto III, and his dream code consists of emphatically discrete symbols: chanterelles, islands, floats. Gorchakov, whose surname is evocative of Pushkin’s epoch, dreams in emotionally coloured ‘pictures’: childhood moments, street scenes, and, especially, memories of musical events (‘concerts forested with bows’). In the strict symmetry of the poem’s structure Gorchakov’s monologue in canto VIII parallels Gorbunov’s monologue in canto III, and the stylistic difference between the two is pronounced: instead of intricate reasoning metaphors one finds here a stream of disjointed, almost incoherent, exclamatory sentences – there are twenty-nine exclamation marks in the original Russian text of canto VIII and only one in canto III, but in the translation the rules of English syntax leave canto VIII with only nine exclamation marks (still unusually many for Brodsky, who used exclamation marks very sparingly). The fact that the majority of questions are asked by Gorchakov, ‘the feeling one,’ and answers are given by Gorbunov, ‘the thinking (=speech-creating) one,’ underscores the leading role of the latter in the poem’s antiphony. As is well known, Brodsky placed language at the top in the hierarchy of human faculties. Hence in the end of canto X he says: ‘The higher pitch belongs to Gorbunov, to Gorchakov, the low.’ There is only one place in the poem that would prevent us from interpreting Gorchakov and Gorbunov as two manifestations of one personality. Gorbunov says in canto VII that he is ‘born under Gemini, in May’ (Brodsky’s own birthday was 24 May) and Gorchakov in March, ‘under Aries.’ In astrology ‘Aries people’ are characterized, first of all, by creativity, while those born under Gemini, by dualism. The ‘Gemini’ are paradoxalists (Cirlot 117). The symmetrical structure of the poem is a reflection of the symmetry between the two personages, ever conflicting but ever needing each other. Brodsky wants his reader to fully appreciate this symmetry and for that purpose he uses an interesting device: fourteen cantos of the poem are named in such a way that the table of contents would read as a sonnet-like poem with individual lines symmetrically mirroring each other (in the Russian original they also rhyme: a a b b c a a b b c a a d d): 1 Gorbunov and Gorchakov 2 Gorbunov and Gorchakov

Gorbunov i Gorchakov Gorbunov i Gorchakov

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3 Gorbunov in the Night 4 Gorchakov and the Doctors 5 A Song in the Third Person

Gorbunov v nochi Gorchakov i vrachi Pesnia v tret’em litse

6 Gorbunov and Gorchakov 7 Gorbunov and Gorchakov

Gorbunov i Gorchakov Gorbunov i Gorchakov

8 Gorchakov in the Night 9 Gorbunov and the Doctors 10 A conversation on the Porch

Gorchakov v nochi Gorbunov i vrachi Razgovor na kryl’tse

11 Gorbunov and Gorchakov 12 Gorbunov and Gorchakov

Gorbunov i Gorchakov Gorbunov i Gorchakov

13 Conversation about the Sea 14 Conversation in a Conversation

Razgovor o more Razgovor v razgovore

The poem’s very strict formal symmetry is by itself a celebration of reasoning. All fourteen cantos are practically the same size: one hundred lines (cantos I and XIII are ninety-nine lines each). All twelve dialogical cantos consist of ten-line stanzas rhymed a b a b a b a b a b or a b a b a b a b b a, which creates a sense of closure at the end of Cantos I, II, III, VII, IX, XI, and XII. This monotony is strategically broken by cantos V and X, which feature longer unequal stanzas and less uniform rhyming schemes. According to Andrei Bitov, Vladimir Nabokov praised the unusual form of ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ in a letter to Brodsky in August 1970 (Bitov 13). It is tempting to see the splitting of the poem’s lyrical voice into two quarrelling voices as a representation of the Freudian consciousunconscious duality, but one is prevented from doing so by a number of anti-Freudian jabs in the text. Incidentally, in this poem it is the patients who try to analyse dreams and who make references to Freud while the doctors conduct their interviews in the police-like manner of the Soviet ‘materialistic’ psychiatry.7 Brodsky most fully enunciated his attitude toward Freud in an interview with Birgit Veit: Freud is a remarkable gentleman sui generis; he broadened our knowledge of ourselves. But, all in all, [he] didn’t make a big impression on me ... An example of this gentleman’s foolishness is his idea of the nature of creativity – that it is sublimation. It is bull because both the creative process and

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human erotic exploits, so to speak, are in reality independent of each other; the one is not a sublimation of the other. Both are sublimations of a creative force in human nature. (Brodskii, Bol’shaia 68)

Freudian pansexualism is not taken seriously here, but the use of the sea as a symbol of the unconscious that clearly echoes Jung (Aion 142) plays a certain role in ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ (especially in canto XIII). Brodsky employed a dialogical form in a number of poems before and after ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov,’ for example, in chapter 24 of ‘Procession’ (‘Shestvie,’ 1961), ‘Dialogue’ (‘Dialog,’ 1962), ‘Isaac and Abraham’ (‘Isaak i Avraam,’ 1963), ‘A Show’ (‘Predstavlenie,’ 1987), and others. There is an element of drama in any dialogue, and critics have linked ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ to Brodsky’s ‘Marbles’ (1970s–1982), a play with only two characters who are engaged in an endlessly meandering philosophical dialogue (Vail and Genis). There is one peculiarity shared by the majority of Brodsky’s dialogical poems and his plays: they lack stage directions and even indications of who says what (see ‘Democracy!’ [1990] and ‘The Tree’ [‘Derevo,’ 1964–5)8. In ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ Brodsky collects as it were all omitted ‘he said’ phrases in the bizarre canto V with its surreal conclusion: ... And, a distance off, the He-said moved upon the clouds. It wore the smile of Gorbunov, of Gorchakov.

Why is it necessary to turn a humble locution whose only purpose is attribution of direct speech into an object? Canto X, symmetrically paired with canto V, provides an answer of sorts. Just as in canto V ‘he said’ becomes an object and thus a subject of a dialogue, in canto X the text that is clearly the narrator’s monologue is arbitrarily divided into dialogical cues set in quotation marks. Brodsky makes an important statement in the first stanza of canto X: all human utterances belong to dialogue – even a few nominative sentences describing a nocturnal cityscape ‘are a conversation, too, since all these things have been described in words.’ The period in which Brodsky was writing ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ was the time of the Bakhtinian renaissance in Russia. The statement that everything said is a ‘conversation’ seems to be a reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s doctrine of dialogism in general and to his teaching that in verbal art ‘objectless, one-voiced speech’ is impossible (Estetika 288–9), with the proviso that Brodsky never read Bakhtin

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and learned his ideas ‘by osmosis’ (Brodsky’s expression). When this author asked Brodsky whether he had read Bakhtin, Brodsky replied – as if to illustrate Bakhtin’s ideas of reported speech – that he had once ‘leafed through’ Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and liked most of all the quotations from Dostoevsky. Gorchakov’s statement ‘I feel my very self’s at stake / when I don’t have an interlocutor’ (canto VIII, stanza 6) is quintessentially Bakhtinian and even can be traced to Bakhtin’s likely philosophical inspiration, Martin Buber’s 1917 treatise, I and Thou, which postulated that I may be realized only in the act of communication with Another (Thou). In the original, Brodsky states it even more directly: ‘I am [exist] only when I have an interlocutor’ (ia togda lish’ esm’, kogda est’ sobesednik!). The poem’s chronotope is a madhouse at Great Lent (Velikii Post) time. Jokingly and seriously Great Lent and Easter are regularly mentioned in the text. For the faithful Great Lent is ‘a spiritual journey whose aim is to take us from one spiritual plane to another’ (Shmeman 91). In this respect ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ is closer to a mystery play (passion play) than the earlier ‘Procession,’ whose genre-defining subtitle is ‘a mystery play.’ The key to the sacral subtext of the poem can be found in the Lenten prayer of St Efrem Sirin: ‘Grant me to see my transgressions and not judge my brother.’ This prayer is widely known in Russia thanks to Pushkin’s versified version. The opposition of flesh and soul, which is common in Christianity, becomes more pointed at the time of Great Lent: the soul is in danger of being betrayed by weak and treacherous flesh. In the poem the theme of betrayal is supported by New Testament analogies: Gorbunov is compared to Christ on the eve of crucifixion and Gorchakov to Judas, while seven pairs of cantos correspond to the seven weeks of Orthodox Great Lent preceding Easter (later Brodsky used the same numerical symbolism in ‘Homage to a Chair’ [‘Posviashchaetsia stulu,’ 1987]). Another disguised hint at the Christ analogy is in the titles of cantos IV and IX – ‘Gorchakov and the Doctors’ and ‘Gorbunov and the Doctors’ respectively. They allude to the New Testament episode of the young Christ being questioned by the learned men, ‘the Doctors,’ in the Temple (Luke 2:46,47). There are many West European paintings and Orthodox icons depicting ‘Christ and the Doctors.’ The standard Russian translation of Luke has uchiteli (literally, ‘teachers’) where a Latin version has ‘doctors,’ but ‘doctors’ as in a caption, ‘Christ and the Doctors,’ translated into Russian would become vrachi. The most famous painting on this subject is also the most pertinent to ‘Gorbunov and

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Gorchakov,’ the one by Albrecht Dürer where inquisitive ‘doctors’ look grotesquely sinister. The crux of the passion-play plot is betrayal. Parallel to the body-soul dichotomy, Gorchakov represents the sensual and Gorbunov the spiritual. Correspondingly, Gorchakov in this passion play plays Judas: ‘I love you and betray you, too, to pain’ (the ending of canto VIII). Gorbunov, who is mocked by the doctors (‘How strange that Gorbunov, nailed to the cross, / must look for help from Gorchakov below’ [canto IX, stanza 8]), reacts to their offer of a cup of tea – an allusion to the drink of vinegar offered to Christ on the cross – with the words of Christ appealing to God the Father: ‘Oh, why have you forsaken me?’ (canto IX, stanza 9). Betrayal of the higher spiritual Self by a treacherous Body, pain-avoiding and clinging to life, is one possible reading of the poem. Recapitulation The ill-starred coincidence of a private calamity and political persecution made the first four months of 1964 the worst period in Brodsky’s life, and the second confinement to a mental institution was this period’s nadir. At the time of his confinement Brodsky had reasons to doubt his sanity, and a few months later, exiled to a northern village, he undertook writing ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ as an attempt to find meaning in the terrifyingly absurd experience. In the process he discovered a religious paradigm in his drama. There are no loonies in Gorbunov-Gorchakov’s madhouse. Not a single character in the poem acts out his delusion: no ‘Napoleons,’ no human ‘teapots.’ Madness in this place is not a particular pathological condition but a generalized existential Adversity. To succumb to this Adversity, which comprises betrayal by loved ones, the brutality of fellow men, and one’s own biological vulnerability, is the equivalent of losing one’s mind, i.e., one’s identity. Brodsky especially emphasizes the loneliness of the man engaged in this struggle and compares it to the loneliness of Jesus Christ at Golgotha. In a visionary moment he also compares it to an Old Testament episode: A man ... a well ... and sand like Tartar hordes a-whirling round ... He hasn’t got a drop to drink; he’s thin; it’s hotter, hotter ... Sun is at ... what do you call it ... at the zenith. Hostile ground. (canto IV, stanza 5)

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The biblical Joseph managed to get out of the well, where he was thrown by his brothers, and to prosper in a foreign land.

NOTES I am grateful to my colleagues Richard Sheldon and John Kopper for editorial help. 1 See Brodskii, Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo (hereafter SIB). The poem is dated 1965–8 [.] It was conceived probably as early as 1964. See ‘New Year at Kanatchikov Dacha’ (1964) [SIB 2: 42] and ‘With Sadness and Tenderness’ (16 June 1964) [SIB 2: 10–11] ... The first draft of a few lines related to the poem and written, most likely, in May 1964, is this: The one lying at the window was Gorbunov[,] and Gorchakov [Russian National Library, Department of Manuscripts, Brodsky archive, file 67, folio 57] In Notebook No. 2, page 24 (probably, summer 1965) there is a plan of the poem with interludes between chapters. (Brodskii, ‘Maramzinskoe Sobranie’ [hereafter MS] 3: 265)

2

3 4 5 6 7 8

Here and elsewhere Russian texts, except quotations from ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov,’ are given in our translation. ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ is quoted in the authorized translation by Harry Thomas (165–208). I.e., in the Ardovs’ apartment. Ordynka is a street in the old part of Moscow where the Ardov family lived. Victor Ardov was a popular writer-humorist, his wife, Nina Ol’shanskaia, an actress, and their two sons, Boris (a theatre scholar) and Mikhail (then a journalist), were friends of Brodsky. Anna Akhmatova often stayed with the Ardovs when she visited Moscow. Rev. M.V. Ardov kindly permitted me to quote from these unpublished memoirs. A.A. Surkov (1899–1983), a poet and a high-ranking functionary in the Communist Party and Writers Union. See Bloch and Reddaway 201 about the ‘wet-pack’ treatment. See, respectively, Patera, Koubourlis, and Slovar’ iazyka Pushkina. On Soviet psychiatry see Bloch and Reddaway and, more sympathetic to his subject, Calloway. Unpublished poem; see Russian National Library, Department of Manuscripts, Brodsky archive, file 63, folios 139–55.

PART TWO Madness, War, and Revolution

Vasily Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War. 1871. Oil on canvas. The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

... Suppose I am insane, but I am speaking the truth. My father and brother are rotting over there like carrion. Make bonfires, dig pits and destroy, bury all your arms. Demolish all the barracks, and strip all the men of their bright clothes of madness, tear them off. It is unbearable. ... Men are dying ... Leonid Andreev, The Red Laugh This is a relatively small blemish on the canvas of the flaming dawn of an expanding communist day. A. Lunacharsky, Several Words Concerning Suicides

The present section includes articles examining Russian psychiatric consciousness during periods of crisis in Russia’s most recent history – terrorist acts in the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s, the RussoJapanese and First World Wars, the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and the Civil War of 1918–22. In his chapter, ‘The Concept of Revolutionary Insanity in Russian History,’ Martin Miller investigates the history of the concept in Russian literary and ideological contexts. In Miller’s view, the formation of the frightening image of the revolutionary-lunatic in Russian culture is a defensive reaction by a significant portion of Russian society to the threat of instability. Irina Sirotkina, in ‘The Politics of Etiology: Shell Shock in the Russian Army, 1914–1918,’ demonstrates how events of 1904–5 and 1914–18 stimulated discussion about the etiology of psychiatric diseases. She argues that the views of Russian psychiatrists on the origins of mental disease were slowly politicized and radicalized during the war years and that the so-called psychiatric opposition to the Russian government was formed through army psychiatrists’ acceptance of the Revolution and their active participation in the creation of Soviet psychiatry. Sirotkina also examines the different ways Russian and Western doctors treated those suffering from shell shock. Based on archival resources, Kenneth Pinnow’s ‘Lives Out of Balance: The “Possible World” of Soviet Suicide during the 1920s’ is devoted to Red Army investigations of the suicidal personality. Researching the ‘possible world’ (Jerome Bruner’s term) of Soviet suicide, Pinnow demonstrates how psychiatric diagnoses became politicized, making them essentially illustrations of Marxist ideology. This theme is expanded upon in Dan Healey’s chapter, ‘Early Soviet Forensic Psychiatric Approaches to Sex Crime, 1917–1934,’ which exam-

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ines in detail the diagnoses of sexual offenders in the first years of the Soviet government. Healey shows how Leningrad’s court psychiatrists at the beginning of the 1920s became ‘psychological detectives,’ wittingly or unwittingly confirming through scientific methodology the system of values instituted by the judicial system. The historians’ examination of data convincingly demonstrates that interest in the problem of insanity becomes actualized and politicized in periods of social conflict. Psychiatric, literary, judicial, and political interpretations of insanity by contemporaries are attempts at self-realization and signify, in part, the search for a lost order.

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6 The Concept of Revolutionary Insanity in Russian History martin a. miller

The association of the terms ‘revolutionary’ and ‘madness’ has become embedded in Western cultural mores over the past two centuries. In Imperial Russia, the perception of revolutionaries and revolutions as exemplars of the irrational has a history of its own – one that is both related to, and separate from, its Western conceptual counterparts. In this chapter, I shall attempt to trace the broad outlines of the history of the Russian concept of revolutionary madness, while keeping the larger comparative context in mind. The linking of events as revolutionary and behaviour as pathology can be examined from two perspectives. On the one hand, revolutions have been seen as traumatic national experiences, which, by the very nature of their extraordinariness, produce extreme forms of behaviour. On the other, people who participate in revolutions have been characterized as having been the victims of disturbed backgrounds or inherited traits of immorality and insanity; normal people, according to the corollary, simply do not engage in such violent and chaotic events. There were many examples during the mid-seventeenth-century English revolutionary civil war of groups, like the Levellers and the Diggers, whose doctrines were seen as extreme and even illegitimate. Until the Enlightenment, political opposition that went beyond, or seriously challenged, the sanctity of monarchism was conceptualized as a collective phenomenon – secular conspiracies, religious evil (the Devil’s work, witchcraft, and so on), despotic cabals, or spontaneous moments of mob rage and violence. Madness, on the other hand, was understood as a phenomenon of individual character. Case studies describe asocial and apolitical traits among the insane, who are portrayed as weak, confused, irrational, and in pain, but not as politically conscious actors in public space (see Jackson; Hunter and Macalpine).

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It is not until the French Revolution that we find the formation of the concept of revolutionary insanity being crafted as a medical diagnosis. Philippe Pinel, minister of public health during the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras and one of the architects of modern psychiatric care, devoted a section of his path-breaking 1806 Treatise on Insanity to the problem of diagnosing madness in the midst of political upheavals. For Pinel, madness was ‘an affliction’ characterized by ‘the loss of reason.’ ‘Attachments,’ he wrote further, ‘are converted into aversions, love into hatred.’ The madman ‘may fancy himself a deity, an emperor,’ and he is vulnerable to societal turbulence, which can convert him into a state of furious delirium. Deprived of normal responses to the environment, he ‘gives himself up to all the extravagances of maniacal fury, or sinks inexpressibly miserable into the lowest depths of despondence and melancholy. If the former, he resembles in ferocity the tiger, and meditates destruction and revenge. If the latter, he withdraws from society, shuns the plots and inveiglements which he imagines to surround him, and fancies himself an object of human persecution and treachery, a victim of divine vengeance and reprobation’ (Porter, Faber 12–13). Pinel also wrote about another side of the problem – namely the ordinary, unpolitical individuals who are driven to insanity by being caught up in a revolutionary maelstrom. Some of his case studies are of patients whose inner sense of security and rationality collapsed under the strain of the Revolution. He describes in vivid detail instances where men and women of the former aristocracy, as a consequence of having lost their property and their social place during the Reign of Terror under Robespierre, drifted into psychological episodes of maniacal violence, delusionary identities, and sadomasochistic behaviour (Porter, Faber 52–4).1 The luminous images of revolutionary insanity presented by Pinel entered the diagnostic canon of the emerging profession of psychiatry in Russia, but much later and in an entirely different manner. Even in Russia, it was the French Revolution that seems to have been the triggering event for the initial formation of the concept. The events in Paris and Versailles beginning with the storming of the Bastille in July, 1789, disturbed Catherine the Great so profoundly that she quickly moved to oppose many of the Enlightenment-sponsored policies and decrees that had characterized her long reign. Her moment of truth came the following year when the recently published book by Alexander Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, was brought to her attention. Radishchev, whom Catherine had sent to Prussia years before to study

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German Enlightenment literature, believed that he was continuing to follow the empress’s cultural orientation by arguing that the wretched condition of the serfs in an autocracy was a problem that threatened the very nature of legitimate authority. Catherine’s reaction to the book was swift and severe. Her marginal notes to her copy include the following comment: ‘The purpose of this book is clear on every page: its author, infected and full of the French madness, is trying in every possible way to break down respect for authority ... to stir up in the people indignation against their superiors and against the government’ (qtd. in McConnell 157). Radishchev was forced to confess after he was arrested that he had written ‘an insane book’ (see Babkin 170–1), though later in Siberian exile, he wrote a friend that the French under the Terror had created a regime that he criticized as ‘folies françaises’ (Radishchev 3: 404). Further consolidation of the association of political opposition and madness in Russia emerged quite dramatically in the well-known case of Peter Chaadaev, who in 1836 was ‘diagnosed’ by Tsar Nicholas I as being mad for having published an article in the newspaper Telescope which dared to suggest that Russia’s past was devoid of innovation and that the country’s survival as a productive civilization depended on its relationship with the West. Chaadaev was institutionalized in Russia’s new asylum system, which, paradoxically, was established for the care of the insane by Nicholas himself, the result of an earlier visit to the innovative York Retreat in England, where he had been impressed with the new modes of moral therapy introduced there (Bazhenov, Psikhiatricheskiia 83). The actual appearance of the concept of revolutionary insanity as a permanent feature of the Russian cultural landscape is to be found neither in a psychiatric clinical case study nor in the government’s reaction to revolution, but in the extraordinary fictional characters created by Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky in his most political novel, The Devils. It is here that the vivid imagery of revolutionary experience as psychopathological etiology, originally postulated in a clinical context by Pinel in France, and developed to a limited degree by Catherine the Great and Nicholas I, finds its genuine Russian contours. Much has been written about the characters in this novel, and about the political context in which it was completed. Begun as a tale about ‘A Great Sinner’ who is alienated from all the qualities that defined Russia for Dostoevsky, the manuscript was diverted by the trial of the followers of Sergei Nechaev during the winter of 1869–70. The already sprawling canvas of the nascent novel was expanded further to incorporate the

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impact of an actual revolutionary leader who ordered the murder of a dissenting member of his circle. As Dostoevsky’s notebooks and letters show, he altered some characters and created new ones under the impact of this trial, which he attended and was obsessively concerned about. Critics have understood the novel primarily as a means for Dostoevsky to express his disgust for and fear of the emerging radical movement both in Russia and in growing émigré circles abroad. The interpretations have centred on the author’s conviction that Russians who have renounced God and country are condemned to be mired in a lifelong labyrinth of destructive pathways.2 What has received less attention is another facet of the novel – namely that the thoughts and acts of its protagonists were representations of clinical psychopathology that would later be incorporated into the psychiatric profession’s diagnostic nosology. Indeed, even when we do find this view, it is considered in a negative light. Joseph Frank, in the most recent volume of his monumental Dostoevsky biography, makes mention of this problem, noting that Dostoevsky has long been criticized for ‘preoccupying himself with what could only be considered abnormal and psychopathological characters.’ Frank, however, though he references the author’s peculiar ‘psychiatric talent,’ argues against this approach, stating that Dostoevsky ‘took great pains to anchor his fanatical creations in the realism of his time.’ More specifically, every action of Peter Verkhovensky’s was either one that Nechaev actually performed, or one that he ‘would have if given the opportunity’ (Frank 443). In truth, both aspects of this problem are valid and not contradictory. In other words, Dostoevsky did indeed fashion his characters from real life and was convinced they were reflecting a reality he perceived. At the same time, these characters were representations of psychopathologies that had not yet been legitimated in clinical textbooks. In his Diary of a Writer, a source that deserves far more attention from historians than it has received, Dostoevsky wrote at length in 1877 about a trial in which a woman was charged with infanticide. Dostoevsky pondered the circumstances. The woman awakened that fateful morning, fed her child breakfast as she always did, and then ‘ordered the girl to stand up on the window-sill and look out of the window. When the girl did so, the mother lifted the little girl by her legs and pushed her out. Then she shut the window, got dressed and went to the police station to denounce herself. Tell me: is this really logical and not fantastic?’ (Diary 2: 924). After imagining many possible motives for such an act, Dostoevsky

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concluded that ‘you must concede that a person who deliberately ventures to throw himself into an abyss – heedlessly and unhesitatingly – that in such a human soul, there must be at that moment a dreadful feeling, a dark despair, an irresistible urge for perdition, for self annihilation ... And if there was no repentance, there was gloom, damnation, madness’ (Diary 2: 925). He went further in his analysis (which covers almost ten dense pages), using psychiatric terms that may have come from the doctors who treated his epilepsy. He wrote about the woman’s ‘affect’ in her behaviour and about the relationship that exists between the mad and the sane in general. ‘Do you know,’ he wrote, ‘that a great many people are ill because of their boundless confidence in their normalcy, and, as a result, they are infected with awful self-conceit and impossible narcissism, which sometimes reaches the level of the conviction of one’s infallibility?’ (Diary 2: 932).3 There is no doubt of Dostoevsky’s certainty that his characters were real and that real people exhibited their traits. In a letter to Nikolai Liubimov in the spring of 1872 just after The Devils was published, he wrote that Stavrogin’s confession, which Mikhail Katkov refused to publish, was the cry of a man who ‘is our type, a Russian, a person who has lost touch with everything native and most importantly, with faith; he is a degenerate out of ennui ... Along with the nihilists, this is a serious phenomenon. I swear that it exists in actuality’ (Complete Letters 4: 23). Some of his politically radical contemporaries were similarly convinced. Peter Tkachev wrote a review essay of The Devils called ‘Sick People’ in which he acknowledged that Dostoevsky had portrayed the wild behaviour of people who were mentally ill. He went further by admitting that Dostoevsky had captured the lunacy of Nechaev by portraying his tendencies in the character of Peter Verkhovensky in the novel (Tkachev 3: 5–48). Others, of course, disagreed. The populist theoretician N.K. Mikhailovskii, to take one prominent example, felt that Dostoevsky had entirely exaggerated the reality of the Russian revolutionary underground by focusing on ‘the criminal exceptionalism of the Nechaev Affair’ as though it were ‘a picture of radical youth as a whole’ (Mikhailovskii 1: 852). A review of the characters in The Devils reveals Dostoevsky’s brilliant portrayals. Nikolai Stavrogin and his entourage are dominated by delusions of grandeur, by hallucinatory experiences, by paranoid fantasies, and by suicidal and sado-masochistic drives, all contextualized within the framework of a climaxing political conflict between the threatening revolutionaries and the vulnerable social order. The regional governor,

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von Lemke, literally goes insane as a consequence of his inability to tend to the responsibilities of security and public order, and his wife (Julie) exhibits traits of extreme mood swings that suggest she suffers from a form of manic-depression. The members of the secret radical circle all display elements of psychological dysfunctionalism. What unites them is not ideological agreement but a mutual need for submission, obedience, and suffering. Indeed, they also share febrile qualities, speaking in states of high anxiety to others in what are in fact maniacal monologues. Captain Lebyatkin, we are informed, regularly takes a Cossack whip to his crippled sister, who is called ‘the sick one’ by Peter Verkhovensky. Shigalov dreams of the establishment of a tyrannical post-revolutionary era in which everyone will be so nearly equal that reality will be reduced to a classless society of slaves. Kirillov seeks to realize the fantasy of complete freedom by advocating the abandonment of conventional Christian morality. He is introduced to the reader as a person ‘doing interesting research on the causes of the increasing incidence of suicides in Russia.’ His findings include the necessity of imposing ‘total destruction in the name of the ultimate good.’ Kirillov eventually is forced by his own ‘logic’ to commit suicide himself in order to become god and free humanity.4 Peter Verkhovensky is shown to be highly irrational, a man unable to control his furious emotions of rage against individuals and society, a person without any code of ethics who truly cannot distinguish right from wrong. The most fascinating of all the characters is certainly Nikolai Stavrogin, who exhibits the most outrageous and unacceptable aspects of the behaviour of political madness that Dostoevsky fashioned in this novel. He was, from the first notes the author made about his intentions for this work, the centrepiece of the world of the devils. Stavrogin remains the most contradictory, charismatic, elusive, and fascinating of all the protagonists. His suffering is at times palpable and at other times almost metaphysical, but it is his madness, which generates his agony and his ennui, that attracts and repels everyone around him. Stavrogin returns to Russia preceded by his reputation as a formidable émigré revolutionary figure. We later learn that he is married platonically to the crippled and retarded Maria Lebyadkin, permitting him to live a life of debauchery and duplicity with Lisa Drozdov and Maria Shatov, among others. But his most irrational act is designed to shock readers with an unspeakable crime that no sane person could commit –

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the violation of a little girl. In the chapter called ‘At Tikhon’s,’ Stavrogin confesses to a priest, in a scene more psychotherapeutic than religious, what he has done in a futile effort to achieve forgiveness. The description of the rape scene was considered so scandalous that it was not published until the 1922 edition of the novel. Moreover, Dostoevsky himself withheld a passage that he had crafted from Stavrogin’s suicide note to Lisa at the end of the novel that appears only in his draft notes. Here he has Stavrogin say ‘Don’t look for love; I’m not going to love you. I am a stranger everywhere. At times I am rather ill – ill with a terrible disease. I would like to lock myself in, all by myself. Underground, if this were only possible. I have a frightful hatred of everything in Russia’ (Notebooks for ‘Possessed’ 410). The ‘terrible disease’ was his severe depression, which Dostoevsky also referred to elsewhere as ‘a malignancy’ ( J. Frank 480; see also Rice). Here Dostoevsky delivered perhaps his strongest description of the mad revolutionary who, succumbing to his inner despair, led himself beyond not only good and evil, but beyond life itself. In 1884, just three years after the great writer’s death, an article appeared in Russkii vestnik called ‘Dostoevsky as Psychopathologist,’ by a young psychiatrist, Vladimir Fedorovich Chizh (1855–1914). Chizh had studied under I.P. Merzheevskii at the Medical-Surgical Academy and the First Psychiatric Clinic in St Petersburg, becoming one of the leading members of ‘the first generation of fully trained psychiatrists’ in Russia (Iudin 112, 114). Chizh also had significant training in the West. In 1884, he travelled to Leipzig to work in the new laboratory in experimental psychology directed by Wilhelm Wundt, then to Nancy, where he studied at the innovative Bernheim clinic. He completed his work in Paris, where he attended the charismatic lectures of Jean-Martin Charcot, France’s pre-eminent psychiatrist. It was Charcot who introduced Chizh to the borderlands of psychiatry and literature as a result of Charcot’s familiarity with Ivan Turgenev’s fatal illness and death in Paris. Upon his return to Russia in 1885, where he began a successful career at the Panteleimon Hospital in the capital, and at Iurev University, Chizh composed the first of his many psychological essays on literary and historical figures, including not only Dostoevsky and Turgenev, but also Gogol’ and Belyi.5 Chizh’s orientation to psychiatric illness was strongly influenced by his reading of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso characterized the anarchists who threatened the leaders of Western Europe

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as born criminals with pathological disturbances that he believed were inherited from birth.6 This was the nosology that Chizh took to Dostoevsky’s fictional characters. In his essay, ‘Dostoevsky as Psychopathologist,’ Chizh recognized that he was travelling in unchartered territory. ‘Psychiatrists,’ he wrote, ‘though trained to observe psychopathologies, have rarely turned to literature’ for illustrations of symptoms of mental illness. He cited the many characters in Shakespeare’s plays as examples of such symptoms, and then proposed to examine the characters in Dostoevsky’s novels who, he believed, represented ‘the full spectrum of nervous disorders’ (Chizh, Bolezn’ 270).7 Of all the distressing disorders described by Dostoevsky, Chizh felt that he handled epilepsy most realistically. Perhaps because Dostoevsky suffered from the disease himself, he was able to create manic, delusional, depressed, and anxiety-ridden characters like Stavrogin, Kirillov, and von Lemke in The Devils, though Chizh felt that their symptoms were less than clearly presented. To solidify his interpretation, Chizh compared some of the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s fiction (especially from The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment) to the standard psychiatric work of the Berlin psychopathologist Wilhelm Griesinger (d. 1868), one of the nineteenth century’s outstanding researchers in psychopathology and the founder of modern biological psychiatry. He found striking comparisons to the behaviour of the revolutionary fanatics in The Devils. From Chizh, the conception of revolutionary madness entered the psychiatric lexicon in Russia, in part through his published articles and also as a result of his very public debates with other (usually more liberal) psychiatrists. V.I. Iakovenko, for example, argued at the 1907 national meeting of the Pirogov Society of Russian Physicians in Moscow (the essay was later published) that the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War had uncovered ‘organic weaknesses’ and a variety of pathologies including a deeper involvement in extreme political activity. For Iakovenko, disturbed individuals were attracted to political factions, and he asserted that those who resisted autocratic authority were engaged in ‘healthier’ responses than those who joined the Black Hundreds. Chizh countered that the most disturbed individuals were those who, like the characters in The Devils, suffered from delusions of grandeur and exhibited violent and destructive behaviour in the interests of destroying the existing order (see Brown, ‘Revolution’ 292–5). Though he rejected the proposal by his colleagues to establish a psychiatric diagnostic category called ‘revolutionary psychosis,’ Chizh nevertheless argued that political

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radicals suffered from ‘destructive drives’ rooted in the nature of their inner ‘pathological organization’ (qtd. in Sirotkina, Diagnosing 42, 43). The revolution of 1905 was the event that sharply changed the orientations of many Russian psychiatrists. Faced with the very real challenge to political and economic stability, physicians found themselves devoting increasing attention to exogenous causes for what they believed were rising rates of neurasthenia, hysteria, and other forms of mental illness. While it is difficult to present accurate statistics, it is clear from the annual congresses and the medical journals that psychiatrists, whether they were liberal or conservative, were more willing to accept the linkages between sociopolitical upheaval and mental pathology than they had been before 1905 (see Morrissey, ‘Suicide’). There can be little doubt that the extraordinarily effective terrorism of the era, in which thousands of Russians – from state ministers to regional officials – lost their lives in bomb incidents, created a real atmosphere of dread and instability. For some, the chaos of the 1905 Revolution, which the government seemed incapable of preventing, provoked fears that the political violence would lead to the moral degeneration of Russian society.8 The year 1905 turns up repeatedly as a historical divide in the contemporary evidence. Dr Ivan Bloch, who was, along with his contemporary Richard Krafft-Ebing, one of the most renowned psychiatrists of his time, included as an appendix to his widely translated book, The Sexual Life of Our Time, a long autobiographical essay written by a Russian anarchist. The author, identified only as N.K., describes in almost lurid detail the intersection in his upbringing of pathological sexual experiences, sadomasochistic drives, and his violent involvement in the Russian revolutionary movement during 1905. During the Revolution, he wrote, he began to understand the riddles of his urges toward violence. ‘We strive to see mankind in pain and poverty, in order that we may love men more ardently; to love them for that reason, because their misery provides for us intense pain’ (N.K. 599). To satisfy his need for punishment, he plunged into the joy of suffering he experienced as he engaged in acts of anarchist violence, not unlike Dostoevsky’s devils. Perhaps the climax in the formulation of the concept of revolutionary madness came with the thundering critique of the intelligentsia that appeared in the pages of the widely read Vekhi (Landmarks) symposium published in 1909. The volume, edited by Mikhail Gershenzon, was the result of a number of communications among a group of intellectuals who had formerly occupied positions of significance in the radical movement but who all had turned against it after the failure of 1905.

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Gershenzon himself wrote of the ‘disintegration of the personality,’ in a collective sense, of the intelligentsia, and its ‘neurasthenic attitude to life’ as a result of decades of intolerance and alienation culminating in the 1905 defeat (Gershenzon 65). A.S. Izgoev, another contributor to the book, described the corruption and masochism of the young generation, as evidenced in the high incidence of inappropriate sexual experiences (from seduction of maids and nannies by men still very young to excesses of masturbation, revealed in surveys of university students in Moscow). Growing up without a firm code of morality and cut off from their families by their rebellious drives, the students joined ‘self-education’ groups reading illegal literature, which in turn led them directly into radical political parties. Our revolutionary youth, Izgoev concludes, is motivated largely by suicidal urges. Further, he writes that ‘the Russian intelligentsia has formed a peculiar monastic order of people who have condemned themselves to death’ by virtue of their involvement with underground opposition parties. ‘During crises, popular movements, or even mere public excitement, the extremist element very quickly becomes dominant,’ developing ‘a sick conscience’ (Gershenzon 85, 89). In the last essay in the volume, the philosopher Semyon Frank painted a portrait of these pathological revolutionaries that would have pleased Dostoevsky. The revolutionaries of 1905 were ‘intoxicated with the ideal of the radical, universal achievement of the people’s happiness ... and salvation.’ In their sickness, they could not distinguish between their love for abstract humanity on the one hand, and their fear and hatred for real people on the other. Thus, they engaged blindly and madly in the ‘passion for the building of the earthly paradise’ which became in their hands ‘a passion for destruction.’ To succeed, they had to promise ‘the merciless elimination of the enemies of the fatherland’ and ‘the forcible conversion of the world’ as a consequence of their delusional perceptions. For Frank, 1905 was the frightening historical moment when the threat of the triumph of the devils was a distinct possibility (Gershenzon 142–3, 144, 151). How are we to interpret this evidence? One path toward answering this question is to recognize that the development of the concept of revolutionary insanity involves the process of diffusion and confusion of two previously separate discourses. On the one hand, psychiatric diagnosis had become increasingly refined during the second half of the nineteenth century, while, on the other, a cultural construction of

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the same imagery had emerged within the intelligentsia. Put another way, the medical notion of insanity blended with fears of political upheaval to create a cultural construct of revolutionary madness. This was perceived as a threat to the social order and was also a reflection of the collective anxieties of a nation generated by the powerful statesponsored transformations in process at this time, from Sergei Witte’s industrialization program to Peter Stolypin’s agrarian reforms. To be sure, these anxieties were projected into other constructions of extreme thinking. The era from the Silver Age through the wildly experimental artistic innovations of the early 1920s was filled with the eschatological imagery of the coming of the apocolypse, as seen in the writings of Andrei Belyi, Boris Savinkov, Yevgeny Zamiatin, and Velemir Khlebnikov, among others (see Williams). This, however, was the madness of the sane. The image of the revolutionary as a lunatic undoubtedly provided a sense of comforting relief amidst the new demands made by the relentless forces of ‘rational’ modernization and industrialization during these years. There was a strong motive behind the need to define political extremism as a biologized form of madness. The intention was first to identify the threatening spectre and then to either cure or contain it. The theories of Lombroso, Max Nordau, and Krafft-Ebing found a vulnerable audience in educated Russian society across a wide spectrum. Merging the representation of the revolutionary and the notion of madness together guaranteed that neither would be more clearly understood. Instead, by pushing both images outside the zone of conventional morality, the definers of revolutionary madness contributed to the process of empowering each image with an arsenal of projected personal anxieties. Rather than creating an understanding of the rage of revolutionaries and the delusions of the mad, the theoretical construct fused both into a single binary threat. The result was the delegitimization of both categories, and the solidification of a new and powerful enemy to be combated on the public stage at all cost. Confronting the perception of revolutionary madness in 1905, therefore, required the activation of a collective defence mechanism – a supreme effort, as one scholar has put it, to ward off the anxieties of the age, an effort that, at such moments in history, reveals our ‘extraordinary ability to colonize huge portions of our consciousness’ (Nye xiv).

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NOTES 1 For additional related case studies, see Pinel 186–8, 224–8, 282–5. 2 See Dostoevskii, Besy, which contains both the complete novel and 250 pages of criticism by intellectuals and scholars. 3 For a relevant discussion of this case, see Murav, Russia’s Legal Fictions 125–55. 4 For an interesting recent discussion of Kirillov’s suicide and the man who inspired the character, see Paperno, Suicide, 143–61. 5 He also wrote essays on Tsar Paul, Arakcheev, Comte, and Nietzsche, among others. On Chizh, see the following: Chizh, Psihkologiia and Bolezn’ ; Kruglianskii 155–71; Rice 200–10; Sirotkina, Diagnosing 23–5, 42–3, 50–2. 6 See the discussion in Erikson 19–52. 7 For Chizh, Dostoevsky was ‘a penetrating observer in the sphere of psychopathology’ (Bolezn’ 313). 8 Such fears were also very much a part of the degeneration etiology that had become a prevalent part of psychiatric diagnostic classification since its original formulation in France by Benedict-August Morel in the 1850s. See Chamberlin and Gilman, and also the ‘founding text’ in the cultural discourse, Max Nordau’s Degeneration, originally published in 1892.

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

Recent work by Western historians has substantially expanded our knowledge of psychiatry in the First World War (Kaufman; Lerner, ‘Hysterical’; Roudebush; Shepard). Contrary to the previous view that the war did not alter psychiatric theories, these studies demonstrate that psychiatry came out of the war changed. First, psychiatry firmly established itself as a specialty within war medicine. Second, post-war discussions around what had initially been diagnosed as ‘shell shock’ facilitated the entrance into psychiatry of the category ‘psychoneurosis,’ the idea that mental illness can have a psychological origin, and of psychotherapy (Brunner; Lerner, ‘Rationalizing’). Compared with studies of war psychiatry in Britain, France, and Germany, the Russian story remains untold. Although the first articles are appearing (Friedlander, ‘Neskol’ko’ and ‘War’; Astashov),1 nobody, to my knowledge, has undertaken a comparison of wartime psychiatry in Russia and in the West. It hardly needs mentioning that Russia’s psychiatry was part of world developments and never existed in isolation. And yet, there were differences between Russia and the West. This chapter examines how Russia handled psychiatric casualties during the First World War, and it relates how the specific characteristics of Russia’s military medicine, psychiatric community, and, finally, political conditions differed from Western experience. To take a telling example, the Russian discussion of ‘traumatic neurosis’ was not unlike the Western debates around shell shock. It was the way neurotic cases were handled that divided Russian psychiatrists from their Western counterparts. On this point I disagree with the historian Catherine Merridale. Correctly observing that Russian psychiatrists were well acquainted with Western discussions of shell shock, she claims that they

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imitated both the conceptions and the harsh ways of Western military doctors in dealing with traumatic neurosis. In particular, Merridale believes that ‘the majority [of psychiatrists in Russia], and almost all nonspecialist medical professionals, regarded new evidence about battle trauma as an indication of malingering, personal weakness, or moral turpitude’ (40). My impression, however, is that the hard-liners were a distinct minority in discussions of shell shock. Russian psychiatrists, for various reasons, rejected the identification, widespread in the West, of traumatic neurosis with hysteria, which made shell shock a shameful disease and a sign of weak will bordering on cowardice and malingering. Unlike many of their Western counterparts, Russian psychiatrists did not conspire with the government to send back as many soldiers as possible to the front. Both as a result of the conditions they worked in and as a sign of their opposition to the government, psychiatrists adopted their own line in dealing with war neurotics, and they kept to it until shortly after the end of the Civil War. The Birth of the Diagnosis If one believes an article in the Russian Gazette (Russkie vedomosti), during the war with Japan one of the causes of mental illness in the army was ‘Chinese vodka – khanshin, which makes those who are not used to it deaf; the symptoms reappear if the next morning one drinks water.’2 The editor of the official newspaper of the Russian army in Manchuria confirmed that ‘alcohol was much to blame for our defeat in the Far East.’ At the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the German emperor Wilhelm II commented that, in a future conflict in Europe, victory would be on the side of the sober. Shortly after Russia had entered the First World War, Nicholas II prohibited the vodka trade. This decision was welcomed by educated society, and especially by physicians, who considered alcohol a real poison. The fact that in the first months of the war there were fewer cases of mental illness in the army than in 1904–5 was attributed to the beneficial influence of the dry law.3 Yet even at the very beginning of the war, Red Cross hospitals and reception stations received a significant number of casualties.4 The first psychiatric reports from the front recalled psychiatrists’ observations in the Russo-Japanese War. Like the liberal intelligentsia at large, psychiatrists disapproved of the war, and they reported a doubling of the number of cases of mental illness in the army compared with pre-war conditions. Moreover, they believed that the war had hit soldiers harder

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than officers. One observer reported that, in contrast to the officers, whose insanity developed because of alcoholism, progressive paralysis, neurasthenia, and degeneration (all morally charged diagnoses), the lower ranks suffered from genuine war psychoses in which war events determined the content of delusions and hallucinations.5 M.O. Shaikevich, a physician of the Moscow Military Hospital, believed that the majority of officers affected by illness ‘had either been ill earlier or were to some extent predisposed.’ By contrast, the lower ranks suffered from a special disease, which Shaikevich termed psychosis depressivo-stuporosa. All the same, he doubted that this disease was caused solely by combat. In his view, ‘war only aggravates those specific conditions which the lower ranks have to endure in the Russian army’ (Shaikevich 18). Following the lead of the radical intelligentsia, psychiatrists argued that these unprepared soldiers who were unwilling to fight ought to be considered the real victims of the war, or, to be more precise, of the government which had sent them to the front. With the onset of the Great War, the discussion of ‘war psychosis’ was reopened. The Moscow physician O.B. Feltsman reported that the cases which were coming to Moscow hospitals from the army exhibited mainly depressive and stupor-like symptoms, in agreement with the earlier diagnosis, psychosis depressivo-stuporosa. In tune with him, the Petrograd physician S.A. Sukhanov predicted that, in this war, ‘the depressive-melancholic syndrome’ would frequently accompany psychotic cases (Fel’tsman 174; Sukhanov 205). Yet, contradicting these expectations, the main subject of the war publications turned out to be a neurosis supposedly caused by shells and called ‘air contusion.’ This term had been in use since the Russo-Japanese War, the first in which both sides deployed modern artillery. The Japanese army had German machine guns; during the siege of Port Arthur alone, they fired 1.5 million times. The Russian army was equipped almost on a par with the Japanese, and artillery cannonades from both sides followed one another (Menning 170–90). The soldiers felt themselves to be cannon fodder. Besides those killed or wounded by shells, there were also the ‘contused,’ some with brain injuries and concussions, some with strange symptoms of an undefined origin. The illness started with fainting; having regained consciousness, the person was affected with a heavy headache and spinning head, his hearing lessened, and speech became distorted. Violent movements, fits, paralysis, and memory losses followed; the person became frightened, anxious, and depressed (Vyrubov, Kontuzionnyi 4–8).

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The first published reports classified the symptoms related to conditions of combat under ‘neurasthenia’ or ‘nerve exhaustion’ (Ozeretskii 524–5; Avtokratov, ‘Prizrenie’ 665–8 and Awtokratow, ‘Die Geisteskranken’).6 There were also references to ‘traumatic neurosis,’ a term coined in connection with railway and work accidents. Russia did not have a law of compulsory insurance against accidents at work like the one Germany adopted in 1884. Instead, the law of 1903 determined individual responsibility of factory owners for physical damage to workers. In 1909, when there were rumours that a project for an insurance law might materialize, physicians showed some interest in the issues of trauma (Stanilovskii 5). Although traumatic neurosis had not been an issue before the war as much as it had in the West, during the war with Japan the latter diagnosis was widely used. Initially, it was understood to result from ‘a brain injury caused by shells’ (Shumkov, qtd. in Iudin 361). Yet already in the Russo-Japanese War it had become clear that mental illness could occur without obvious damage to the brain: for instance, in cases when the shell passed at a distance too far to cause physical injury, and even in soldiers who were not under shelling. In such cases, psychiatrists preferred to speak of a multiple etiology of the illness – of a combination of such factors as physical exhaustion, climate change, undernourishment, lack of sleep, emotional shock, and constitutional predisposition. The folk name for the shell-shocked or contused soldiers was ‘confused’ (skonfuzhennye); behind this name lurked the idea of the purely psychological origins of traumatic neurosis.7 Psychiatrists were divided about the nature, causes, and treatment of war neuroses. Some continued to see their origins in the organic damage caused by shells; others chose a psychological explanation. There was no consensus about how to term, classify, and treat such cases (Young 50, 60). The figures for psychoneuroses, including ‘neurasthenia,’ ‘hysteria,’ and ‘psychasthenia,’ varied, depending on the information source, from ‘very few’ to nearly a quarter of all psychiatric casualties (Bondarev 130; Khoroshko, ‘Psikhiatricheskie’ 381; Timofeev 261–2). As the question of ‘where psychasthenics belong’ had not been resolved, neither psychiatric nor neurological hospitals accepted them. There were special facilities for those classified both as mentally ill and with an injury of the nervous system, but the so-called neurotics of war fell between categories and did not receive appropriate care.8 It was not necessarily better when psychiatric hospitals did accept neurotics. First, the conditions in psychiatric hospitals left much to be desired. Second, once labelled ‘mentally ill,’ the patient received an

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indelible stigma and was stripped of a significant portion of his rights. Moreover, traditional psychiatric treatment did not always help neurotics, and at times it could cause harm. Thus, though patients with nervous diseases were traditionally given six-month leaves, physicians who treated neurotics discovered that short leaves, after which the patients had to continue service, were much more efficient. Besides, when on a leave, many soldiers simply had nowhere to go to and no pension to live on. A meeting of psychiatrists and neurologists in June 1915 raised some of these issues. The participants stated that there was a need for special facilities for neurotics in proximity to the front line, where it would be easier to give neurotics prompt help and also to restore them to the army. Physicians also emphasized the necessity of altering both the classification of diseases and the pension statutes so that war neurotics would not remain unsupported. It was suggested that a neurologist with voting rights should be introduced into the commissions in hospitals and evacuation stations that examined soldiers and decided what to do with them.9 Despite the fact that there was no clarity about the nature of traumatic neurosis, practical necessities made physicians forget their theoretical disagreements and, de facto, recognize the new category. Treating Army Neurotics, Russian-Style Recent literature on shell shock and its treatment in different countries has revealed a sobering picture of psychiatrists’ tooth-and-claw struggle with what they believed was an ‘epidemic of war neuroses.’ They considered this epidemic ‘a war-time parallel to the so-called pension neurosis among work-shy laborers,’ which threatened to empty the state budget after the war. According to one historian, ‘most German psychiatrists and neurologists concluded that the “war neuroses” had little to do with war; essentially identical to peace-time accident neuroses, they could be explained as psychological – or hysterical – reactions in terrified, weakwilled, or lazy men’ (Lerner, ‘From Traumatic’ 156, 162), In the words of the same historian, military psychiatrists described pity and charity as effeminate and even pathogenic impulses (Lerner, ‘Psychiatry’ 20). Hence their use of brutal methods of ‘shocking the patient back into health,’ such as electric shock, as well as ‘persuasion’ methods known in France as torpillage and méthode brusque and in Germany as ‘active therapy’ and Überumpelungs-methode (surprise attack method) (Leese 71–2). The ‘heroic treatment’ of shell-shocked soldiers caused public resentment after the war.

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By contrast, in Russia psychiatrists rarely used shock therapy, and it did not become an issue. In the Russo-Japanese War, treatment of psychiatric casualties was primarily limited to rest, better food, hot baths, and transport to Moscow (Wanke 55). Ten years later physicians became more adventurous in the choice of treatment. Psychiatrists reported practising the traditional treatment of neurotics: hydro- and electrotherapy, rational therapy, and exercises on muscle control before a mirror. One physician found that traumatic neurosis ‘is easily treated with compresses, warmth and gentle galvanization’; another reported on the efficiency of the irrigation of the ears in cases of shell-shock deafness, twenty-four-hour compresses on the eyes in the cases of blindness, and suggestion and electrotherapy for movement disorders. He explained the equally good results obtained from different techniques by suggestion and autosuggestion, massage, electrotherapy, ‘strong emotions, including religious ones,’ and ‘a sophisticated apparatus for diathermy or a simple enema,’ which could be transformed into a magic wand in the hands of a skilful physician. The only method that he considered useless was ‘Freud’s psychoanalysis’ (V.V. Ianovskii 31–3; Arinshtein 85–8; Rotshtein 385). Psychiatrists admitted using strong electric currents to paralysed organs, in combination with massage, only in a few individual cases, in order to provoke involuntary movements. One of them gave electroshock only to ‘hysterics’ while prescribing strengthening and calming therapies, such as baths, bromide, and valerian, to two other categories of traumatic neuroses, ‘neurasthenics’ and ‘psychasthenics’ (Pussep 83–4). In contrast to the West, in Russia the occasional use of electrotherapy and other painful treatments, such as the just-mentioned ‘apparatus for diathermy,’ did not turn into a common practice pursuing half-medical, half-punitive purposes. Those rare hospitals which were sufficiently equipped to carry out electrotherapy on their patients did not report using strong currents with the intention of ‘shocking the patients back into health.’ The Seventeenth Nervous Hospital in Voronezh can serve as an example: though it had all the machinery for electrotherapy and did use it, the doctors mainly relied on massage, ‘direct suggestion’ (without hypnosis), and the ‘general moral atmosphere’ of the hospital. In the photographs included in the report, soldiers pose in front of sophisticated apparatus together with young attractive nurses, looking well and relaxed (Sergievskii). In the West, electrotherapy was firmly tied to a disciplinary discourse which justified the use of painful treatment by the good cause of sending patients back to the front line. In Russia such

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disciplinary rhetoric was not popular, nor was the identification of shell shock with hysteria and malingering. According to the reports of some Dutch physicians, up to 90 per cent of the hospital patients were malingerers. In the words of one historian, in spotting malingerers a military doctor was not only a doctor but also a detective; it was one way in which he could prove himself of true military stock (van Bergen 66, 73). In Britain, fearing the wrongful exposure of the innocent, doctors were somewhat more cautious in diagnosing malingering, but they were also under pressure from the military (Cooter 132). By contrast with their Western counterparts, Russian physicians seemed less anxious to expose malingerers in psychiatric wards. Indeed, quite the opposite: they expressed their concern about the careful examination of such cases and warned against overlooking a still-ailing patient and mistakenly qualifying him fit for his duties. The veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, Shumkov, believed that an unjustified suspicion of simulation could seriously distort the real picture of mental illness in the war. Another physician claimed that such suspicion results from lack of experience, and he warned psychiatrists to be wary of this ‘more than of malingering in its own right’ (Panskii 288–9; Khoroshko, ‘Psikhiatricheskie’ 380–1; Shumkov 363–6). L.O. Darkshevich, who studied with J.-M. Charcot at the Salpêtrière at the same time as Freud, was well prepared to recognize the reality of male hysteria. He therefore protested against the hunt for malingerers in army hospitals and required that the doctor justify his suspicions rather than forcing the patient to prove his illness. Hard-liners were the exception. Yet one of them, L.M. Pussep, while quoting high French figures for malingerers, nevertheless admitted that among his twelve hundred patients he personally had found none (Darkshevich 605; Pussep 77). Very few Russian psychiatrists shared the view of shell shock as a paradise diagnosis for malingerers, and even fewer believed that such patients needed strict discipline. Revealingly, those who did uphold such views were military physicians in top positions. Pussep was one, and V.F. Chizh, the chief psychiatrist of the Red Cross in the Kiev region, another. Convinced that traumatic neurosis is the result of ‘autosuggestion, aggravation, even malingering,’ Chizh recommended sending patients with such symptoms, after a few weeks in the hospital, to special convalescent detachments with strict army discipline. But Chizh’s conservative views gained him a bad reputation, and his recommendations were never implemented (Chizh, ‘Otchet’ 103–4). The number of soldiers who were sent to convalescent detachments was,

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in the words of a psychiatrist, ‘so insignificant that the question rises whether they should be sent there at all, and whether it would not be better to let them rest in one of the divisions in the rear’ (Bondarev 129). There could be several explanations for the relaxed attitude toward malingerers and mild treatment of war neurotics, which so divided Russian physicians from their Western counterparts. First, because of the absence of an insurance law, Russia did not have the same wave of ‘pension neuroses’ that had hardened the hearts of Western psychiatrists before the war and consequently made them deaf and blind to the complaints of war neurotics. For Russian physicians, minimizing the state’s expenses for war pensions was not an issue: pension regulations did not stretch far enough to embrace the category of ‘traumatic neurosis,’ not to speak of such diagnoses as ‘psychasthenia’ and ‘hysteria.’ Second, even if physicians had wished to use electrotherapy more widely, they could hardly have done so. Russian wartime facilities could not compete with well-equipped Western, especially German, clinics and sanatoria; the majority of army hospitals had no baths and no machines for electrotherapy. Even in the capital there were very few institutions that satisfied all the medical criteria for treating neurotics; these included the Military-Medical Academy Clinic in town and the All Mourners Hospital and the Sivoritsy Clinic out of town.10 Thirdly, given Russia’s larger population, which allowed for several mobilizations, the task of returning soldiers to the front was arguably less urgent. Another reason that Russian psychiatrists were much less anxious about shell shock was the lack of complete information about the frequency of the disease. As was widely acknowledged, there was no reliable statistical information about psychiatric casualties. The government failed to establish information and statistics centres for the army, and public bodies were limited by their lack of information sources. In addition, very few institutions involved in collecting medical statistics used the category ‘traumatic neurosis.’ Though present in the classifications used by the Zemstvos and Towns Union Statistical Bureau, the category was absent from the regional (guberniia) statistics of the mentally ill. Physicians argued that neurasthenia escaped any statistics, but the majority of them agreed that the number of traumatic neuroses was relatively low. The Moscow General Hospital, for instance, reported 10 per cent of its patients as nervously ill (Zakharchenko 204–9; Vyrubov, ‘K voprosu’ 304–13). Nevertheless, compared with the fact that the overwhelming majority of Western psychiatric casualties were shell-shock cases (in

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Germany, two-thirds), Russian figures were rather modest. Moreover, multiple mobilizations uncovered a mass of ‘genuine’ mental illness that overwhelmed the hospitals in the rear, numbers caused, as psychiatrists sadly concluded, by an insufficient psychiatric service in times of peace (Timofeev 262). Among those examined and diagnosed as mentally ill, almost a third were cases of ‘innately underdeveloped intellect,’ who were not up to military service requirements; over another third were psychoses, and up to a quarter were epileptic. The cases of traumatic neurosis drowned in the mass of newly uncovered illnesses (Kashchenko, ‘Nekotorye’ 379–81). Finally, one should consider that the patriotic mood might have contributed to downplaying the figures for traumatic neuroses. At the beginning of the war, General Hindenburg claimed that ‘the one whose nerves are stronger will win.’ In May 1915, an influential Moscow neurologist, G.I. Rossolimo, responded with an article in the Russian Gazette, ‘On Strong Nerves and Victory.’ He believed that ‘ten months of war have not persuaded us of the weakness of our nerves,’ and he compared this state favourably with that of the German army, where the number of mentally ill soldiers had substantially increased.11 Psychiatry in Opposition Yet, among these tentative explanations of why Russian psychiatrists adopted relaxed attitudes to the treatment of war neurotics, it probably was their political views that had the most weight. Historians have already shown that, unlike their Western counterparts, the overwhelming majority of whom had private practices, most Russian physicians depended almost entirely on their main employer, the state. This dependency, as well as problems of public health of the impoverished population, the solution of which lay beyond medicine, made physicians one of the most radical groups of the intelligentsia. Having become critical of the government’s policy toward public health, many of them became critical of the regime as such. During the early twentieth-century revolutionary events, physicians publicly blamed the repressive regime for destroying the population’s health (Frieden). These tensions increased during war, which aggravated Russia’s problems and made criticisms more salient. In addition, many civilian physicians were recruited to the army and put under the command of military officials who lacked any medical training. (Russian military medical service was an oddity compared to Western armies, a relic of an ancient ‘regimental system.’

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Absent in peace, the medical service emerged in time of war and was composed of a military medical personnel, military non-medical personnel, and civilian doctors and nurses [see, e.g., Handbook 31].) The problems that doctors encountered in the army only widened the gulf between them and the non-medical authorities, and the way their army superiors treated them caused enmity against the higher ranks (Gabriel and Metz 234). Psychiatrists were, perhaps, even more radicalized than their colleagues from other medical occupations (Brown, ‘Professionalization and Radicalization’ 143–67 and ‘Psychiatrists’ 267–87). This related to the fact that psychiatry’s status was traditionally lower than that of other medical disciplines. Those in charge of the mentally ill were looked down on as madmen’s keepers, and it was not until the late nineteenth century that psychiatry changed into an academic discipline. But even then the position of psychiatrists was hardly enviable: on one hand, society expected them to take care of the mentally ill; on the other hand, it was unwilling to satisfy psychiatrists’ demands to enlarge facilities and improve conditions for both inmates and personnel. Even zemstvo and municipal sanitary bureaus were not responsive to psychiatrists’ suggestions. In the opinion of one historian, on the eve of the Great War a long-term conflict between psychiatrists, on one side, and the government and zemstvos, on the other, endangered the very existence of the occupation (Hutchinson 132–5). The war only exacerbated these problems. Psychiatric service in the army was in the hands of several organizations: the War Department, the Russian Red Cross, zemstvos, the Supreme Council’s Commission on the Invalids of War, and the Tatianin Committee, which took care of refugees. The lack of co-ordination rendered the efforts of the medical personnel inefficient, and it finally resulted in the loss of lives. Physicians blamed the government for the organizational chaos; many of them welcomed the fall of the old regime and invested their hopes in the improvement of public health under the new government. As the war went on, it became more and more unpopular. Peasants, who formed the basis of the Russian army, never volunteered to join up; forced to join, they experienced the rupture with their families and habitual way of life as a catastrophe. Contrary to the ideological declarations about the patriotism of the masses, mobilizations were accompanied by peasant riots. Even the intelligentsia was far from being as enthusiastic as was depicted in newspapers (Sanborn; Smirnov). Psychia-

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trists univocally described war conditions as hellish; one of them even recalled Pushkin: ‘And death and hell from every side’ (I smert’, i ad so vsekh storon) – only he thought that modern wars were much tougher (Liass 239). Psychiatric accounts made it clear that combat conditions could affect anybody, that the brutality of war is the main cause of psychiatric casualties, and that psychic trauma deserves understanding rather than blame. Clearly more in sympathy with their patients than with those who sent them to war, psychiatrists often portrayed sick soldiers with compassion. One of them described K., a soldier who collapsed in the battle of BrestLitovsk, when several hundred men were blown up in a fortress. In the hospital, K. constantly hallucinated: ‘Fire, fire ... My Lord, how many have perished ... and Timokha has died ...’ (Timokha was his friend). Neither medicaments nor physiotherapy over six months had any impact on the patient, who remained disoriented. He regained his self-awareness only when his wife and brother came to visit him and the latter started telling him about their village life (Khoroshko, ‘O dushevnykh rasstroistvakh’). Physicians often showed interest in soldiers’ personal stories and their feelings about war. Mikhail Kutanin composed and distributed a questionnaire about ‘personal experiences in the war,’ and Lev Rozenshtein suggested that a non-military physician should systematically inquire into soldiers’ feelings and even psychoanalyse them; he recommended women psychiatrists for this role (Kutanin 119; Rozenshtein 522). ‘Besides wounding the soldier’s body, shells distort his feelings and mutilate his soul,’ and the psychiatrist’s role is to heal the latter.12 It was not rare for psychiatrists to use their cases in order to criticize both the war and the political regime responsible for it. In one case, a peasant soldier was said to have first developed mental illness in his military service several years prior to the war. He was on duty guarding a prison when, in front of him, an inmate attempted to escape and was shot dead. Sent later to the front, the soldier apparently developed serious breathing problems. It was the reactionary nature of Russian life, the physician implied, that made innocent people mad (Vysotskii 158). In another case, a soldier went through a series of battles without showing any signs of illness. Yet in the last of these battles, which began early in the morning and was accompanied by the most violent artillery attacks against his battalion, he was affected. The soldier was neither wounded nor shell-shocked, but he started to throw himself at his com-

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rades and cry: ‘It is hell here! It is homicide! The devil is here!’ Physicians put their own thoughts in the mouths of their patients, who were ‘terrified by the idea that humanity which for millennia strove toward culture, could allow such mass self-destruction! ... Some began to think that all of humanity had gone mad’ (Gerver, Russkii vrach 14.35: 796, 818 and 14.36: 841). Soldiers’ mental illnesses mirrored the general madness of the war and of the world that rejected them after they suffered at the front. Darkshevich described a patient, ‘aged twenty-four, who, after being wounded and contused, could not think of his future without fear and depression.’ He lost sleep and self-control, ‘especially in circumstances which he considers trying, such as waiting in government offices.’ Queuing for hours in a pension office, this despondent man became irritable and behaved aggressively (Darkshevich 582–3). Between the lines of psychiatric records one can read their sentence on the war and their dissatisfaction with a government that had failed to set up an efficient medical service in the army and to help veterans in the rear. By the end of the war, these attitudes prompted psychiatrists to support first the Provisional Government and then the Bolsheviks. Physicians were attracted by the new government’s promises to set up a single agency, which had been lacking in the war, to centralize psychiatric services. Like the Soviet health care system in general, the Soviet psychiatric service was created in response to the war. In 1920, the separate psychiatric organization of the War Department was abolished, and the mentally ill soldiers under its care, now termed ‘Red Army soldiers,’ were shifted to a civil agency. By that time, a Ministry of Health Care had already been established, and psychiatric care became centralized in the ministry’s neuro-psychiatric subsection. The subsection announced support for ‘the victims of war and revolution’ to be an urgent task.13 War neurotics had finally been officially recognized, and the state formally assumed full responsibility for their treatment and support. Yet, as soon as they became a burden to the state, attitudes toward war neurotics became more severe.14 Once a highly emotive phrase, ‘victims of war and revolution’ gradually lost its meaning and became part of bureaucratic jargon. Still common in reports in the 1920s, the term disappeared in the 1930s, when to speak of ‘victims of revolution’ became ambiguous and even dangerous. Traumatic neurosis vanished from Soviet classifications for decades, to reappear only in the 1980s, in the Americanized version of ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (‘Travmaticheskii’ 652–7).

Shell Shock in the Russian Army, 1914–1918 129 NOTES This is a revised version of a paper presented in St Petersburg in April 2003, at the conference ‘Science, Technology, and Society during the First World War.’ I am indebted to the Wellcome Trust for the opportunity to work in the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine. Much of the primary source material for this article can be found in Psikhiatricheskaia gazeta for the years 1915–16. 1 This topic has recently been discussed by Jacqueline Friedlander. See ‘Approaching War Trauma.’ 2 Qtd. in Zhurnal nevropatologii i psikhiatrii imeni Korsakova 4.4 (1904): 771. 3 Psikhiatricheskaia gazeta 11 (1915): 177; Wilhelm II quoted in McKee, 152. 4 According to some sources, by April 1915, there were 5,833 cases of war casualties in 48 psychiatric hospitals (about half of all Russian psychiatric hospitals). Other sources reported that between the beginning of the war and November 1915, 12,185 soldiers and officers had been treated in 68 hospitals; the latter figure did not include cases among refugees of war, prisoners of war, and other groups (Binshtok and Kaminskii 61–2). 5 Zhurnal nevropatologii i psikhiatrii imeni Korsakova 5.6 (1905): 1214. 6 The latter article was referred to in the Western discussions of shell shock during the Great War. See Merskey, 491. 7 To be ‘contused by air’ was dishonourable for the army officers. See Darkshevich 605. 8 Psikhiatricheskaia gazeta 13 (1915): 215; 16 (1915): 278; 20 (1915): 337. 9 ‘Soveshchanie po prizreniiu dushevno-bol’nykh i nervno-bol’nykh voinov,’ Psikhiatricheskaia gazeta 13 (1915): 209–12; 217. 10 The requirements included electro- and hydrotherapy; a countryside location was desirable (Kashchenko, ‘Ob organizatsii’ 214. 11 Rossolino, qtd. in Psikhiatricheskaia gazeta 11 (1915): 178. 12 Psikhiatricheskaia gazeta 1 (1916): 87. 13 GARF, f. 482, op. 1, d. 81, l. 3–4. 14 On the treatment of war neurotics after the Revolution see Merridale 41–3.

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

Suicide and madness are closely intertwined in history. At various times the act of taking one’s own life has symbolized either the loss of selfcontrol or the expression of personal autonomy. This interpretative tension made the determination of the suicide’s state of mind critical to his treatment by the church, the state, and society at large. In tsarist Russia, as in other European countries, persons who were deemed insane or under the grip of mental anguish at the time of their suicide were treated with greater leniency by the law. Like criminals found ‘not responsible’ for their actions, insane or anguished suicides did not merit punishment because they had not acted with full awareness of themselves and their crime.1 Although suicide was removed from the Russian penal code in 1917, the self-destructive individual remained intensely studied by those working to understand and change human nature during the Soviet experiment of the 1920s.2 Psychiatrists and forensic doctors, in particular, sought to unravel the suicidal personality (lichnost’ ). In his 1927 study of some 350 suicides in Moscow, the psychopathologist Nikolai Pavlovich Brukhanskii concluded that he could not find a single example of an ‘average, sufficiently stable and healthy individual.’ ‘All suicides,’ he wrote, ‘are psychopathic personalities or are acting in a psychotic state’ (Brukhanskii, Samoubiitsy 23, 32). Similarly, Soviet forensic-medical experts claimed to have found evidence of degeneration in the brain and endocrine system of autopsied suicides, physiological changes that they believed accounted for the instability, impulsiveness, and hypersensitivity of the self-destructive individual (Kriukov; Ziskind 49). This chapter focuses on a new group of experts that emerged to study and treat the suicidal personality during the early Soviet period. It

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examines the written accounts of political workers who investigated suicides as part of their larger responsibility to care for the so-called ‘political-moral condition’ (politiko-moral’noe sostoianie) of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (RKKA). I contend that their accounts expressed a culturally and historically specific ‘folk psychology,’ which can be defined as a system of shared beliefs, often commonsensical, about human nature and situated behaviour.3 This ‘folk psychology’ incorporated prevailing medical and psychiatric theories of the mind, but it expressed the notion of the unbalanced individual in fundamentally sociopolitical terms. Political workers in the Red Army regarded suicide as a bourgeois ‘illness’ that threatened the ideal of a collectivist society. In the course of their investigations, they constructed a flexible explanatory framework that was specific to the Soviet experience of the 1920s and reflected their larger role as caretakers of ideological well-being. Red Army investigators saw suicides as the result of disharmony between external reality and individual self-identity, which itself was the product of such factors as biology, class, and politics. I would argue that their approach to suicide partially de-medicalized the act. Ultimately, the investigators were concerned with the individual as a sociopolitical being and thus viewed ‘health’ in terms of the Soviet regime’s goal of creating citizens who were conscious of their responsibilities to society. Sanitarians of the Soviet ‘Soul’ The study of suicide in the Red Army cannot be understood outside the framework of the new regime’s transformational agenda, which relied heavily on surveillance in order to study and shape the inner beliefs of the people.4 Beginning in the early 1920s, the Soviet military undertook the systematic investigation of all acts of suicide among Red Army men and commanders. The effort was part of the broader ‘struggle for a new everyday life’ (bor’ba za novyi byt) and was spearheaded by the Political Administration (PUR), the military wing of the Bolshevik Party. It resulted in the production of voluminous materials, including statistical surveys, informational summaries, and political reports (svodki).5 The matter of the Red Army’s ‘health’ was especially significant to the young Soviet regime, given the army’s role in defending the country against external aggression and its importance to the revolutionary project as one of the primary sites in the effort to build socialism on the micro-level (von Hagen 6). Both sign and source of ‘illness’ within the

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collective, suicides suggested the presence of dangerous environments, beliefs, and practices, or even people among the ranks. They were therefore to be studied by the military’s political workers, who routinely reported on the attitudes and actions of the men in their unit, regiment, division, or party cell. Neither medical nor psychiatric personnel, political workers were instead experts on the care of the individual’s political self. They were responsible for promoting political consciousness and preventing ideological ‘degeneration,’ yet another example of the transference of medical concepts into the realm of politics (Miller).6 Aiming to achieve total transparency, officials exhorted the political workers to give proper attention to each and every case of suicide. For example, a 1924 Political Administration survey of Red Army suicides concluded, ‘The simple “registration” of suicides in reports from the localities is meaningless [bessmyslenna]. Every case must be illuminated as fully as possible. We must make it a rule to collect materials in all cases of suicide without exception.’7 In fulfilling these guidelines, political workers reconstructed the suicide on the basis of autopsy reports, medical records, police accounts, and the testimonies of others, all of which they interpreted through the lens of ideological health. Their reports were therefore never simply a compendium of facts, but also symbolic of the concern for the collective and its members. The very compilation of these accounts expressed the recognition of the need to study the individual and to treat suicide as a serious social and political problem. I maintain that the informational reports tell us as much about the investigators as they do about the suicide. Specifically, the narratives offer a window into their authors’ understandings of human psychology and situated behaviour. They express, for example, ideas about the general circumstances surrounding suicide, explanations of the suicidal state of mind, and assumptions about the types of people who take their own lives. They also involve notions of causation, motivation, and desire, as well as expectations about how normal or abnormal people act within certain contexts. Thus, narratives of suicide in the Red Army reflect the ideals and values championed by representatives of the new regime as well as the particularities of the military, including its mostly male composition and its special concern for discipline and morale. Situating Soviet Suicide Together, the Red Army narratives form what Jerome Bruner calls a ‘possible world’ where unexpected and deviant actions are made com-

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prehensible (Bruner 43–50). Suicides in the Soviet military demanded explanation because they transgressed boundaries of ethical and political conduct, indicated abnormal states of mind, and defied assumptions about the individual self as continually evolving toward a certain endpoint. To be sure, such expectations reflected the universal belief that the instinct for life is a natural, and therefore normal, condition of human existence. However, they also reflected assumptions about the kind of person that the revolutionary regime was bringing into existence. Specifically, the act of suicide violated visions of the ideal Soviet male as strong-willed, optimistic, and politically conscious. Through their narratives, the Red Army’s investigators helped to build a conceptual bridge, an imagined world between these idealized traits and the reality of suicide. The ‘possible world’ of Soviet suicide was created within the larger narrative of the transition to communism. Epitomized by the evolutionary approach of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the concept of the ‘transition period’ (perekhodnyi period) was a useful device for explaining the continued presence of suicide and other social pathologies as ‘vestiges’ of the old bourgeois order that had yet to be expunged from everyday life.8 It also helped to explain the presence of suicides by suggesting imbalance and instability in the ‘social organism,’ a condition similar to the disequilibrium experienced by the human body during such developmental phases as puberty and adolescence. Socially speaking, the deep contradictions of the New Economic Policy, which allowed for the partial restoration of the market, created a murky world without clear moral boundaries or firm ethical guidelines. Revolutionary theorists and Bolshevik ethicists feared that under such circumstances some people, notably the young and the politically immature, would lose their way and fall into despair and immorality. Only when the new, socialist forms of everyday life were made a reality would the dangers of suicide and other bourgeois ‘illnesses’ disappear. In the meantime, the regime anxiously called for vigilance, lest the remnants of the old world pollute the new one.9 Within this narrative framework, understandings of Soviet suicide relied on notions of the suicidal personality as a manifestation of the imbalance in society. Red Army investigators largely rejected the notion of an ‘inborn suicide,’ a deeply deterministic theory that posited a hereditary predisposition for self-destruction that was passed on from one generation to the next.10 This is not to imply that biological and hereditary factors were deemed unimportant; rather, they were inter-

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preted within a framework that suggested the suicide was made over time, not predetermined from birth. Such an understanding fitted well with the optimism of the revolutionary moment and left open the possibility that the suicide might be unmade if he/she was treated in a timely manner and placed in a healthier environment. Reports on suicide suggested a view of the personality as a dynamic and highly plastic entity whose features were shaped by a constant interaction between social experiences and biological features.11 Although political workers in the Red Army never invoked the formal term, their understanding of suicide resembled the doctrine of ‘socio-biology,’ a popular scientific approach of the period that tried to take into account the biological components of ‘social’ behaviour and customs. For example, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko, the head of the People’s Commissariat of Public Health, argued that the personality of the suicide (samoubiitsa) was the end product of the continuous ‘interaction and counteraction’ between external surroundings and the internal self (Semashko 5–6). While the relative effects of either nature or nurture could vary from person to person, conceptually it was impossible to fully separate one factor from the other. Notions of time and development therefore figure prominently in the reports on Red Army suicides. Investigators suggested that individual identity was composed of a past, present, and future self. They routinely included information about the suicide’s past (his medical history, class background, education, and previous work experience); present (his occupation and family life, living conditions, state of health at the time of the suicide); and future (his career outlook or possible social roles as husband, father, lover, Party member, and so on). All three of these elements, in combination, played a role in producing the suicide. A person, for example, might be predisposed to certain states of mind because of his biological organization or social origins, which in turn might make him extremely vulnerable to the destabilizing effects of certain conditions in the present. Moreover, these circumstances usually had fatal consequences precisely because they seemed to prevent the suicide from realizing his potential self in the future. Seeing no way out of the present state of affairs, the soldier put an end to his life. In the words of the military procurator, the suicide believed that he had reached a ‘dead end’ from which there was no escaping.12 Stunted self-realization figured prominently in suicides listed in the reports under the category ‘without prospects’ (besperspektivnost’). Suicides so categorized resulted when the individual became convinced that

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circumstances prevented him from realizing his future self. On a personal level this future self could involve becoming a father or husband; professionally it might centre on educational or career goals. For example, a Party member who tried to kill himself because of his girlfriend’s betrayal later told investigators that he attempted suicide because of the ‘inability to organize [his] life for constant advancement both in the realm of public life [obshchestvennaia zhizn’ ] and in the realm of intimate, personal life’ (Tsel’min 21). Still other suicides were linked to feelings of worthlessness, frustration, and hopelessness caused by the inability to achieve professional goals. These included the Party cell secretary Frank, who shot himself when he failed to pass the entrance examination for an advanced training school; the cadet Georgii Smolin, who killed himself following a rebuke from his Party cell; and the teacher Gil’ferding of the Military-Technical Academy, who hanged himself ‘after his lack of ability as an instructor was exposed at an educational conference.’13 Such suicides fed broader anxieties about political degeneration. Political officers frequently characterized suicides as ‘weak-willed,’ ‘unstable,’ or excessively ‘nervous’ people who, unlike the ideal Soviet male, could not cope with their situation. Young soldiers and commanders, in particular, were said to be highly impressionable, and therefore less stable, their minds and bodies undergoing a volatile process of formation. While this high plasticity represented an enormous opportunity for shaping the personality through education and training, it also entailed great danger, since the young person was at the same time extremely vulnerable to ‘unhealthy’ or destabilizing forces coming from both within and without the body. According to one Red Army report of 1925, the largest percentage of suicides among the junior command staff fell ‘on the element lacking firm ideological principles, the least developed mentally in general, lacking firmly formed views about life, in terms of age the youngest, the most impressionable, and the most distracted.’14 Not surprisingly, young people were considered the segment of the military population most susceptible to the corruptive effects of decadent literature, petit-bourgeois lifestyles, and difficult material conditions, all factors that could not only undermine a person’s commitment to the revolution but also contribute to a depressed and suicidal state of mind. Red Army investigators generalized that suicidal tendencies arose primarily in those people who lacked the psychological and emotional tools needed to understand and manage the vicissitudes of everyday life. Investigators emphasized throughout the 1920s that the everyday life of

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Red Army men and commanders was highly stressful because of abominably poor housing conditions, low levels of material or financial support, prolonged separation from loved ones, isolation in remote parts of the country, inconsistent applications of disciplinary measures, and a general state of ‘overloading’ (peregruzka) which led to physical and mental exhaustion, especially among the officer corps and political workers.15 Under the cumulative effect of such pressures, the immature or ‘worn out’ (izmuchennyi) individual became extremely sensitive to external stimuli, thereby making otherwise normal difficulties appear insurmountable. The ‘possible world’ constructed through the Red Army narratives suggested that people killed themselves because of a lack of harmony between their inner self and their external circumstances. By implication, human happiness rested on the achievement of a genuine correspondence of the two, or at least on the potential for such correspondence. In this respect, the notion of the personality as a dynamic entity provided an important framework for dealing with acts of suicide in the military. It was a deeply sociopolitical understanding that allowed for the possibility of reducing suicides at two mutually reinforcing levels: through the restructuring of everyday life and through the inculcation of certain norms, values, and beliefs in the individual.16 ‘Nervous’ Suicides Red Army investigators did not understand suicide to be the product of a distinct mental illness. Nor did they believe that all suicides were insane. They did, however, assume that the individual who killed himself was out of sorts and not ‘himself.’ Investigators routinely made observations about the suicide’s character based upon the testimony of other soldiers, noting in particular the indications of instability before the suicide. Bouts of crying, visible nervousness, and agitation were all thought to signal a loss of mental and emotional equilibrium, which would deprive the individual of his ability to react properly to changes in his life. The military reports attributed this loss of equilibrium to a combination of organic and exogenous factors. Representative in this respect were the discussions about suicides committed by former members of the political underground or veterans of the imperialist and civil wars. During the early part of the 1920s, in particular, political workers and other activists routinely made a connection between the onset of selfdestructive tendencies and previous participation in the revolutionary

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struggle. For example, the authors of a 1926 report for the Red Army’s Main Administration emphasized this causal pattern to explain the different rates of suicide in the Imperial and Soviet militaries. They argued that the relatively higher levels of suicide under the Soviet regime were attributable to widespread exhaustion (iznoshennost’) among soldiers and officers resulting from the dual experiences of prolonged warfare and famine.17 Another survey of suicide listed the ‘severe shattering [izdergannost’] and over-exhaustion [pereutomlennost’] of the old fighters of the Red Army’ as being among the ‘illnesses of everyday life’ that were indicated by suicide.18 The stress produced by prolonged periods of selfsacrifice, exposure to danger, and material deprivations eventually took its toll on the individual, who was sapped of the strength needed to maintain a coherent sense of self.19 Investigators also linked nervousness and exhaustion to the rhythms of military life and to the deep financial challenges facing the Red Army under the New Economic Policy. Numerous studies of the command and political staff noted with alarm the widespread problem of ‘overexhaustion’ (pereutomlennost’) among these most responsible workers. On one level, the Red Army investigators were concerned about the implications for the military’s fighting capabilities, since the erosion of energy led to passivity and a slackening of effort. Even more troubling, one 1923 report noted that the continuation of ‘nervous overstraining’ sometimes led to full-blown cases of mental illness, ‘insanity’ (umopomeshatel’stvo), and suicide.20 A special commission of the Political Administration expressed these same concerns during its investigation of the 36th Zabaikal’skii Division. Its summary of the division’s politicalmoral condition emphasized ‘the significant spread of nervous and mental illnesses, as well as suicides among the political staff,’ suggesting that the political workers required summer rest, treatment at sanatoriums, and a general improvement of their living and working conditions.21 An essential element of the emergent folk psychology, the concept of nervousness (nervnost’) was used by Red Army officials in reference to both long- and short-term states of being. The individual might be characterized as possessing an innately nervous disposition, or he might be described as having more recently developed a nervous condition under a specific set of circumstances. Either way, nervous persons displayed a similar set of representative behaviours communicating a lack of balance. In terms of their outward demeanour, nervous suicides were prone to irritability, agitation, preoccupation, bouts of sobbing, excitability, and explosive outbursts of anger. Nervousness was therefore

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emotional and mental disorder written on the body. As described in one report, the suicide ‘literally appeared to be a bundle of nerves [komok nervov].’22 The power of ‘nervousness’ as an explanatory diagnosis reflected its status as a wastebasket diagnosis open to myriad applications and appropriations. In fact, the authors of several Red Army surveys on suicide complained that the concept was gradually losing any real meaning because of overuse and imprecision.23 One particularly detailed discussion of causation noted that nervous (and thus psychological) instability played a role in almost all cases of suicide. The challenge for investigators, it concluded, was to uncover the actual part played by the nerves in bringing about the suicide. According to the report’s authors, ‘If we were to attribute to the category “on the grounds of nervous illness” all cases of suicide in which the element of nervous instability is present, then we would not make any progress toward resolving the question of the roots that nourish suicides in the Army and could not illuminate those paths to be followed in the fight against suicides.’24 Nevertheless, within the ‘possible world’ of Soviet suicide the concept of nervousness made cases of self-destruction more ‘manageable’ by localizing instability within the body and allowing for the possibility of various treatments. It made internal states legible or visible to the knowledgeable outside observer, who might then take the appropriate measures to help the individual out of his crisis, and it allowed for the possibility of restoring a person to equilibrium. In the case of nervousness, the inner vitality and stability of the individual could be physically ‘repaired’ through an extended period of rest, the regular practice of physical culture, or the introduction of a more rational schedule of daily activities. For those soldiers and officers most severely affected, the identification of their nervous condition might even lead to their early discharge from the Red Army, as the military strove to eliminate the potential for suicide and other ‘illnesses’ from its ranks.25 Suicide and Class The suicidal personality was also interpreted through the framework of class. Being good Marxists, Red Army investigators subscribed to the notion that individual identity was strongly determined by one’s social position, with instinct and consciousness rooted in the class origins of the person. Thus, the Political Administration could routinely speak of peasant ‘moods’ among Red Army men who hailed from the country-

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side. Similarly, it could emphasize the dangers posed by petit-bourgeois women – the daughters of priests, tsarist officials, and other ‘former’ people – who would metaphorically ‘infect’ their male lover or spouse with an alien worldview. This ideological corruption reportedly led to poor work habits, an obsession with creature comforts and personal life, and even bouts of suicide among the most tormented commanders and political officers. Such thinking helped to explain the occurrence of suicides among Bolshevik Party members, who were thought to be the most politically dependable members of the military. Investigators interpreted these suicides to be the product of ideological ‘degeneration,’ which indicated a fall from consciousness and from belief in the revolution. Reports on party suicides inside the Red Army spoke of individuals having been corrupted by unhealthy influences that bred a pathological focus on one’s personal life and personal dilemmas. Following the dramatic suicide of the poet Sergei Esenin in December 1925, for example, Red Army investigators routinely linked acts of suicide among Party members to the effects of ‘Eseninism’ (eseninshchina), a moral-psychological condition that suggested a host of non-proletarian vices, including alienation, decadence, and a general inclination toward self-destruction.26 On a broader level, social class factored in notions of mental and emotional stability, which was thought to be highly contingent upon a congruence between a person’s internal class essence and his/her surroundings. According to the Freudian psychoneurologist Aron Borisovich Zalkind, ‘[o]ne and the same social milieu acts [deistvovat’] in various ways depending on the different predisposing social class tendency of the organism: in one instance it can cause nervous illness while in another it can strengthen the nervous system’ (Zalkind 26–7). In effect, the significance of the Bolshevik Revolution for mental health depended on a person’s socioeconomic background. While the working class could expect greater health under Soviet power, the country’s former elites were primed for an increase in nervous and mental disorders. They lived in a kind of limbo, the world to which they belonged no longer existing and the one rising in its stead containing no secure place for them within it. In other words, so-called ‘former people’ could not achieve integration into the Soviet social order. Using the notion of the class self, Red Army investigators interpreted certain suicides to be the product of a profound internal conflict that arose from the individual’s inability to construct a new self-identity within the changed landscape of the 1920s. These people became lost

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souls whose expectations about themselves and their future no longer seemed plausible in the post-revolutionary context. Tellingly, the Red Army reports sometimes placed this type of suicide within the broad category ‘disenchantment with life,’ for this classification implied the feelings of resignation, depression, or alienation that investigators assumed to accompany the maladjusted class psyche. This is how a special commission studying suicides in the Western Military District understood the suicide of a twenty-two-year-old cadet of the Third Infantry Reserve School, who was the son of a wealthy businessman. In explaining the suicide’s death, the commission emphasized his social and psychological maladjustment. First, he reportedly demonstrated a lack of commitment to the new regime by resigning from the Komsomol organization over a disagreement about the New Economic Policy. Second, his so-called loose lifestyle (razgul’naia zhizn’) and general disinterest in cultural-enlightenment work were interpreted as a preoccupation with his own life at the expense of his obligations to the larger collective. Finally, the special commission identified several elements in the cadet’s suicide note that conveyed feelings of alienation and uselessness, including the phrase, ‘All my ideals have long ago been crushed and with a devastated soul, with nothing to believe in, it is impossible to live.’ The commission’s report concluded that the suicide was ‘characteristic of people who have left one class but have not yet merged with another.’27 The suicide of the teacher Antonov also revolved around the question of the alienated self-identity. A veteran of Kolchak’s White Army, Antonov wrote to his mother that he had grown pessimistic and disenchanted with life because of his poor material condition. In one of his poems Antonov declared, ‘If I cannot succeed in life, then I will succeed in death.’ Summarizing their reading of Antonov’s suicide, the political workers who examined his death concluded: ‘An obviously faint-hearted element from a petit-bourgeois milieu, who had dreamed in his childhood of perhaps working in a state-bureaucratic field. But then, having fallen into a working-class and peasant milieu and, having seen himself maladjusted to the difficulties of proletarian struggle, he felt himself a small, useless [nikchemnyi] person.’28 The ‘possible world’ created within the Red Army narratives therefore helped to explain the continued presence of suicides despite optimism that they would disappear once the collective integration of socialism was achieved. In many respects, the feelings expressed by Antonov and the cadet were universal signs of internal crisis and anomie. Through the

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interpretative framework of class, however, investigators read them as indicators of a particularly Soviet form of suicide. In fact, the ‘possible world’ of the Red Army narratives implied that some suicides could be expected during the transition period as human elements conditioned to life in the old social order succumbed to the stresses and strains of the country’s revolutionary transformation.29 This understanding also explained a related group of suicides – those among class aliens who sought to ‘mask’ their true inner selves from others. The double life led by these people violated assumptions about the need for a genuine correspondence between one’s internal self and the larger social milieu. In addition to the stress created by the everpresent fear of being unmasked, keeping up a social façade negated the possibility of a true sense of belonging in Soviet society. Over time these circumstances took a heavy toll on the individual both mentally and physically. In the most extreme cases it could even lead to suicide. For example, Sizikov, a non-Party Red Army man, hid his social origins from others (he was the son of a large landowner). The brief summary of his death stated, ‘Fearing responsibility for his deception, having been unmasked – he shot himself.’30 Here we see the way in which different elements of the ‘possible world’ could overlap and reinforce each other. Given the Soviet regime’s classbased system of rewards and punishments, exposure as an ‘alien element’ in the Red Army usually meant a sudden and premature end to a one’s vision of self-realization. The unmasked individual lost a potential life in the Bolshevik Party or the Red Army, which led some to take their own lives. For example, the Section Commander Riabov of the Siberian Military District got drunk and shot himself after he had been expelled from the Party and discharged from the Red Army upon his unmasking as being of kulak origins.31 Similar stories of revelation and despair were recorded in the 1930 report on the political-moral condition of the military. The Red Army man Shkilondze shot himself following his removal from the army for being the son of a noble landowner; the cadet Gorodetskii did the same after he was transferred out of flight school as an ‘alien element’; and the Section Commander Paprits reportedly attempted suicide because of his dismissal from the Red Army as a disenfranchised person (lishenets).32 According to this same report, the number of these suicides was increasing along with the implementation of Party purges and the general heightening of class warfare that accompanied the collectivization and industrialization drives of the late 1920s. Indeed, the logic of the

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transition period suggested that one could expect more unbalanced individuals as the level of instability rose within the body politic. In 1930 the Main Administration and Political Administration seemingly confirmed such expectations, creating an entirely new statistical category to encompass acts of suicide motivated by exposure of one’s true social background – ‘discharge from the army and hiding alien origins.’ This group of suicides was said to be a ‘reflection of the great sense of urgency [trebovatel’nost’ ] and watchfulness that has accompanied the process of intensifying the class struggle in the country.’33 In and of itself, the category ‘discharge from the army and hiding alien origins’ is highly suggestive of the link between the identification of one’s alien persona and the possible end to one’s career in the Red Army or the Bolshevik Party. The revelation of the ‘true’ self became the event that precluded the individual from becoming the person he envisaged himself to be.34 The Signs of Soviet Suicide The ‘possible world’ of Soviet suicide also included a set of signs associated with the suicidal state of mind. These included words, actions, and gestures that observers and suicides alike thought to be revealing of certain intentions and outlooks. In particular, the Red Army investigators scoured the suicide’s record for outward indications of depression, alienation, ideological confusion, or a general loss of interest in life and work. For example, they looked for signs that, in retrospect, indicated a sense of finality or a preoccupation with death on the part of the suicide. Once such indicators were identified, it was then possible to uncover the specific incidents that set off the suicidal drama. These triggering events might be the receipt of a letter with bad tidings from home, a woman’s refusal of marriage, the failure to receive a promotion, or the discovery of an incurable illness. Political workers frequently highlighted noteworthy changes in the individual’s behaviour just prior to his death. A sudden alteration in habits or demeanour was interpreted as an outward manifestation of an internal crisis produced by an event that held great significance for the suicide. In terms of behaviour, the repertoire of observable signs indicating a crisis included withdrawal into one’s self, frequent outbursts of anger, mood swings, weepiness, bouts of heavy drinking, a loss of interest in work, or even a total abandonment of concern for one’s personal appearance. Each of these connoted a general departure from normal codes of conduct, but they assumed special significance if they violated

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others’ perceptions of the given individual’s normal character. In other words, they represented a break in expected action based on earlier observations of the person over time, and therefore required a causal explanation. Here the suicide of Iablokov is particularly instructive. Iablokov was an assistant platoon commander in the 25th Division who had established rather good political credentials through his lengthy service in the Red Army. Although he reportedly had difficulty adjusting to the stricter discipline of the peacetime military, he managed to ‘correct himself’ and petitioned for entrance into the Bolshevik Party. The battalion party cell approved his application, but the regimental bureau later denied it after looking deeper into Iablokov’s life. According to the official account of Iablokov’s suicide, ‘the refusal of entrance into the Party obviously had a negative effect on him. He changed [peremenilsia], began to carouse, got involved with petit-bourgeois girls and, when they failed to reciprocate, he went on a drinking spree that intensified to the point of selling all his belongings.’ By focusing on the sudden transformation in Iablokov’s behaviour, and its apparent coincidence with the rejection of his admission into the Party, the District Political Administration arrived at a conclusion regarding the cause of Iablokov’s suicide. His action was assigned to the group of suicides motivated by ‘dissatisfaction with service.’35 Suicidal states of mind could also be marked by other manifestations of personality, including the kinds of literature that a person enjoyed. For example, the fellow sailors of one suicide interpreted his preoccupation with writings on death and suicide to be a sign of his depressed mental state and self-destructive inclinations.36 More broadly, Red Army investigators looked for a fascination with literature marked as culturally or politically threatening. Stories dealing with topics such as hooliganism, suicide, sexual debauchery among young people, and other examples of so-called decadence (upadochnichestvo) were thought to have a negative effect on the impressionable reader. Once under the influence of this material, the individual was destabilized by its conflicting depictions of Soviet reality, sometimes to the point of contemplating an early end to his life. Primary among dangerous literature was the poetry of Sergei Esenin, who assumed cult-like status among Soviet youth following his suicide in late 1925. As a consequence, the practice of reading poetry by Esenin, quoting from his work, or even mimicking his writing style in diaries and letters transmitted ideas about a number of mental or emotional states, among them pessimism, apathy, and alienation. Leukhin, a suicide in

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the Black Sea Fleet in February 1927, reportedly concluded his suicide notes with a ‘Eseninist phrase,’ and he was described in the Political Administration report as having been ‘antisocial’ (neobshchitelen) and highly indifferent. The official diagnosis of the suicide suggested that Leukhin’s interest in Esenin only reinforced this common perception of his nature and mental state. ‘We consider,’ stated the summary, ‘the cause of the suicide to be Leukhin’s apathetic mood under the influence of the Eseninist literature in which he became engrossed.’37 The signs of Soviet suicide were not unidirectional in their meaning and usage, however. Because suicides were enmeshed within the same symbolic system as their observers, they too had to draw upon the ‘possible world’ of Soviet suicide to understand their personal condition and to convey this understanding to others. Leukhin and others selected from a common set of coded objects, words, gestures, or even situations, which communicated a variety of ideas, feelings, conditions, or psychological states. For example, the purchase and reading of Eseninist literature resonated among friends and fellow soldiers precisely because of the public discussion of ‘Eseninism’ and its implications for the country’s youth. Similarly, the adoption of certain phrases and explanations in Soviet suicide notes suggests that a common interpretative framework shaped both the readings of the Red Army investigators and the very object of their inquiries.38 In narrating a ‘possible world’ of suicide, the authors of the Red Army reports were also shaping the concrete and subjective world of everyday life in the military. Conclusions Contributors to this volume have emphasized the importance of both narrative and politics to the construction of madness and to the selfidentity of those designated to treat and cure it (Brintlinger, Miller, Iangoulova, Healey). The Red Army reports surveyed in this chapter further reveal the mutability of such concepts as sickness and health, the overlapping of medical and political discourses, and the mutual constitution of investigators and their objects of study. Within the context of the Bolsheviks’ efforts to reshape human nature during the 1920s, suicides were partially de-medicalized and became a specific type of indicator in the hands of a new group of experts. To the historian, the examination of the political workers’ narratives reveals a folk psychology encompassing an understanding of ‘health’ that extended beyond a purely physical definition to include other

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constituent parts of human subjectivity, including one’s class origins, social roles, and political commitments. Suicides were not just mentally and emotionally unbalanced individuals, but also maladjusted persons, whose disintegration threatened the collective. Indeed, it is this political facet of self-destruction that prompted and rationalized the Red Army investigations of suicide during the 1920s. Within the ‘possible world’ constructed through the narratives, suicide was marked as a form of pathological individualism that merited study, definition, and treatment as part of a larger concern for the comprehensive care of the military population. This way of understanding the suicidal personality fed into a distinct system of medico-political therapeutics that preserved individuality within the collective. It made suicide and its prevention largely an issue of public health, social work, and political enlightenment. Ideally, those servicemen recognized as being unstable would enter into the care of experts responsible for physical and ideological well-being. Medical doctors and psychiatrists in the Red Army’s Military-Sanitary Administration, for example, would examine the ‘nervous’ individual, diagnose his mental condition, and prescribe a therapeutic regimen to ‘repair’ his physical and psychological state. At the same time political workers would take care of the soldier’s ‘unhealthy’ political self by treating him through a combination of education, public service, and cultural programs. The goal of such efforts was to restore the individual to ‘health’ in order to preserve his role as a responsible citizen who was actively involved in the Soviet social order. In the final analysis, the ‘possible world’ of Soviet suicide placed responsibility for health on the shoulders of both the individual and the surrounding collective. Given the fact that the suicidal personality was seen partly as the product of the external environment, military officials routinely made recommendations regarding living conditions, relationships between servicemen, and the accessibility of different forms of material and spiritual support for the individual. At the same time, they defined individual consciousness in terms of a self-reflexivity that recognized the larger social significance of one’s personal thoughts and actions. Their investigations into suicide promoted mutual surveillance as an essential part of civic responsibility, both to oneself and to the community. Ideally, the troubled individual would seek help and reveal himself to others before he did so through suicide, while those around him would watch out for the ‘signs’ of suicidal intent in order to forestall the complete breakdown of the individual.39 In this respect, the Red

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Army narratives are further evidence of the individual’s centrality to the Bolshevik project: the condition of the group was only discernible through its particular members, whose thoughts, feelings, and human interactions had to be constantly observed through the lens of the new socialist folk psychology. Suicide, the product of highly personalized perceptions of reality, would disappear from Soviet reality only after the realm of individual subjectivity was opened up and made everybody’s business.40

NOTES Research for this essay was made possible by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR), and the Allegheny College Faculty Support Committee. I thank Angela Brintlinger, Fred Corney, Barbara Riess, and the anonymous reader for their valuable insights and suggestions.

1 On notions of ‘responsibility’ before and after 1917 see the pieces by Lia Iangoulova and Dan Healey in this volume. The legal status of suicides in Imperial Russia is discussed in Paperno, Suicide, esp. 49–66; and Morrissey, ‘Patriarchy.’ 2 The 1922 and 1926 Soviet law codes did, however, make the instigation of suicides a crime. 3 I am adapting the term and concept from Bruner, chapter 2. 4 On the distinctive as well as general features of the Soviet approach to the population see Holquist. 5 The study of suicides in the Red Army was a collaborative project. The Political Administration worked with a variety of organs, including the Military-Sanitary Administration (VSUpr), the Special Department of the GPU (OOGPU), the Military Procurator of the Supreme Court, and the Main Administration of the Red Army (GURKKA). 6 On the overlapping of political and medical discourse in Imperial Russia, see also Martin Miller’s contribution to this volume. The Bolsheviks’ understanding of degeneration is explored in Halfin 99–108. 7 ‘Obzor “Samoubiistva v krasnoi armii i flote (avgust-dekabr’ 1923 g.),”’ Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (RGVA) f. 9, op. 28, d. 333, l. 49ob. 8 One Red Army study, for example, argued that suicides must be regarded as the ‘after-effects [otgoloski] of the former illnesses of everyday life.’ ‘Obzor

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11 12 13

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“Samoubiistva v Krasnoi armii i flote za ianvar’-aprel’ 1924 goda,”’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 738, l. 54. The discourse of the transition period is explored in Naiman passim; and Gorsuch, 18–27. On the rejection of biological determinism see, for example, the circular of 4? December 1924 from Kuz’min, Military Procurator of the Supreme Court SSSR, RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 738, l. 36ob; and ‘Samoubiistva v chastiakh M.V.O. (Obzor za 1923 i 1924 g.g. po dannym Prokuratory MVO),’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 739, l. 46ob. Bauer has emphasized the importance of human plasticity for early Soviet psychological theories of behaviour. See esp. 79–88. ‘Samoubiistva v chastiakh M.V.O.,’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 739, l. 51. ‘Doklad. O samoubiistvakh sredi chlenov RKP(b) v partorganizatsii krasnoi armii i flota. (Po skheme Orgotdela TsKKRKP(b) i dannym Partkomissii.),’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 736, ll. 1–1ob; and ‘Statisticheskii ezhegodnik za 1928/29 god. Politiko-moral’noe sostoianie RKK,’ RGVA f. 54, op. 4, d. 64, l. 48. The latter report claimed that these suicides were born of the individual’s lack of understanding of his rights as a military man, since all members of the Red Army had ‘firm prospects.’ Report of Assistant Military Procurator Dobronravov to the Military Procurator of the Western Military District (14 January 1925), RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 781, ll. 71–2. On suicide and the overloading of individuals see the Report of 23? April 1927 from Chernevskii, head of PUR’s Infstatotdel, RGVA f. 9, op. 26, d. 429, l. 1ob; and ‘Protokol No. 3: Zasedaniia tsentral’nogo politsoveshchaniia 24 marta 1926 g.,’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 1175, l. 50. In addition to political education, sanitary-enlightenment work was seen as an important means of fighting against suicides by getting Red Army men to become more conscious of their responsibility to care for their mental and physical health. ‘Predlozheniia po dokladu o samoubiistvakh v Krasnoi armii i flote,’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 739, l. 32. ‘Samoubiistva v RKKA za 1924/25 god,’ RGVA f. 54, op. 6, d. 462, l. 9ob; and ‘Kratkii obzor o samoubiistvakh v Krasnoi armii i vo flote za 1924–25 gody,’ Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’noi i politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI) f. 17, op. 85, d. 126, l. 101. ‘Obzor “Samoubiistva v krasnoi armii i flote za ianvar’-aprel’ 1924 goda,”’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 738, l. 53. For an example of the linkage between these elements see Sol’ts. ‘Obzor material’no-bytovogo i politiko-moral’nogo sostoianiia Krasnoi armii na I–VIII 1923 goda,’ RGVA f. 9, op. 26, d. 111, l. 49.

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21 Report of the PUR Inspection Commission 7–11 March 1924, RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 468, l. 143. 22 ‘Obzor-direktiva. O samoubiistvakh v chastiakh Turkfront za vremia avgustdekabr’ 1924 g.,’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 781, l. 83ob. 23 One survey included a list of the ‘unconvincing conclusions’ reached by military procurators during their investigations into suicide. The reports, for example, cited the following as causes of suicides: ‘psychical disorder’; ‘mental abnormality’; ‘psychosis’; ‘psychopathic condition’; ‘hysteria’; ‘melancholy’; ‘nervous depression’; ‘morbid mental condition’; ‘lack of balance’; ‘neurasthenia’; ‘psychopathic condition’; ‘nervous instability’; and ‘insufficient mental development.’ These diagnoses were contrasted in the survey with those cases where the presence of a more precise illness was indicated: ‘illness of the cerebrum’; ‘epilepsy’; ‘degeneration’ (degeneratsiia); ‘persecution complex of mental illness’; and ‘improper joining of the skull.’ ‘Statisticheskii ezhegodnik za 1928/29 god,’ RGVA f. 54, op. 4, d. 64, l. 53. 24 ‘Samoubiistva v RKKA za 1926/27 god,’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 73, l. 13. Despite these concerns, the authors of the report concluded that any study of causation must take into account the mutual relationship between the nervous system and external factors or motivations. 25 ‘Samoubiistva v Krasnoi armii i flote. Za ianvar’-mart 1925g.,’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 739, l. 75; and ‘Kratkii obzor o samoubiistvakh v Krasnoi armii i vo flote,’ RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 126, l. 101ob. For examples of the Red Army’s campaign to ‘unburden’ the officer corps and political workers see ‘Peregruzka aktiva i nashi zadachi,’ Krasnaia zvezda, no. 40 (18 February 1925), 3; and ‘Nevrasteniki ne nuzhny,’ Krasnaia zvezda, no. 77 (4 April 1925), 4. 26 On ‘Eseninism’ see Lunarcharskii and Knorin; and Bobryshev 98. The cultural and political dimensions of Eseninism are explored in Carleton 107–12. 27 ‘Samoubiistva v voiskakh zapadnogo voennogo okruga,’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 781, l. 67. 28 ‘Obzor samoubiistv po ukrainskomu voennomu okrugu,’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 738, l. 42ob. 29 On the increased possibility for suicides amid the uncertainties of the transition period see Liadov 18. 30 ‘Statisticheskii ezhegodnik. Politiko-moral’noe sostoianie RKKA. (Sostoianie distsipliny, samoubiistva, chrezvychainye proisshestviia). 1929/30 god,’ RGVA f. 54, op. 4, d. 69, l. 33. 31 Ibid., l. 33. 32 ‘Statisticheskii ezhegodnik za 1928/29 god,’ RGVA f. 54, op. 4, d. 64, ll. 49ob–50.

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33 Ibid., ll. 44ob, 49–49ob. This category was included in the following year’s report as well. See ‘Statisticheskii ezhegodnik,’ RGVA f. 54, op. 4, d. 69, ll. 32ob–33. 34 For this reason the authors of the 1930 report expressed deep concern over the careless and arbitrary unmasking of individuals. ‘Statisticheskii ezhegodnik za 1928/29 god,’ RGVA f. 54, op. 4, d. 64, l. 49ob. 35 ‘Obzor samoubiistv po ukrainskomu voennomu okrugu,’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 738, ll. 42–42ob. 36 ‘Svodka politicheskogo upravleniia Raboche-Krest’ianskoi Krasnoi armii. No. 367,’ RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 127, l. 22ob. 37 ‘Svodka politicheskogo upravleniia Raboche-Krest’ianskoi armii i flota. No. 356,’ RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 127, ll. 69–69ob. 38 Paperno develops the argument for a hermeneutic circle around suicide in Suicide. 39 I discuss the importance of mutual surveillance in Pinnow, ‘Violence.’ 40 On the desired sharing of experiences with officers see ‘Samoubiistva v chastiakh M.V.O.,’ RGVA f. 9, op. 28, d. 739, l. 51.

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9 Early Soviet Forensic Psychiatric Approaches to Sex Crime, 1917–1934 dan healey

New scholarship on the ‘sexual revolution’ in Bolshevik Russia has turned increasingly to medical sources. Early Soviet ideology accorded considerable significance to the medical view of sexuality, whether healthy or pathological, and authorities conferred their blessings on the medical approach to the issue during the 1920s. Literary scholars and historians have noted how medicalized views of sexuality circulated in public debates about the ‘sexual question,’ how a divided Party struggled with this awkward and unanticipated subject, and how the medical profession responded to the Party’s invitation to take custody of the issue (Naiman; S. Frank; Carleton; Bernstein). The focus, and the arguments, in new research about the sexual revolution have for the most part concentrated on ‘discursive’ phenomena and effects, even when medicine is brought into the equation. As Fran Bernstein has demonstrated in the case of Soviet sexual enlightenment, however, attention to discourse alone fails to capture the experience of radical shifts in sexual lives and their regulation. Medicine is not only a discourse; it is also an ever-changing set of practices in asylums, clinics, and, in the case of sexual crime, in institutions where forensic specialists examined criminals and their victims. Police and prosecutors called upon psychiatrists to assess the capacity of some rapists and sexual abusers to stand trial: were they responsible for their actions or mentally ill and in need of compulsory therapy? The discipline of forensic psychiatry straddled a troubled boundary distinguishing mental disease from criminality. Sexual crime raised questions that went to the heart of this distinction. Our understanding of Soviet distinctions between the medical and the criminological in the area of sexual crime deserves refinement.1 We

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know rather little about the role, practices, and influence of early Soviet forensic psychiatry when dealing with such crimes. Soviet legislation radically transformed the psychiatrist’s place in the criminal justice system, giving credence to the idea that sexual crimes could be caused by mental disease. How did early Soviet forensic psychiatrists use this new power in their determinations of who was mentally ill, and who was fit to stand trial, in crime investigations? By examining the functions that Soviet law handed to psychiatrists we can establish what doctors of the mind were expected to do in investigations of sexual abuse and rape. Examples of routine practice followed by psychiatrists as they worked with sex criminals and their victims can then demonstrate how doctors responded to this new set of responsibilities. Finally, the influence these medical men had on the judicial process in cases of sex crime can be assessed. For the legislative framework much can be gleaned from published commentaries and forensic medical periodicals. The discussion of practices is based on court records of sex crimes from the Leningrad Oblast’ State Archives, Vyborg.2 These cases are predominantly incidents of rape and the sexual abuse of minors, which happened in or near Petrograd, as the city was called during the time of this sample. All cases date from 1922–4, the initial years when the first RSFSR Criminal Code took effect. Virtually all records include some medical documentation, usually a physical examination of victims for evidence of harm or defloration. From this larger set, this chapter discusses a sample of eighteen cases with psychiatric expertise – normally, some record of an examination by a mental doctor of the alleged perpetrator or (less often) of his victims. This modest sample of psychiatric cases cannot claim to be representative of Soviet forensic psychiatry as a whole. Yet arguably it offers an opportunity to see how forensic psychiatrists responded to the challenges presented by the Bolshevik invitation to participate in sex crime investigations in a key city, Leningrad, which had an impressive psychiatric infrastructure. The temporal limits (set by archival constraints) nevertheless enable us to see how psychiatric expertise operated in the supposedly utopian years before Leningrad’s sensational Chubarov Alley gang-rape case of 1926 began to transform the way Soviet leaders viewed sexual crime.3 Pre-revolutionary sex crime legislation dated from the early nineteenth century, and despite attempts to revise the law, remained focused on the protection of women’s ‘honour’ and of public morality. Laura Engelstein has described the 1903 Draft Criminal Code as moving to-

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ward a less archaic vision of gender (Engelstein 75–84). In particular the 1903 Code saw rape as an offence against the dignity and security of the person, rather than an assault on a woman’s reputation or, implicitly, on the chattels of a husband or father. Another significant aspect of the 1903 Draft was the increased protection afforded young persons of both sexes from the sexual threats. Again, this Draft Code reflected new motives for this protection, and at base these were medical in origin. The new code imagined that the harm done to youngsters could be more than physical; now the mental or even psychosexual development of the young person was to be protected. Modernizers revising late Imperial Russia’s criminal law were responding incompletely both to the rise of women’s emancipation and to the trend in sexology toward a conception of sexuality as an aspect of identity profoundly affected by nurture as well as nature. In their modernizing work the drafters of this code sensed that the old language of public morals was under challenge from a scientific discourse of psychosexual development. Youngsters sexually abused were endangered not by a vaguely religious ‘moral corruption,’ but by the potential for long-term diversion from ‘normal’ sexuality, a naturalized biomedical heterosexuality. Young persons of both sexes were extended this kind of protection, as the Draft Code enunciated an offence, new for Russia, of non-penetrative sexual acts whether with boys or girls (Engelstein 83).4 This code was never fully adopted, nor was the kind of medical infrastructure that such an approach to sex crime implied available to the police and courts. Forensic medical practice had made impressive strides after the Great Reforms gave formal recognition to the role doctors could play in legal proceedings, but there was little system to the provision of medical expertise. Medical men were not paid for their legal duties, and police drafted in any ‘expert’ that came to hand. To be sure, by the last decade of tsarist rule there were new faculties of forensic medicine in a handful of universities and a core of professor-level experts was established. Forensic gynecology was particularly well developed.5 The legal system, like the rest of the tsarist regime, was, however, less open to the expertise claimed by doctors of the mind. As Julie V. Brown has shown, conflicts over the concepts of non-responsibility (in criminal cases) and compulsory medical treatment (for the criminally insane) left a chasm of mistrust between the psychiatric profession and the Imperial state (Brown, ‘Professionalization of Russian Psychiatry’; see also Rozhanovskii). A side effect of this wider battle for control was

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that forensic psychiatric interventions in cases of sex crime were probably comparatively rare until the very end of tsarist rule. Soviet legal experts who drafted the first RSFSR Criminal Code, enacted in 1922, sought a clean break with an old legal order that had only half-heartedly embraced modern ideas of sexuality and gender equality. They brought the psychiatrist into the courtroom as a medical practitioner with a recognized expertise accorded the same legal credibility as the forensic gynecologist or expert in forensic chemistry or ballistics. Soviet law also allowed judges to prescribe mandatory medical treatment, including compulsory psychiatric therapy, as a substitute ‘measure of social protection,’ instead of imprisonment or fines (Morozov et al. 158–61). The first Soviet criminal code contained three articles describing sex crimes against young persons of either sex. Key distinctions for the legislators were between penetrative and non-penetrative acts. The first of these articles, number 166, forbade sexual intercourse with individuals not having achieved sexual maturity – in our terms, statutory rape. Article 167 prohibited aggravated forms of such intercourse – where defloration occurred, or when ‘perverted forms’ of sexual intercourse were employed (i.e., either oral or anal penetration). The striking feature of this legislation was the lack of an age of consent. Rather, Soviet law used the threshold of ‘sexual maturity’ to describe the moment when sexual autonomy began. A ‘sexually mature’ person could consent to intercourse and other penetrative sexual acts; a person who had not reached sexual maturity was not free to give consent, and the partners of such persons were thus criminalized. What defined ‘sexual maturity’? That is beyond the scope of this chapter – but it is relevant that the standard anticipated by legislators, and described by medical specialists, was heavily gendered. When the sexual maturity of girls and women was at issue in cases of sex crime, the standard doctors applied was biological, based on menstruation, on the ability to conceive and carry a pregnancy to term successfully. The question of sexual maturity in young men arose far less frequently, but indications exist that boys were subjected to a standard that emphasized the psychosexual development of the young boy rather than his physical development (Healey, ‘No Age’). The third article, number 168, was intended to describe and prohibit non-penetrative sexual acts with children and minors. The acts were described as ‘corruption ... by means of depraved acts’ (razvrashchenie ... putem razvratnykh deistvii), and the use of ‘children and minors’ signalled that persons under the age of eighteen were intended by the legislators,

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regardless of their putative sexual maturity. Here concern to safeguard the young person’s psychosexual development motivated the prohibition against adults engaging in sexual touching, exposure of genitals, or exposing youngsters to pornography or sexual play. Bolsheviks understood, however imperfectly, that such acts were regarded by sexologists as having a deleterious impact on the child’s sexual identity. Another group of articles protected the sexual inviolability of the adult, but the records with extensive psychiatric expertise were cases of the abuse or rape of young persons. A fairly large proportion of attacks on children and youths, when investigated, resulted in an application for psychiatric examinations of accused or victims.6 A much smaller proportion of ordinary rape cases of adult women had a psychiatric evaluation appended to them. Despite Bolshevik intentions to institutionalize the role of the psychiatrist in the courtroom, the infrastructure to do that consistently across Soviet Russia was always far more modest than ambitious legislation would suggest. Petrograd-Leningrad was (like Moscow) exceptional in that it had an institute devoted to legal psychiatry, the Lenin Diagnostic Institute of Forensic Neurology and Psychiatry, funded by the Petrograd provincial (guberniia) branch of the Commissariat of Public Health and directed in the early 1920s by L.G. Orshanskii. (Orshanskii had had a long pre-revolutionary career in the Petersburg psychiatric establishment [Morozov et al. 137–40].)7 Frequently in these cases another medico-legal establishment figures in the documents. The provincial branch of the Commissariat of Public Health had a Department of Forensic Medical Expertise. This department regularly convened commissions which reviewed the evidence gathered by a range of medical specialists for particular criminal investigations and arrived at comprehensive determinations for specific individuals (whether perpetrators or victims of crimes). Such commissions usually included gynecologists, physicians, and, where relevant, psychiatrists. What is striking for this early period is the apparent autonomy of medicine in conducting this work. A small number of files show that psychiatrists complained that police did not always share criminal investigation files with doctors, which hampered psychiatric assessment of suspects or victims. But otherwise, evidence of the kind of manipulation of forensic medical expertise apparent in court records from the 1930s is not present in this earlier era.8 Why did the police and courts resort to psychiatric expertise in sex crime cases? The primary function of the psychiatrist was to determine

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whether someone accused of a crime, who appeared to be mentally unbalanced, was actually fit for trial. (The concept in question is denoted by the term vmeniaemost’, imputability or criminal responsibility.) Such persons might be judged not responsible (nevmeniaemyi) for their actions if examination showed that they had a serious mental illness or defect. Charges against these individuals could be dropped, and they could be diverted from the criminal justice system to compulsory medical treatment.9 Initially I expected to find a reasonably significant proportion of defendants deemed by psychiatrists to be nevmeniaemye. This expectation arose from my earlier work on the psychiatric and legal views of homosexuality in the early Soviet period. Some psychiatrists had argued that homosexuality and other sexual deviations were not merely antisocial acts, but anomalous or pathological biomedical conditions. Among these psychiatrists were a number (including Orshanskii) who viewed sexual deviance as symptomatic of psychopathy. For them, psychopathy was an insidious borderline personality disorder. Outwardly the psychopath seemed a perfectly normal subject, but he concealed beneath an orderly surface a range of antisocial impulses. The moral function of the psychopath was impaired in a dramatic and fundamental way – in fact, the concept of psychopathy had originated in earlier nineteenth-century ideas of moral insanity. By the late nineteenth century, psychopathy was often ascribed to the fashionable medical catch-all etiology, degeneration. The fusion of moral degradation with hereditary taint gave psychiatrists a convincing and flexible explanation for antisocial behaviour. The psychopath as criminal type might be a fantasist on a grand scale, a con artist or fraudster, a violent hooligan or a sexual deviant (Werlinder).10 In the early 1920s, liberal, tsarist-educated psychiatrists working with the Soviet legal system apparently found this model of a medicalized antisocial personality type congenial to their sense of revolutionary élan. Perhaps for this reason, Moscow psychiatrists reportedly designated about 20 per cent of the suspects brought to them for assessment to be psychopaths, and, of that group, a high proportion were deemed not responsible to answer for their crimes (Healey, Homosexual 175).11 My Petrograd sample does not display this pattern.12 All but two of the eighteen cases in my sample contain referrals to psychiatrists of suspects for determinations of their mental health. Twelve cases resulted in pronouncements of fitness, and the defendants went to trial and were sentenced. In most of these cases, however, the examining psychiatrist noted some disorder that accounted for the doubt having been raised in

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the first place. These people often displayed minor psychic disturbances, annoying or puzzling for the police who first encountered them, but they were insufficiently crazed to lead psychiatrists to deem them worthy of medical rather than legal attention. Leningrad psychiatrists frequently fell back on degeneration as the cause of such conditions. Diagnostic Institute director Orshanskii favoured this explanation. In the 1923 case of Vladimir Zharnovskii, a twenty-five-year-old music teacher accused of sexually abusing boys in two schools, Orshanskii in typical form concluded that the defendant ‘suffers to a rather high degree from pederasty and displays a number of signs of degenerative character.’ Among these signs were ‘neurasthenia ... an unstable mood, insufficient selfcontrol and excessive sensitivity.’ Yet despite these defects, ‘there is no illness present that would render Zharnovskii not responsible’ for his crimes.13 Orshanskii’s attitude toward Zharnovskii’s account of himself during a month-long period of observation in the Institute perhaps holds some keys to the psychiatrist’s decision to pronounce him answerable for his actions. The suspected abuser of boy-pupils was from the intelligentsia; during the civil war he briefly directed two schools in Petrograd and was now studying for a degree in civil engineering. Orshanskii wrote in his assessment: When evaluating his own personality there is an inclination to exaggeration: he considers himself a fine administrator, says that even in his gymnasium years he did independent organizational work; from age eighteen he had a responsible post assigned to him personally by [People’s Commissar of Enlightenment Anatolii] Lunacharskii; in his own words he set up a series of pedagogic establishments in Petrograd, fought against abuses everywhere, investigated complaints and conducted trials. He was married but is now divorced. Considers himself an excellent musician and also jurist, and according to his own words he was accepted into the college of advocates [kollegiia pravozashchitnikov].14

Zharnovskii’s background, education, and defence of his revolutionary record (to say nothing of his name-dropping) certainly demonstrated the rudiments of sanity to the psychiatrist. Whatever the exaggerations in his curriculum vitae, there was no doubting Zharnovskii’s smooth adaptation to the new realities of revolutionary life. Perhaps, too, Zharnovskii’s claims that he had suffered a contusion while at the front in 1919 and that his father had ‘ended his life in a clinic for the mentally ill’ appeared too much like clever attempts to excuse his sexual

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misdemeanours to this mind doctor on the grounds of heredity or trauma. Indeed, in sex-crime cases it seems that doctors were just as dismayed by the alleged offences as the rest of society, and as a result psychiatrists were disinclined to extend medicalized sympathy to the perpetrators. Despite declarations that revolutionary law rejected bourgeois moralizing about sexual crime, psychiatrists served as a secular guarantor of the moral value of the Soviet legal process.15 By confirming in most cases the responsibility of the sex criminal for his actions, psychiatrists invoked science to draw a boundary between crime and illness. Rare determinations of non-responsibility dramatically demonstrated the power of the psychiatrist to set this boundary. In one case in this sample, the brother of a defendant accused of rape persuaded the remand prison holding him to order a psychiatric evaluation, citing his brother’s history of mental illness. The accused rapist was acquitted after having been sent to the Diagnostic Institute, where an authority on psychopathy, A.K. Lents, found that he ‘suffer[ed] from mental degeneration with episodes of pathological outbursts.’16 The second diversion from the criminal justice system involved a man accused of raping a fourteen-year-old girl; his behavior raised doubt in the court about his sanity, and he was sent to the Diagnostic Institute. Orshanskii found him to have a chronic posttraumatic mental disorder, and the file suggests police abandoned the investigation.17 The hope of securing such a diagnosis inspired defendants, like Zharnovskii, to claim that they suffered from a mental infirmity or even a history of full-blown madness. Individuals did this with varying degrees of sophistication and understanding of psychiatric discourse. Their bids for exculpation on these grounds are intriguing examples of Michel Foucault’s ‘reverse discourses,’ in which patients (or in this case, wouldbe patients) absorb and read back medical discourse to doctors to promote their own interests.18 One of the fiercest criticisms made about early Soviet forensic psychiatry by the Stalinist cohort that took control of the discipline in the 1930s was precisely this, that patients knew enough about psychopathy, and the laws on compulsory medical treatment, to demand a diagnosis on that basis. In 1936 a Moscow expert observed that ‘one came up against psychopaths who already held a belief in their reduced or non-responsibility [for crimes], aggressively insisting on their right to lawless, antisocial behaviour in connection with their illness.’ Even worse, such criminals knew they could be classified as ‘patients’ and used the language of medicine to demand ‘cures’

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and to protest against the length of ‘treatment’ they had to submit to compulsorily.19 These cases offer several clear examples of would-be patient appropriation of psychiatric discourse. In 1923, a supposed sunflower-seed vendor was accused of luring girls of fourteen and sixteen into his flat, where he exposed his genitals and compelled the girls to submit to sexual touching. The culprit, Vladimir Mutuzov, thirty-two years old and a declassed church sexton, allegedly posed as a vendor to meet young people. They then supposedly visited his room to look at religious pictures. A sharp-eyed neighbour observed his activities with the fourteen-year-old girl through the windows in a light-well; the neighbour then watched as the girl counted five rubles when she left Mutuzov’s flat, and followed her home, where she alerted the girl’s mother. When questioned by police, Mutuzov confessed to having anally raped this girl and several other boys and girls; yet when the various victims were located and interviewed, it emerged that there had been no rape or penetration. Instead they only reported that the sexton tried to undress them and expose himself. Nor did forensic gynecologists find any physical traces of defloration or anal intercourse. The police concluded that Mutuzov made the strange admission of ‘pederastic rape’ in a bid to simulate a mental illness. They were undoubtedly led to this conclusion by Mutuzov’s claims that as a child he had suffered a fractured skull. His relatives later confirmed this injury, and reported that a doctor had at the time warned them that ‘madness or mental illness’ could eventually result from this trauma, especially in view of his unpromising heredity – his parents were alcoholics and there were cases of madness among his collateral kinsmen. Two psychiatrists from the Diagnostic Institute examined Mutuzov and found him lucid and responsible for his actions, despite suffering from ‘neuro-psychic degeneration expressed in sexual perversions in the form of exhibitionism (exposure of the sex organ).’20 Mutuzov was sentenced to four years’ deprivation of liberty in strict isolation, a fairly severe sentence (the maximum being five years). In his case it is striking that not only the defendant but also his relatives sought exculpation with a claim of mental illness. In another, more harrowing case of systematic abuse by a father lasting over sixteen years, the criminal used medical discourse to frame his Supreme Court appeal.21 From his daughters, a son, and other relatives, the police learned that Ivan Mikhailov, a conductor on the October Railway and a widower, had coerced sex with a niece and two daughters repeatedly since 1907 in his own home. Mikhailov’s relentless sexual

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demands finally came to light when he forced his sixteen-year-old son Nikolai to rape his half-sister Lidiia in his presence. (Lidiia raised a complaint; charges against Nikolai were eventually dropped.) Ivan Mikhailov had tattoos of ‘figures with erotic content’ on his body; he was alleged by his children to have engaged in sex with dogs and cats as well as his immediate family.22 When he was examined by psychiatrist Professor V.P. Osipov of Petrograd’s Military Medical Academy, Mikhailov’s chronic alcoholism was noted, but he was deemed mentally fit and responsible for his actions. In sentencing him, the court cited expertise that diagnosed Mikhailov as suffering from ‘reduced mental capabilities and a pronounced sexual psychopathy, but not to a degree excluding imputability.’ The court further found that because his ‘sexual anomalies bore such a sustained and prolonged character and continued to threaten society, and were impossible to eradicate by methods of medical treatment, that Mikhailov is an exceptionally socially dangerous element.’ He was sentenced to an unusual ten years’ imprisonment.23 Within three days Mikhailov submitted a plea for mercy that was laced with medical metaphors and arguments.24 He acknowledged his designation by the court as a socially dangerous element, comparing himself in relation to society to an ‘infectious disease for the human organism.’ His ‘sexual passion,’ he said, ‘had infected his blood many years ago’ and drove him to seek outlets for his lust when his wife refused him. Aware of the ‘shameful passion’ that he inflicted on his family he said it came upon him in ‘mad, irresponsible fits.’ The medical opinion that he was ‘vmeniaemyi but suffering from sexual psychopathy, was like saying a man has healthy limbs, heart, liver and stomach, but that he is crazy.’ Mikhailov argued that he was responsible for his actions at work and in his day-today affairs, but that in sexual matters ‘I completely lose ... control of my will and reason.’ In the presence of a sexual object he forgot everything: ‘I satisfy my lust like a savage animal.’ Mikhailov insisted that he was sick, and he questioned the specialists who designated him as ‘incurable.’ Many such ‘incurable sexual psychopaths’ had been successfully treated by ‘modern science,’ he insisted. What was the point of imprisoning him if he was sick and ‘incurable’ – would it not be more sensible to subject him to the ‘supreme measure’ (i.e., to execute him) as a socially dangerous element, if that was the case? Corrective detention was unlikely to rehabilitate him if he was incurably ill. Mikhailov concluded by asking the Supreme Court to amend his sentence ‘to give me the opportunity to correct myself through intensive medical therapy for my mental infirmity.’

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The Mikhailov file is incomplete and the reaction of the Supreme Court is not known. He was not diverted to compulsory therapy, for he remained in prison, as a medical certificate issued less than a year later shows. Near death from tuberculosis, Mikhailov was seen by physicians who recommended his early release. Ironically, they invoke the incurable nature of this life-threatening illness as the justification for lifting his sentence. Significantly, some offenders were aware of the medicalization of sexuality, and of its potential linkages to exculpatory madness, as these bids for transfer from prison to compulsory medical treatment demonstrate. Soviet legislation on these matters was only a few months old when these cases came to trial; popular awareness of the discourse of sexual psychopathy had longer roots in pre-revolutionary journalism, boulevard literature, and entertainment (see, e.g., Engelstein 359–420; Bershtein; McReynolds). The Petrograd press of the 1920s continued to feature stories about sexual violence, frequently showcasing the role of psychiatric expertise in diagnosing the perpetrators’ fitness to stand trial (see, e.g., G[ard], ‘Delo Miatsa’ 3, and ‘Krovavyi’). If criminals hoped that psychiatric institutions for compulsory therapy were a soft option, they were mistaken. The few institutions that existed in the 1920s quickly filled up, and the dream of providing inmates with individualized psychiatric attention and stimulating exercise and education was never possible, given resource constraints.25 Psychiatric aspiration overstepped its reach in this sense, wishing to medicalize what Stalinists later saw as antisocial behaviour lacking any biomedical cause. As they ‘worked the system’ to seek mitigation, sex offenders apparently detected echoes of this dream of medical solutions for criminal sexual passions in the prospect of court-ordered therapy. Just as Stalin-era leaders of forensic psychiatry would later complain, so-called psychopaths of the 1920s presented articulate appeals to the authority, and sympathy, of psychiatric specialists. A final aspect of psychiatric intervention in sex crime cases was the assessment of victims of these offences. Mental doctors had two distinct questions to answer here. The most common one was to determine for police and courts the degree of harm done to the victim. Another question investigators sometimes asked psychiatrists related to the existence before the crime of any inclination to sexual excess or perversity on the part of the victims. Both sets of questions imported new moral messages into the Soviet courts under the guise of dispassionate science. It is symptomatic of the gendering of the forensic medical gaze that

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sexual harm to women was demonstrated via gynecological, not psychiatric, examinations, reflecting a physiological, not psychological, understanding of rape. Harm was proven to the satisfaction of early Soviet courts if evidence of a struggle, of penetration, or of infection was demonstrated. In the ordinary rape or sexual assault case, psychiatrists rarely examined female victims because Soviet legislation, policing, and jurisprudence regarded women’s bodies, and not their testimony, as the conclusive source of evidence of the crime (see, eg., Leibovich 100–2; Rozanov). Yet the moral character of the female victim, supposedly ignored in a legal system purged of ‘bourgeois philistinism,’ could become a concern for forensic psychiatrists. If we return to Vladimir Mutuzov, the sunflower-seed vendor convicted of non-penetrative sexual acts, we see that the lack of a struggle, any screams, and Mutuzov’s payment of five rubles to his victim raised doubts about the moral probity of his fourteen-year-old victim. Perhaps what the sharp-eyed neighbour witnessed through Mutuzov’s window was not a coerced transaction. Police gave doctors a list of seven questions to answer with regard to his victim.26 A forensic gynecologist examined Mariia Dubova and established that she had not yet attained sexual maturity and was still a virgin. Physically, she was innocent and, in the eyes of the law on sexual maturity, to be protected from even consensual sexual intercourse. Psychiatrists were then given three issues to assess: the state of her mental health at the present and at the time of the crime; ‘her moral constitution: perversity, etc.’; and whether she showed signs of degeneration. Two psychiatrists from the Diagnostic Institute examined Dubova and found her ‘without mental deviations, lacking any signs of [sexual] perversity or any indicators of physical degeneration.’ This diagnosis enabled the police and courts to ascribe innocent motives to the fourteen-year-old girl. Mutuzov’s violent threats were cited as the reason why she did not put up a struggle. In the indictment, her moral character was further embellished with a note of class-based sentimentality and a nod to her healthy hereditary background. Her father, a worker at the Arsenal Factory, was ‘a man burdened with a large family ... in good health, does not abuse alcohol, who has raised his daughter with absolute morality.’ Responsible, sober, and unproblematically virile, this worker represented a living exemplar of the conscious proletariat. Psychiatrists did not employ this moralistic language, but their scientific discourse was a convincing foundation from which prosecutors could represent Mariia Dubova as socially and hereditarily pure.27

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Psychiatric intervention could also be used in the early Soviet legal system to establish whether victims of sexual assault suffered psychological harm. While such examinations might reveal little evidence of serious damage, in this sample it seems that courts set some store by this type of psychiatric assessment. Even when no harm was uncovered, the effect was to dramatize the state’s concern for the disruption to the psychosexual development of the abused youngster. The indictment for the rape of six-year-old Volodia Nikolaev by seventeen-year-old Ivan Boronin in 1924 demonstrates this dramatization eloquently.28 The boy was examined by physicians for evidence of physical damage, and no such effects were revealed (Volodia had not struggled but consented to sodomy with the inducement of forty-nine tsarist kopecks). Police investigators also had him assessed for harm to his mental state, hoping to demonstrate a malign impact on ‘Nikolaev’s neuro-psychic system.’ When no damage was found, however, they reasoned that it was ‘premature’ to seek such evidence, since the damage to his personality could take considerable time to manifest itself.29 Where investigators had access to psychiatric expertise they appear to have used it to make the case for long-term psychic damage to the victim, and where police and courts lacked it, they might still refer to such considerations in the indictments and sentencing documents they produced.30 Conclusions What do the activities of early Soviet psychiatrists in sex crime investigations tell us? While the modest number of cases examined here cannot be the basis for wide generalizations, it is plausible to posit a few hypotheses and observations for further consideration. My first hypothesis concerns the legislation and institutionalization of forensic psychiatry that came with the Revolution. It would appear that revolutionary Bolshevik lawmakers invited psychiatrists to become a routine part of sex crime investigations in order to drain the sex crime of its sensational and political potential. Evgenii Bershtein points out the extent to which the radical Left (and to a lesser extent, the radical Right) exploited the discourse of sexual psychopathy for its potential to make political points before 1917. Naturally, this does not mean that after 1917 sex was depoliticized, or drained of sensational appeal. But by sending the sex offender into the forensic psychiatric institute, and the psychiatrist into the courtroom, the monstrous was to be rendered comprehensible. Once an explanation was tendered, society’s treatment of the

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sexual psychopath could be founded on a materialist, scientific approach purged of religious or bourgeois moralizing. Or so went the logic of the Bolshevik invitation to psychiatrists, an invitation that failed to acknowledge the moralizing potential of science as it accorded psychiatrists a significant and ultimately problematic parity of esteem with other kinds of forensic expertise. My next observation considers the curious apparent reluctance of these Petrograd psychiatrists to use their power to divert sex offenders to compulsory medical therapy. Certainly, limited resources to treat such criminals restrained doctors; it may also be true that police and prosecutors put limits on such diversions that are not visible in these court records. Another factor could well be that determinations of nevmeniaemost’ potentially exposed the weaknesses of psychiatric medicine. ‘Sexual psychopathy’ lacked a proven root cause, common descriptors, and plausible therapies. This was a dilemma wherever Western psychiatry was practised at this point in its history: doctors of the mind recognized clients with problems, very much wanted to claim authority over them, but possessed little in the way of an effective therapeutic arsenal (Scull, ‘Psychiatry’).31 Degeneration theory continued to inform their determinations and furnished its own moral discourse of tainted heredity.32 The elevation of the psychiatrist to parity of esteem with other forensic specializations in the new legal order was, perhaps unwittingly, not founded on materialist knowledge, but on a revolutionary investment of cultural authority in psychiatry by some lawmakers, police, and prosecutors. In this sample of sex crime cases, the Petrograd psychiatrists’ frequent diagnoses of degeneration, combined with an opinion that the subject was fit to answer for his crimes, responded to that investment gratefully, but returned the problem to the moral not medical sphere. In the two instances of diversion to therapy in this sample, a chronic and profound mental illness apparently influenced the decision that the suspect was too ill to answer for a crime. Psychopathy was a borderline condition between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ mental illness, and even in a big urban centre the Soviet psychiatric infrastructure was insufficiently resourced to cope with it.33 These psychiatrists did not display a utopian ardour for the claims of their discipline despite the investment made by the regime in their authority; they acted with considerable caution, in Petrograd at least.34 Another observation is that Petrograd’s sex offenders and their families were no passive agents in these processes, but active participants in the shaping of forensic psychiatric opinion. The various bids for a

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designation of non-responsibility seen in these cases suggest not merely the clumsy opportunism of men desperate to avoid prison, but an informed alertness to the claims and aspirations of psychiatric medicine. These were perhaps claims made more on behalf of psychiatry than by psychiatrists themselves, but they were clearly sufficiently disseminated to inspire the railwayman Mikhailov, to take one example, to launch an appeal based on medical jargon and concepts. This appropriation of discourse in and of itself was apparently enough to make psychiatrists cautious in diverting criminals to medical treatment. Nevertheless it speaks to a popularization of psychiatric views of sexuality beyond elite Party jurists and medical experts. Further exploration of this popular understanding of medicalized sexuality would help to illuminate the history of Russia’s sexual revolution. The Soviet legal psychiatrist’s focus on the victims of sexual crime as a new object of psychiatric attention is also significant, especially as, in these cases, the impulse to examine victims came from police and prosecutors. By confirming the sexual innocence of the objects of assault or abuse, psychiatrists became psychological detectives, helping the police with their inquiries. While in this sample psychiatrists avoid explicitly moralizing language, their expertise was valued for providing scientific evidence that allowed police and courts to construct scenarios free of troubling ambiguity. Whether or not police had access to sophisticated psychiatric victim assessment, a new sensibility of concern for the longterm psychosexual welfare of the victim, especially the younger victim, is evident in these cases. Finally, if these cases indicate anything about the routine conduct of forensic psychiatry in Petrograd’s sex crime investigations before the sensational Chubarov Alley case, it would seem that they point to a discipline cautious about its authority, following the lead of the police and prosecutors who sought its advice. Conscious of the ambiguities of their position, Petrograd’s tsarist-educated psychiatrists providing expertise displayed no ‘utopian’ enthusiasm for medicalizing the sex criminal. Instead, they usually furnished scientific ‘evidence’ that returned the problem to the police and courts. Nevertheless, their participation in a system that elevated forensic psychiatry to a parity of esteem with other forms of expertise endured, uninterrupted by the politicized ‘campaign justice’ of the Chubarov case. It was this parity of esteem that did much to embed in modern Soviet thinking a view of sexual violence as potentially caused by mental pathology, by psychopathy. It is logical that

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biomedical causes remained a secondary factor when ideologists orchestrated ‘campaigns’ to bring particular sexual crimes to the fore. When politicized, sexual crime was the result of class-alien influences and social factors such as drunkenness that could respond to social correction. Authorities still reserved the explanation of mental illness to deal with the small number of cases of sexual violence that would occur in a fully realized socialist society.35 In that sense, the routine participation of psychiatrists in the investigation of sexual crime was utopian, looking forward to the day when a benign environment would significantly reduce the incidence of sex crime to a few pathological cases.

NOTES This chapter derives from my research project entitled ‘Early Soviet Forensic Medicine and the Limits of Sexual Utopianism.’ I gratefully acknowledge the Wellcome Trust (grant no. 054869) and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (APN16097) for their support of the project. I am also indebted to the publisher’s two anonymous readers who suggested improvements. 1 For example, Naiman’s discussion of experts’ contributions to Soviet sexual ideology in the 1920s refers to a number of leading forensic psychiatrists (Leningrad’s L.G. Orshanskii, Moscow’s N.P. Brukhanskii, V.A. Vnukov, and A.O. Edel’shtein) as ‘criminologists,’ and does not examine the disciplinary practices and institutions that shaped the discourses these doctors produced. See, e.g., Naiman 124–6, 283. The discursive approach also leads Carleton away from sustained consideration of the disciplinary contexts in which his various medical protagonists generated their sexual prescriptions; see Carleton, ch. 3. 2 Leningradskii Oblastnoi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv v Vyborge (LOGAV). The overall set consists of sixty-six cases; from this sample, eighteen with psychiatric expertise are discussed in this chapter. I am grateful to Nataliia Ismailova for her exploratory work in this archive on my behalf. 3 On Chubarov Alley, see Naiman ch. 7. The ‘utopian’ appearance of sexual values in the earlier 1920s is an impression created by the hardening of Soviet attitudes in the wake of Chubarov and later the Cultural Revolution that ‘resolved the sexual question’; on these points see, e.g., Carleton ch. 5. Criminal court records for early-1920s Petrograd-Leningrad and its environs are held in LOGAV. Leningrad court records from the mid-1920s onward

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4 5

6

7 8

9 10 11 12

13

14 15

16 17 18

Dan Healey are held at TsGASPb (Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga), but at the time of writing, resource constraints severely limited its hours and terms of operation. On US medical discourses of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ sexuality, see Freedman, and Robertson. Women were the overwhelming majority of victims of sexual assaults, and physical evidence (defloration, infection, bruises) was held to be conclusive, as in other European legal systems. Forensic gynecologists also conducted the medical supervision of licensed prostitutes under the old regime – the most extensive medical surveillance of sexuality in tsarist Russia. This finding from my sample confirms the statement made about the frequency of psychiatric intervention in such cases in Vnukov and Edel’shtein, 26. See also his file in the personnel records of the Diagnostic Institute: TsGASPb, f. 2895, op. 6, d. 42. In Moscow in the 1930s, medical evidence in sex crime trials was apparently gathered selectively to satisfy the demands of prosecutors; defending advocates invoked it in vain. See Healey, Homosexual 212–13, 220. See on these regulations Brukhanskii 355–91; note also Morozov et al. 129–61. For a relevant Soviet statement of the concept see Orshanskii. Moscow forensic psychiatrist E.K. Krasnushkin and Leningrad’s Orshanskii were slated for this after the profession was Stalinized. See Vnukov, 16. Whether in Moscow sex crime cases would conform to the trend cited in Vnukov would need to be tested in Moscow’s provincial archive (Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Moskovskoi Oblasti, TsGAMO), but this archive refuses to release criminal records. Leningradskii Oblastnoi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv v Vyborge (LOGAV), f. 2205, op. 1, d. 689, ll. 71–71ob. For another example in which Orshanskii pronounced a defendant responsible for his actions while at the same time finding evidence of degeneration, LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d. 1969. LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d. 689, l. 71. For a typical comment on Soviet sexual legislation’s rejection of bourgeois morality, while protecting the weak and extolling of the prospect of converting sexual energy to social purposes, see G.M. Segal, 8–9. LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d.1193, ll. 144, 145, 148, 171. In this case the brother supplied documentation confirming civil war–era army diagnoses. LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d. 245, ll. 66, 75. The file ends with no further evidence of police or court involvement in the case. Foucault had in mind the dialogue between psychiatrists and homosexuals

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20 21 22 23

24

25 26

27

28 29 30

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about same-sex love that began in the 1870s and 1880s with the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing. See Foucault, History 100–1. The interaction between Krafft-Ebing and homosexual correspondents is analysed in Oosterhuis. From a chapter on psychopathy written by A.M. Khaletskii in Vnukov and Feinberg 250–2. See also Feinberg 6, 8. For the evolution of Soviet views of sexual psychopathy, see Healey, ‘Homosexual’ 294–316. LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d. 1024, ll. 1–6, 33 ob. LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d. 1395. Ibid., ll. 34, 112 ob. Ibid., ll. 34, 19–19 ob. Under article 167 (aggravated statutory rape) he received ten years; the 1922 Criminal Code prescribed a minimum sentence of five years for this offence. He also received a simultaneous sentence of five years under article 168 (non-penetrative sex acts with minors). Charges of conventional rape and of consensual sexual intercourse with a sexually immature person were dropped. This sentence is one of the most severe I have yet encountered for a non-politicized sex crime; see Healey, Homosexual 218–20. Mikhailov clearly was an articulate worker, although he is variously described in the case file as ‘literate,’ ‘illiterate,’ and ‘semi-literate’; he apparently defended himself at his trial, but it is not clear if he had assistance in composing this appeal. All quotations in this paragraph from LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d. 1395, ll. 118–118 ob. For an early Soviet psychiatrist’s dreams of therapy in the prison setting, see Krasnushkin, esp. 6. The victim was the subject of seven questions from police to forensic medical experts, while on the same document they asked six questions about Mutuzov; LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d. 1024, l. 25. LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d. 1024, ll. 33 ob., 3. Perhaps similar considerations were behind the brief comments made by psychiatrists in the Mikhailov case when his victims (his niece, two daughters, and son) were found to be mentally sound despite their long toleration of his abuse; LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d. 1395, l. 34. LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d. 2235. Ibid., l. 29 ob. For an example from a small town lacking psychiatric expertise, in which the court used this language in its sentence, see LOGAV, f. 2205, op. 1, d. 826, l. 135. For vivid examples of this professional excess of ambition on the part of Brazilian psychiatrists in relation to homosexuals, see Green 107–46.

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32 Soviet thinking about degeneration deserves a study of its own. On prerevolutionary thinking see Beer. For discussions in the Soviet context, see Holquist, ‘State Violence,’ and Amir Weiner. Naiman suggests productive approaches to the concept. For the Western European evolution of degeneration, see Pick. 33 Russian psychiatry, along with most Western versions of mental medicine, made a distinction between ‘major psychiatry’ (the treatment of schizophrenia and disorders with known biological causes) and ‘minor psychiatry’ (neuroses and problems of life adjustment). Until the mid-twentieth century it is unlikely that more than a tiny minority of Russia’s population had access to services for the latter. See Healey, Homosexual, 140–1, 173. 34 This caution is reminiscent of the caution with which Soviet doctors approached problems of sexual anomaly during the 1920s, when the Party’s ideological view of homosexuality was unclear; Healey, Homosexual 150–1. 35 For a statement of the virtual elimination of sexual disorder, except for some medical anomalies, in socialist society, see Z. Gurevich.

PART THREE Madness and Creativity

Ilya Repin, Gogol’s Self-Immolation, 1909. The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Isn’t what we call common sense a highly elastic term, a term used by an ordinary individual against a great man who is incomprehensible to him, and also by a man of genius to cover up his reasoning so as not to frighten ordinary men? In a word, isn’t what we frequently call madness and delirium sometimes the highest degree of intellectual human instinct, a degree so high that it becomes completely incomprehensible, unattainable to ordinary observation? Vladimir Odoevsky, The Second Night [Russkie nochi]

The alleged connection between genius and insanity is fundamental to the history of European insanity. The theory of divine insanity – which, according to Plato, was characteristic of prophets, philosophers, poets, and lovers – became known in Russia during the eighteenth century. This traditional question about the boundaries separating pathological insanity from genius takes on a special significance in the nineteenth century: this is not only a popular literary theme, but also a serious metaphysical problem, constantly fuelled by real stories about insane geniuses – stories to which society reacts with horror and often a fascinated interest. It can be said that every more or less defined cultural epoch in Russia knows its own epitomized lunatics: the playwright Ozerov and the poet Batiushkov, the artists Fedotov and Vrubel’, the writers Uspensky and Garshin, the poet Khlebnikov and the dancer Nijinsky. Certain critics propose that in modern Russian culture the ‘geniuslunatic’ very early on became a secular version of the holy fool, traditional for the Russian religious consciousness – an extravagant, often provocative person, whose behaviour indicates the renunciation of worldly benefits and connections, and whose mystical prophecies suggest a secret knowledge accessible only to the ‘blessed one.’ This section presents articles which examine the concept of creative insanity in the Russian historico-cultural context, as well as a culturally productive dialogue on madness between Russian doctors, writers, and philosophers. Angela Brintlinger’s article, ‘Writing about Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887–1907,’ examines Russian psychiatrists’ writing about themselves and their profession. According to Brintlinger, Russian mad doctors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries established their authoritative scientific discourse in a competition with Russian writers over definitions of insanity. If writers often saw the world as a mental asylum, the doctors saw the asylum as a microcosm of the world.

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Margarita Odesskaya’s article, ‘“Let Them Go Crazy”: Madmen in the Works of Chekhov,’ is devoted to the Chekhovian vision of insanity. In the artist’s work, a certain estrangement of the problem of insanity takes place, such that it is examined simultaneously from several points of view: the writer’s, the doctor’s, the anthropologist’s, and the medical historian’s. Chekhov portrays a humanitarian dead-end which society encounters in attempting to cure a person of a psychological disease but, in doing so, deprives him of his humanity. Yvonne Howell, in ‘The Genetics of Genius: V.P. Efroimson and the Biosocial Mechanisms of Heightened Intellectual Activity,’ considers the recently published ‘theory of genius’ by Russian geneticist and polymath Vladimir Efroimson (1909–89) in the context of his biography and ideology. Howell demonstrates the historical and biographical conditions under which Efroimson tried to resurrect the connection between gout and genius. In ‘Madwomen without Attics: The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative Iurodivaia,’ Helena Goscilo explores the depiction of female madness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, arts, and film. As she shows in detail, in the Russian tradition the type of the female iurodivaia has a creative potential radically different from the symbolic possibilities of the male iurodivyi. Andrei Rogachevskii, in ‘A “New Russian” Madness? Fedor Mikhailov’s Novel Idiot and Roman Kachanov’s Film Daun Khaus,’ explores the link between madness and childhood in Dostoevsky’s Idiot and shows how and why Dostoevsky’s masterpiece has become the subject (or victim?) of several idiosyncratic contemporary remakes. This section concludes with Mikhail Epstein’s philosophical essay ‘Methods of Madness and Madness as a Method.’ Epstein examines dialectical relationships between reason, insanity, and creativity and presents a new interpretation of Alexander Pushkin’s ‘God grant that I not lose my mind ...’ as an embodiment of ‘the art of thinking dangerously,’ on the verge of insanity but still under the control of reason, boldly transgressing the borders of common sense but still remaining within the limits of rationality. Epstein calls this risky kind of creative thinking ‘othermindedness.’

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10 Writing about Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887–1907 angela brintlinger

For the psychiatrist literature is a reference book which gives him many indications for discovering moral evil in the social and individual soul. Dr Ivan Sikorsky (1906) The doctor is like a candle: he sheds light, while himself burning out. Dr Sergei Korsakov, Introduction to A Course of Psychiatry (1901)

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the science and profession of psychiatry in Russia were on the rise, and Russian psychiatrists placed themselves squarely at the centre of the discourse about mental illness. In order to establish their authority, Russian doctors of mental illness pursued three strategies. First, they brought a new scientific language to describe madness, rather than relying on literary or folk language. Second, they self-consciously connected their practices to those in the West, measuring their own work against that of their counterparts in Europe, and thus implying that the work of science transcended the narrower boundaries of literature and culture. Finally, Russian psychiatrists not only wrote about their own patients and treatments, they also aggressively wrote their own history and, by the late nineteenth century, constructing those histories had become a primary source of their legitimacy. The process of self-creation for Russian doctors of the mind meant that they took on writerly roles, adamant that while the general public might learn about various psychiatric idiosyncracies from the great Russian literary giants, their own voices, writing about the madness in which they specialized, needed to be heard and heeded. As we see throughout the present volume, scholars of the history of

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mental illness in Russia tend to look at one of three aspects of the disease; one, they examine the institutional structures, including state and forensic aspects of those structures, which were set up to evaluate and care for the insane; two, they consider the patients – who were they, how did they utilize the care available to them, were they ever cured?; and three, they focus on the doctors – how were they trained, how did they see themselves as professionals, how did they communicate with each other, their colleagues abroad, the state officials who regulated them? In this chapter I briefly consider the first two aspects, but in particular I look at how Russian doctors, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries especially, struggled to establish theirs as the authoritative voice to speak about questions of madness, its causes and its treatments. As they tried to establish the authority and legitimacy of their science, Russian psychiatrists wrestled with the church and state, on the one hand, and with writers on the other, for whom madness was – indeed still is – an important source of literary fodder.1 That writers and doctors should find themselves competing over the discussion of madness makes sense at a certain level. One trend in psychiatric care, including Freud and his followers but not limited to psychoanalysis, has been highly discursive. In analysing, diagnosing, and treating the insane, many doctors observe, question, converse with their patients, and write up their findings, whether in scientific articles or simply in case histories. However, in point of fact psychiatry as a branch of the medical sciences in the nineteenth century, both in Russia and throughout Europe and America, was intricately intertwined with the body. When medical doctors began to claim authority over the mentally ill, they emphasized physical rather than psychic causes. As sociologist Andrew Scull has written, ‘in a Cartesian universe, with the concept of the mind conflated with that of soul, physicians almost universally asserted that mental disease had an entirely somatic basis, and thus was accessible to physical remedies’ (‘Social History’ 7). Like their colleague Henry Maudsley in England, who in 1874 proclaimed that ‘The Explanation, when it comes, will come not from the mental, but from the physical side – from the study of the neurosis, not from the analysis of the psychosis,’ in wresting the mad away from the monastery, Russian doctors sought answers in neurological processes rather than psychological ones, in physical treatments rather than ‘talking cures’ (154).2 This is, of course, an extremely complex issue, and its untangling lies outside the scope of the present article. But what is important for our

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purposes is that in the main the word psychiatry was always connected to neurology or neuropathology in the Russian context.3 It is somewhat ironic, then, that while Russian doctors thought the answer to mental illness lay in the physical sphere, in their own practice they remained intensely logos-driven. We see the evidence of that obsession with writing about illness in the vast numbers of medical journals which circulated across the Russian empire. Psychiatrists on the whole were located in district or regional centres, by virtue of their positions in asylums or medical faculties, and they – along with their medical brethren – did much of their communicating via writing. Articles, reviews, detailed reports, and proceedings of regular meetings and congresses were dispersed throughout Russia. At the same time, the imagination of intellectual and literate spheres was captured by the great Russian literary creators – Gogol’, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Leskov, Chekhov – who delved into the hearts and minds of Russian characters, portraying their passivity and strength, their manipulations and intrigues, their madness and murders. It is this struggle between writers and doctors for control over the discourse of madness during the second half of the nineteenth century that will interest me here. Russian Psychiatrists Face West In Europe the Psychiatric Era opened in the wake of the French Revolution, with the famed Dr Philippe Pinel declaring a need to treat patients kindly, in the spirit of liberté, egalité, fraternité : as Roy Porter recently summarized it, the new, more humane approach to mental patients insisted that ‘if insanity was a mental disorder, it had to be relieved through mental approaches ... Treatment must penetrate to the psyche’ (Madness 105). Pinel became the first of the ‘Great Men,’ canonized by French psychiatrists and historians of psychiatry, but also adopted all over the world, so that Florence’s Chiarugi became ‘The Italian Pinel,’ and Moscow’s Sergei Korsakov became ‘The Russian Pinel.’4 On the centennial of psychiatry in 1892, Russian psychiatrist Nikolai Bazhenov gave a speech detailing a history of the profession before his fellow members of the Society of Moscow Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists. For Bazhenov, that history had primarily transpired far from the borders of the Russian empire. His ‘Great Men’ were all from other parts of Europe: Pinel, William Tuke, Chiarugi, Daquin, and Charcot.5 There was very little room in Bazhenov’s narrative of a hundred years of psychiatry for Russians, although he did point out that Grand Prince

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Nikolai Pavlovich had visited the York Retreat in Tuke’s lifetime and was amazed both by the place and its founder. Perhaps in response to that experience, Tsar Nikolai I removed armed guards from the psychiatric wings of hospitals in Russia with an 1832 ukase. Bazhenov wound up his speech on 25 October 1892, however, by noting that much remained to be done in reforming care and treatment practices. Pinel may have struck off the chains of the French a century earlier, but in Russian villages, Bazhenov reminded his listeners, the mad were still chained by their peasant brethren while awaiting transport to institutions for the mentally insane. Western Europe – the source of the Age of Enlightenment, the home of Pinel and Tuke and Chiarugi – was for nineteenth-century Russian doctors both a source of information and an opportunity to compare methods and results. As in Europe, Russian medicine developed rapidly ‘from the Age of Reason’ – the eighteenth century – to the ‘Age of Science’ – the nineteenth century.6 It is quite clear from the Russian medical journals of the late nineteenth century that Russian doctors were thoroughly aware of developments in Europe and even America as they were happening, and they continually compared conditions in their own institutions, often favourably, with those in Europe. These were energetic and self-conscious attempts to be a part of pan-European progress, and the Russians took every opportunity to tout, trumpet, and celebrate their accomplishments. This international awareness is obvious in the journal Medical Review (Meditsinskoe obozrenie), edited biweekly from 1874 to 1907 by Dr Vasily Sprimon. The Medical Review served to connect Russian medicine with foreign medical literature, both reviewing the literature from England, France, Germany, and the US and also summarizing Russian medical advances through reviews and original articles.7 Readers throughout Russia could become acquainted with what kinds of medical advances were being discussed and published abroad, as well as what was happening at home. The issues and treatments reported on from abroad were discussed at length in Russia, at meetings of the various medical societies, in the reports of individual institutions, and in journal articles on specific cases and diseases. The announcements section of each issue of the Medical Review demonstrated just how close the international medical community was at this point: newly opened or planned hospitals, the deaths of prominent medical personages, philanthropic donations, and all kinds of publications were reported – from Siberia to Scotland to the States.

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Internationalism can also be seen in the phenomenon of the International Congress of Doctors. The twelfth such Congress took place in Moscow in 1897, with more than 7,500 scholars and doctors participating, including 400 from France and 800 from Germany and Austria (Mirskii 174–5). Among the visitors to that Congress were two Frenchmen, Charles Vallon and Armand Marie, who took the opportunity of being in Russia to research the conditions of Russian psychiatric hospitals and clinics. The resulting book, Les aliénés en Russie (1899), was almost immediately reviewed in the Medical Review by one of its most prolific reviewers, Vladimir Serbsky. Here we can see the close contact of medical professionals – the French visit Russia, write about Russian patients and hospitals, in French, and get reviewed by Russian medical scholars, in Russian, for the profession as a whole – a dialogue that we are able to trace through the published record. In his extensive review, Serbsky noted that Vallon and Marie were particularly impressed with a few features of Russian medicine for the mentally ill. First of all, in Russia the mentally ill were kept in hospitals rather than asylums, which the French took to mean that in contrast to their homeland, in Russia mental institutions were ‘healing institutions, not places of confinement for those incapable of living on their own.’ What’s more, by the end of the nineteenth century it was doctors who acted as directors of institutions, rather than non-medical administrators. Thus it seemed to these Frenchmen that the medical took precedence over the administrative in Russian institutions – a contrast with practices in their own experience. Finally, Vallon and Marie were impressed both by the quantity of medical staff and by the quality of that staff. They found the psychiatric clinics of the Military Academy in Petersburg and of Moscow University to be ‘exemplary – nothing comparable exists in France,’ they wrote. ‘Only the lower personnel [were found to be] sub-standard,’ wrote Serbsky, ‘and since this is being addressed, Russia will soon have facilities comparable to any other country’ (Serbskii, review of Les aliénés 784).8 Serbsky’s analysis of the French book highlights some of the very concerns that Russian psychiatric specialists had. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Russian psychiatrists had been fighting, not always successfully, for control of their own institutions.9 They had been struggling to emphasize the humane aspect of their work and trying, though mostly without results, to cure their patients rather than simply caring for them. They had sought to reclassify the insane as patients rather than prisoners, keeping the police outside their institutions.10 In his desire to second the

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praise of the Frenchmen, Serbsky presented the rosiest scenario of psychiatric care in Russia. In 1904, Russian psychiatrist Petr P. Tutyshkin made an answering visit to Western Europe, touring institutions all over Germany as well as in Zurich, Geneva, Brussels, Paris, London, Milan, and Vienna. In his article ‘Psychiatric Institutions of Western Europe,’ Tutyshkin more or less concurred with the one critique by Vallon and Marie that Serbsky allowed into his otherwise glowing review, finding that ‘the quality ... of the personnel, particularly the lower personnel, [in] our institutions is much worse than [in] those of Western Europe, especially in terms of the literacy of the caretakers, the degree of their culture, and their special training for the care of the mentally ill.’11 Tutyshkin’s criticism of Russian medical personnel is also borne out by the medical literature. In report after report, the yearly turnover rates of staff at psychiatric hospitals were of great concern to doctors, as were the reasons for the turnover. For example, during 1898 the psychiatric hospital in Tula had between 325 and 350 patients and 68 orderlies. Of those 35 men and 33 women, 52 left the employ of the hospital during the course of the year (30 + 22). Thirty-four of them, or well over half, quit, which in and of itself was a reason for concern, but 17 were fired: 3 for drunkenness, 3 for beating patients, 2 for rudeness, 2 for helping patients escape, 1 for stealing, 1 for supplying vodka to patients, and 3 for ‘poor quality of work.’ We should also note that 1 died as a result of a patient attack (Serbskii, ‘Obzor’ 703 and ff). These kinds of statistics were published regularly in the medical literature, as Russian doctors tried to quantify and describe the situation of psychiatric care. But although the care of mental patients in Europe was regularly used for self-reproach and as a stimulus to reform in Russia, on the whole Russians stressed the similarities between Russian and European psychiatric care. For example, one of the continual topics of discussion in medical journals and at medical conferences was the proper organization of mental hospitals, including the use of work therapy. At an 1899 meeting of the Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists at Moscow University, a Dr Stupen [sic]12 began his paper ‘On the Problem of the Correct Organization of Work for the Mentally Ill at Psychiatric Hospitals’ with a de rigueur acknowledgment of Pinel: ‘Pinel was the first to suggest work as a curative measure for the mentally ill,’ he said. Reviewing approaches to work therapy in France, England, Germany, and Russia, Stupen stated that in Russia doctors had been using work therapy since 1874, and he emphasized the need for agricultural tasks and other

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outdoor options while noting that by the end of the century about 33 per cent of patients in zemstvo hospitals participated in work daily. In discussion after the paper, Professor Kozhevnikov – founder of the Society and of neuropathological and psychiatric clinics at Moscow University – acknowledged wryly that outdoor work was of course highly desirable as a hygienic and therapeutic measure, but ‘unfortunately, in our climate, work in the open air has limited feasibility’ (Stupen 167–9). Clearly the comparison with Europe could only go so far. Who Went Mad? The discourse – what got written about madness – included papers and discussions, congresses, reports, studies, statistics, and reviews, all printed and distributed in numerous professional medical journals, in a way the primary means of collegial communication across the vast Russian empire. But what about the subject of that discourse? Who went mad? As reviewer Vladimir Serbsky described Dr F.Kh. Gadziatskii’s report on patients at the Imperial Military-Medical Academy clinic in St Petersburg between 1870 and 1890, ‘the author sees evidence of a significant difference in the etiology of mental illnesses in the two sexes: for women – in family life, connected to birthing and various troubles, for men – in extreme exertion of physical and mental strength, along with an excessive indulgence in physical pleasures.’13 From this quick summary, it is clear that the classification of who went mad in Russia mirrored the patterns of diagnoses in the West. Women’s psychiatric illness has a physical locus, in the womb, and hysteria is the diagnosis of choice.14 Men, on the other hand, were only as susceptible as their social class dictated – for the lower classes physical strain seemed to cause psychiatric illness, while for the upper classes it was intellectual strain or, quite the contrary, debauchery that led to mental illness. Not only gender and class but occupation was relevant to diagnoses. In the mid-1890s Dr Danillo, a prominent psychiatrist, reported a case of aphasia due to ‘an aneurism of the aorta ... and the experience of a serious moral trauma ... [caused by] a temporary disturbance of bloodflow in the brain.’ This patient, according to his doctor, was ‘a young literary man of twentythree years.’ In the same 1883 medical journal that reported Danillo’s ‘literary’ patient, a Dr Erlitsky, ‘in describing an instance of syphilis of the brain, points out that the most serious forms of this illness are met with among intellectual persons among whom the brain is the organ of least resistance’ (see Lion; Danillo 21). The age-old connection here is

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clear: intellectuals – especially writers – were far more likely to suffer mental illness than other people.15 Danillo was not alone in seeing intellectuals as particularly susceptible to mental unbalance. The habit of referring to literary figures, whether characters or authors, as a shorthand for social problems, was widespread among psychiatrists and psychologists. In a speech delivered at Second Congress of Russian Psychiatrists in Kiev in 1905, Professor Ivan A. Sikorsky of Kiev University focused on the ‘psychological foundations of education.’ Sikorsky made explicit the connection between literature and psychology – as well as educational practices – that many Russian psychiatrists had been pointing to for some time: The defect of our schooling is its one-sidedness, so foreign to psychological understanding. School develops and strengthens the student’s intellect, while virtually ignoring both feeling and will ... In the gimnazium we see no harmony of the three sides of the human soul. Instead, a cold intellect is formed, despite the late [Vissarion] Belinsky’s warning of how necessary a ‘heartfelt’ intellect is to our society ... The development of feeling makes a young man sensitive, open to everything good. Feeling influences the intellect and will, giving them direction. Appropriate development of all of these sides of the soul is essential for the human being. The soul and life of society has always been reflected in the mirror of literature, where the feelings of man play an important role. For the psychiatrist literature is a reference book, and in it he finds many indications of how to discover moral evil in the social and individual soul. The works of Chekhov and Veresaev – literary men with a background in medicine – give much proof of this. Chekhov depicts monotonous, everyday, boring life in its daily detail, noting everywhere insufficient development of feeling, cold intellect, weak resistance to the very fact of life’s emptiness. Chronic patients, who make up threequarters of the population of psychiatric hospitals, recall Chekhovian heroes. Three of the most important results of the decline of feeling are the decline of idealism, the decline of educational influence of ... fathers on sons, and the growth of crime and suicide. (Sikorskii, ‘Psikhologicheskie’ 134–5)16

Sikorsky’s dependence on literary critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48) along with writer-doctors Anton Chekhov and Vikenty Veresaev, not to mention Ivan Turgenev’s famous trope of fathers and sons, exemplifies how psychiatrists and psychologists took their cue from literary figures, building on the work done by those in the field of fiction.17

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Perhaps Danillo, Sikorsky, and the others were right. Perhaps Russian writers really did go insane in disproportionate numbers. Or perhaps Russian psychiatrists, impressed by or jealous of writers’ capacity to depict madness, decided that the only explanation for that intimate familiarity with the topic was that those writers were all too personally familiar with the condition of madness itself.18 Whatever the explanation, we can see this preponderance of mad intellectuals in the discourse of Russian psychiatry as a strategy, a way of dealing with the competition over the question of which group could write authoritatively about madness. Heroes of Their Own Psychiatric History But the heroes of the narrative of mental illness were not writers and other creative types. Instead, doctors presented themselves and their professional colleagues as heroes, as the ‘harmonious personalities’ missing in a world where, as Sikorsky argued, the growth of crime and suicide could be blamed on a ‘decline of feeling.’ The ‘“heartfelt” intellect’ that he sought could be found among the best psychiatrists and medical experts of the time. The life of Russian doctors at the end of the nineteenth century was not an easy one. As Sikorsky detailed in a 1896 article in Problems of Nervous and Psychiatric Medicine, suicide was a serious problem among Russian doctors. Statistically, while 1 in 1,200 people in the general Russian population committed suicide, 1 in 28 doctors did – 1 in 10 between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Of course, doctors used their medical knowledge in their suicides – 45 per cent chose poison, while 45 per cent shot themselves, and almost no one hanged or suffocated himself, thus keeping both pain and the potential for failure to a minimum. Nonetheless, the statistics gave pause. Sikorsky offered three reasons for this high suicide rate, which give us a window into doctors’ lives: 1) ‘serious mental exhaustion’ among medical personnel, comparable to a soldier’s mental state during wartime; 2) what he delicately referred to as their ‘materially precarious lifestyle,’ or, frankly, ‘poverty’; and 3) the ‘attitude toward doctors – not always justified – by the press and in part the public.’ Reviewer Vladimir Serbsky concluded that ‘Russian doctors have the sad privilege of occupying first place for the most suicides in the world.’19 Sikorsky may have been right to lay some of the blame for doctors’ suicidal tendencies at the feet of the press and popular opinion, and

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some of it with the administrative structures that kept doctors underpaid and overworked. But individual doctors needed to find an antidote for the problems Sikorsky identified: isolation, status anxiety, and lack of creature comforts. One way that doctors coped was to plunge into medical literature.20 Russian doctors loved to write, and part of the impetus behind that graphomania was surely the attempt to redress their professional status.21 As they described their work, and wrote the history of their practice, Russian psychiatrists were attempting to bolster their professional condition, addressing that ‘sad privilege’ that they enjoyed. In writing about themselves, Russian psychiatrists depicted themselves as heroes of a sort. For example, one of Sergei Korsakov’s greatest achievements was his widely used textbook of psychiatry, A Course of Psychiatry (Kurs Psikhiatrii), first published in 1893.22 To characterize the ideal Russian doctor, Bazhenov quoted liberally from the textbook: ... the social significance of doctors [Korsakov had written], especially Russian doctors, is not limited to being healers of disease and guardians of health. Having received both a specialized and a general education at state institutions of higher learning, they themselves are spreaders of enlightenment in many corners of our enormous fatherland, thereby returning at least a small portion of their debt. [They owe this debt] to those who were not fortunate enough to receive an education but who have nonetheless supplied the state with the means to fund students, universities, academies, and clinics. (Bazhenov, Psikhiatricheskie 1)

It was this ideal of the selfless doctor that Korsakov personified.23 Like literary figures, like young educators who went ‘to the people,’ like the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) who took their art out into the countryside, doctors too were ‘spreaders of enlightenment.’ In his obituary of Korsakov (who died in 1900), Serbsky wrote that ‘a complete lack of any egoistic motives and an extremely developed sense of moral duty run through his entire life and work’ (‘S.S. Korsakov’ 953). Bazhenov added: ‘[Korsakov] held high a banner proclaiming: “love thy neighbour and devote thyself selflessly to the interests of society.” God grant that we might continue to carry that banner’ (Speech 956). Several years later, in 1902, Vasily Sprimon, the editor of the Medical Review, himself reviewed the second, posthumous edition of Korsakov’s psychiatry textbook and pointed out that in the chapter on ‘General Treatment for Mental Illnesses,’ Korsakov ‘described in all fullness those humanitarian ideas which he always professed and which gained for him such general

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admiration and the sympathy of each and all’ (Sprimon). This paragon of Russian psychiatrists taught in his textbook that ‘the living soul must be visible in everything, and first and foremost in the individualization of each patient ... The patient must be not a number, but a person’ (Sprimon, quoting Korsakov, Kurs 563). Humane treatment, a concept that goes back to Pinel, for Russian doctors meant that patients were to be individuals, but doctors were the heroes of the narrative. As A.A. Kizevetter was to say about Korsakov’s generation, already after the Russian Revolution, ‘[t]here was a notable trend whereby activists believed they should serve the ideals of freedom and social justice through their everyday, daily work, within the frame of contemporary reality, [and this showed] no less heroism, than in the dramatic effects of true political struggle’ (qtd. in Osipov 411). Korsakov’s former student N.E. Osipov wrote that his name ‘became a symbol of a loving, humane attitude toward the mentally ill’ (409). His textbook was not Korsakov’s only literary legacy; Korsakov had a ‘well-rounded’ education and he left his library, ‘the only luxury he allowed himself,’ to Moscow University’s psychiatric clinic (Osipov 412–13). Another example of the literary aspirations of medical doctors was Nikolai Bazhenov’s book Psychiatric Discussions on Literary and Social Themes (1903). This book was a compendium of mostly previously published articles, but it reminds us of two things in particular – Russian doctors loved to write, and they loved to write about their own history and their literary contemporaries. I have already quoted from one speech published in this book, ‘The Jubilee Year in the History of Psychiatry (1792–1892),’ but here we also find articles such as ‘Ill Writers and Pathological Work,’ on Dostoevsky and Maupassant; ‘The Spiritual Drama of Garshin,’ another writer of the turn of the century about whom Robert Wessling writes in this volume; ‘The Symbolists and the Decadents’; and ‘Gogol’s Illness and Death’ (1901).24 The first article, which had not been published elsewhere, was a speech in memory of Korsakov (‘The Activity and Significance of S.S. Korsakov as a Doctor and Teacher outside the University’), whom Bazhenov elevated to a kind of virtual Hall of Great Men in Psychiatry. It is fascinating that Bazhenov chose to inaugurate ‘psychiatric discussions on literary and social themes’; it is more fascinating, perhaps, that he was not the only doctor who felt he had the knowledge, expertise, and right to pronounce on such topics. But while Bazhenov recognized that psychiatrists such as himself were choosing to delve into issues that were in theory ‘beyond their competence,’ he argued that ‘the right and

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rationale for such interference has been given to us by artists themselves and especially by the aesthetic critics themselves ... If literary men consider it their natural right to interpret life as one big clinic,’ he went on, ‘then it would be unfair to refuse us, clinicians by profession, the right to turn our methods of research to an analysis of their works and of the conditions of art under which these works were created.’ In other words, Bazhenov, like Freud in the West, felt that he had the right and even the duty to analyse people at a geographic and even chronological distance, assuming those people were themselves the authors of literature.25 Writers see the world as a clinic full of patients, he argued, and we as doctors can in turn analyse the writers themselves. Sirotkina has shown how Bazhenov focused his psychiatric eye on Russian writers and their characters. He also directed that eye on his colleagues, in particular Sergei Sergeevich Korsakov, whom Bazhenov characterized as a ‘hero-doctor.’ Korsakov had played an important role in Bazhenov’s own life, as it was under the influence of his teacher Korsakov that Bazhenov chose psychiatry in the first place (Sirotkina, Diagnosing 57).26 Korsakov was professor of psychiatry and the head of the Moscow University Psychiatric Clinic – the same clinic that so impressed the Frenchmen Vallon and Marie in 189727 – as well as of a private clinic on the model of the York Retreat.28 In 1900, when he was only forty-eight years old, Korsakov succumbed to heart disease. This untimely death occasioned public mourning and celebration of the deceased. His students and successors were ‘determined to secure for their mentor, and by extension for their school, the preeminent position in the history of Russian psychiatry.’ Korsakov was famed for advocating the ‘no restraint’ method of caring for patients, mythically invented by Pinel, but Korsakov’s practical attitude about conditions in Russian asylums was forgotten. As Brown reminds us, while Korsakov did deliver the first paper on the topic of ‘no restraint’ in Russia at the First Conference of Russian Psychiatrists in 1887, he went on to argue for professional autonomy for psychiatrists: ‘the strait jacket is a medical remedy and in that sense it can be utilized. We should not take that right away from the doctor. I don’t see that as possible. We cannot completely do away with restraints’ (Brown, ‘Heroes’ 300; Korsakov, ‘K voprosu’). Korsakov was internationally recognized for his work on alcohol-induced psychoses (known as Korsakov’s syndrome), and at his death his image was embellished even further by his friends and colleagues. In his speech at the meeting of the Society of Moscow Neuropathologists

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and Psychiatrists on the day after Korsakov’s funeral, Bazhenov quoted Schiller. ‘How important it is,’ he exclaimed, ‘that a significant actor appear according to the significance of a given historical moment.’29 Korsakov was for the history of Russian Psychiatry a Russian Phillipe Pinel, the instigator and founder of the humanitarian aspects of Russian psychiatric care – at the beginning of the 1880s he helped to found Russian psychiatry through diagnosis and classification of diseases, the introduction of ‘no-restraint,’ and the theoretical introduction of the concept of patronage familial. Indeed, Bazhenov felt that the last two decades of the nineteenth century could very well be called the ‘Korsakov era.’ For Bazhenov, there was a ‘heroism ... in every soul,’ but Korsakov’s came out in its fullest measure, making him a hero of his psychiatric time. When Bazhenov said that Korsakov’s ‘personality [in all its amazing harmony, spiritual constitution, and abilities] is truly a “work of art,”’ he was anointing a Great Man for the history of psychiatric medicine. He was also defining Korsakov as a literary and social character, an exemplar for Russian doctors and Russians generally – a hero in the literary sense.30 During his own lifetime and especially after his death, Sergei Korsakov was seen as an exemplar for doctors and psychiatrists everywhere, a ‘psychiatrist-father’ and a ‘psychiatrist-hero,’ and the founder of the ‘humanitarian traditions’ of Russian psychiatry.31 Bazhenov portrayed him not only as a literary hero, but also as a special kind of doctor, an ‘honored physician in service to the Russian intellectual worker’ (Psikhiatricheskiia 2), and, as Sirotkina points out, Korsakov’s early death showed that he too was an overworked intellectual, himself one of the category of what she calls an ‘archetypal Russian neurasthenic’ (Diagnosing 134–5).32 In some ways, psychiatrists aimed to take a position formerly occupied by writers – as moral leaders of society. After 1905, for example, Dr Tutyshkin saw the beginnings of a new life in which psychiatrists could take a leading role: ‘It has fallen to psychiatrists to act as pioneers on the new and glorious path to a renewal of Russian life ... It is psychiatrists who decide questions of upbringing and education; it is they who decide questions of sin, crime, and criminal justice. Finally, it is to psychiatrists that many other issues belong: humane treatment, philanthropy, charity, the rights of the mentally ill, the proper organization of treatment and care of the mentally ill.’33 Tutyshkin, later canonized by Soviet historians of medicine as an early Bolshevik sympathizer, echoed the ideas of Russian realist writers when he said that ‘The cult of the word as separate from the deed is the great sin of the Russian intellectual.’34 Nonetheless, with his extensive writing and lecturing, Tutyshkin carried on the traditions of his

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medical and literary colleagues. Psychiatrists were the authors of their own narratives as well as the heroes, and if they followed Tutyshkin’s call to arms, they were also to be heroes of a new Russian society. As an integral part of their struggle for authority and legitimacy, Russian doctors in the late imperial period took their history into their own hands, not only following and documenting medical treatments and advances as well as problems in Europe and Russia in their extensive medical journals, but also nominating their own Russian doctor-heroes, including Sergei Korsakov, their very own Pinel, and shaping their image of how such doctor-heroes should act and be seen by society. Medical, memoir, and fictional literature all played a role in the shaping of that image, and the doctors of the mentally ill saw themselves as perhaps in competition with, but also walking hand in hand with, Russian writers, ‘experts of human souls.’35 In Russia writers and psychiatrists competed over definitions of insanity, writers often seeing the world as a clinic, while doctors saw the clinic as a microcosm of the world. (And writer-doctors like Anton Chekhov took this metaphor as a given in their work.) Both writers and psychiatrists took their opportunities to write the history of madness and psychiatry in Russia, and each grasped for the definition of where the body and soul meet. After all, though scientists struggled with and often did their best to ignore the metaphysical implications,36 the Russian scientific term for mental illness is dushevnaia bolezn’, illness of the soul or psyche. Since Russian writers had for years been plumbing the depths of the enigmatic russkaia dusha, the Russian soul, psychiatrists found themselves exploring the very same territory as their literary countrymen. Russian psychiatrists recognized that the conflict between soul and body with which they struggled mirrored almost exactly the relationship between literature and science. Already doctors of the soul, they strove to find that elusive soul in literature, and to become doctors of the literary arts as well.

NOTES Research for this article was made possible thanks to a residential fellowship at the Wood Institute at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, as well as a sabbatical leave from Ohio State University. The author is grateful to audiences at the University of Pennsylvania and especially Middlebury College for their comments on versions of the paper.

Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887–1907 187 1 Julie V. Brown has explored the ways in which professionalizing psychiatrists struggled to wrest authority over questions of insanity from the government. See her ‘Professionalization and Radicalization.’ In another article, Brown argues that ‘the intelligentsia frequently idealized madness in such a way as to make psychiatric approaches largely irrelevant: the fictional heroic figure of the insightful fool was commonly portrayed as less in need of medical help than society itself was in need of his special – even divinely inspired – wisdom’ (‘Social Influences’ 27–44, 31). 2 Maudsley’s book Responsibility in Mental Disease (1874) was almost immediately translated into Russian and published in St Petersburg (1875). 3 When psychiatrists were struggling with bureaucratic insistence on local service for the mentally ill, and thus the dispersal of patients to smaller medical clinics from more centralized regional asylums, they suddenly became advocates of outpatient services. Brown writes about the decentralization of psychiatric care during the early years of the twentieth century, for example, arguing that psychiatrists took up the policy of patronage familial, or community-based foster care for the mentally ill, in great part to keep their patients out of the primarily somatic district clinics. See ‘Social Influences’ 34–8. ‘The need to develop an affordable system of care which would minimize competition and interference from both other physicians and the police,’ she writes, ‘had led them to embrace therapeutic concepts which they acknowledged to be inferior’ (42). 4 As Brown has noted, the elevation of heroes was a common way of writing the history of psychiatry in Russia and of ‘confering credit where credit is perceived to be due.’ Thus she relates that I.M. Balinskii, the ‘Father of Russian Psychiatry,’ received the sobriquet of the ‘Russian Pinel’ from the historian S.D. Vladychko. The struggle between the adherents of Balinskii and Korsakov is the topic of Brown, ‘Heroes and Non-Heroes.’ 5 Philadelphia’s great doctor Benjamin Rush does not make it into the history of founders and reformers of the science of psychiatry. Though he bears the title of ‘father of American psychiatry,’ his preferred treatment for mental illness – as for virtually everything else – was bloodletting (Madness 126–7). Rush did, however, invent a mechanical means for ‘curing madness’ – the ‘Tranquillizer.’ See the description and reproduction of an engraving of a madman being treated in the special chair in Scull, ‘Social History’ 34. 6 In his history of Russian medicine from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, medical historian Mark Mirsky stresses the international character of medical progress. See Mirskii. 7 This is a self-assessment by the journal’s staff. See the jubilee edition, Meditsinskoe obozrenie 51.1 (1899). 8 Brown (‘Peasant Survival Strategies’ 320) also comments on this, comparing

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Angela Brintlinger the calibre of asylum workers to Chekhov’s fictional Nikita in ‘Ward No. 6.’ On Chekhov, see Margarita Odesskaya’s article below. For more on this, see Brown, ‘Social Influences’ 29–31. Brown notes that after the Revolution of 1905, these efforts to keep the police at bay largely failed. See ‘Social Influences’ 31–4. P.P. Tutyshkin, ‘Psikhiatricheskie zavedeniia zapadnoi Evropy,’ Vrachebnaia khronika Khar’kovskoi gubernii no. 14 (1904), reviewed in Meditsinskoe obozrenie 62 (1904): 274–6, 275. Sirotkina mentions an S.S. Stupin – possibly the same physician I am quoting. Sirotkina, Diagnosing 135, 151. This is from an 1894 article surveying statistical data on the mentally ill from the Imperial Military-Medical Academy, one of the main pedagogical as well as treatment facilities in Russia. Dr Gadziatskii reported that, between 1870 and 1890, 1,452 people had been treated at the St Petersburg clinic – 1,038 men and 414 women. Of these, most were between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five and spent between three months and one year at the clinic. Among the twenty- to forty-year-old men there were twice as many bachelors as married men, and among the women between the ages of sixteen and forty-five there were twice as many married as virgins. Meditsinskoe obozrenie 42.21 (1894): 822. This comment refers to city-dwellers; for analysis of why peasants entered mental hospitals, see Brown, ‘Peasant Survival Strategies.’ This echoes the American sentiment, whereby woman was ‘the product and prisoner of her reproductive system.’ See Rosenberg and Smith-Rosenberg 55. Interestingly, in the early Soviet years this emphasis on the physical nature of women’s illnesses was repeated in cases of rape victims. See Dan Healey’s discussion of the medical examination of women’s bodies rather than their minds in chapter 9 above. There was a political aspect to this as well. In 1905 Dr G. Ia. Troshin reported a higher rate of mental illness among political prisoners (2.85 per cent as opposed to 0.1–0.15 per cent among the general population and 1–1.5 per cent among criminals) and correlated this to education, since 80 per cent of political prisoners had a high school education and 40 per cent had a higher education, as compared to 1.8 per cent of criminals with high school educations (‘Svoboda sovesti po psikhiatricheskim dannym,’ Syn otechestva no. 43 [1905]). See Meditsinskoe obozrenie no. 63 (1905): 747–8. See also Brown, ‘Revolution and Psychosis.’ The full text of his keynote speech is published as ‘Uspekhi russkogo khudozhestvennogo tvorchestva,’ as well as in his five-volume Sbornik. Brown notes that Sikorsky disappeared from official Soviet histories of psychiatry because of his involvement as a witness for the prosecution in the interna-

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tionally scandalous ‘Beilis affair’ – the Kiev trial of a Jew accused in 1913 of the ritual murder of a Gentile. See Brown, ‘Heroes and Non-Heroes’ 303. N.E. Osipov also used the ‘fathers and sons’ trope, quoting Bazhenov but also going further. S.S. Korsakov was, in his words, ‘a father of patients ... as a resident at the Preobrazhenskaia hospital and as director of Bekker’s clinic’ (Osipov 410). Sirotkina mentions that the debate on models of education was framed in terms of Oblomovism – the disease of helplessness and inactivity identified by Ivan Goncharov in his 1858 novel Oblomov and by literary and social critic Nikolai Dobroliubov in his 1859 essay ‘What Is Oblomovitis?’ See Kapterev; Tutyshkin, ‘Sovremennye’; and Sirotkina, Diagnosing 221n39. Margarita Odesskaya and Robert Wessling both investigate this question in the present volume. Sikorskii, ‘O samoubiistve sredi russkikh vrachei,’ reviewed by Serbskii 96–7. Further on the question of suicide see Paperno, Suicide. Chekhov’s Dr Ragin only subscribed to one medical journal, and he rarely consulted it. On this question, the most authoritative source is Julie V. Brown, ‘Professionalization of Russian Psychiatry.’ See also Popkin, who comes to a conclusion about writing and professionalization similar to my own, stating: ‘What we see in the Russian case histories, rather than a profession of faith, is an anxious faith in the profession. Somewhat short on Freud’s “detailed description of mental processes,” late nineteenth-century Russian psychiatric writing documents most tellingly the urgencies of professionalization’ (190). Odesskaya notes that Chekhov had this volume on his shelf and probably consulted it when writing his fictional stories about madmen. For more on the psychiatrists of this era within the general medical and scientific community, see Todes, esp. chapter 7, ‘Biological Psychology in the 1880’s and 1890’s: Professionalism and Political Moderation.’ On Korsakov see 350–1. Brown writes that Korsakov was the hero of the Moscow-centred narrative of the history of Russian psychiatry, while Balinskii was the hero of the Petersburg-centred narrative. Both were apparently ‘charismatic teacher[s], creative researcher[s], and innovative in [their] approach to the treatment of mental patients’ (Brown, ‘Heroes and Non-Heroes’ 299). On Bazhenov, see Sirotkina, Diagnosing 20–3 (on Gogol’), 66–73 (on Dostoevsky), 131–2 (on Garshin). Bazhenov, ‘Bol’nye pisateli i patologicheskoe tvorchestvo,’ Psikhiatricheskiia besedy 10–11. This genre, the pathography or posthumous medical biography, is the subject of Sirotkina’s Diagnosing. It was not only Korsakov whom Bazhenov dubbed a ‘hero-doctor.’ He saw

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Angela Brintlinger the entire 1880s as a ‘heroic period in the history of Russian psychiatry.’ Qtd. in Osipov 410. The Moscow University Psychiatric Clinic was right next door to Lev Tolstoy’s Moscow estate, and according to Tolstoy’s daughter Tatiana, her father and Korsakov used to chat over the fence (Sirotkina, Diagnosing 94, citing T.L. Sukhotina-Tolstaia, Vospominaniia [Moscow: Khudlit, 1976] 434, 435). See S.S. Korsakov, ‘Ob ustroistve chastnykh lechebnits.’ Apparently from 1879 to 1897, Korsakov was the director of the Moscow clinic founded by F.I. Gertsog in 1830 – the oldest private clinic for the mentally ill in Russia. Bazhenov took over the clinic in 1905 (Sirotkina, Diagnosing 99). Bazhenov, ‘Vneuniversitetskaia deiatel’nost’ i znachenie S.S. Korsakova kak vracha i uchitelia,’ Psikhiatricheskiia besedy 8. Bazhenov, ‘Vneuniversitetskaia deiatel’nost’,’ Psikhiatricheskiia besedy 9, 2. In turn, Osipov lauded Bazhenov as ‘one of the psychiatrist-fathers, psychiatristheroes,’ along with Korsakov and Serbsky (Osipov 410). Sirotkina states that this is the reason the new journal Psychotherapy (Psikhoterapiia) launched its first issue in 1910 with the article ‘Psychotherapeutic Views of S.S. Korsakov’ (Diagnosing 104). In fact, Zhurnal nevropatologii was named in Korsakov’s honour in 1901 and maintained the extension ‘im. S.S. Korsakova’ well into the Soviet era. Korsakov’s brain, along with those of Kozhevnikov and Bakmet’ev, was kept in the collection of Rossolimo’s Neurological Institute for dissection. See Kapustin, ‘O mozge uchenykh v sviazi s problemoi vzaimootnosheniia mezhdu velichinoi mozga i odarennost’iu,’ Klinicheskii arkhiv no. 2 (1926): 107–14, cited in Sirotkina, Diagnosing 233n88. P. Tutyshkin, ‘K voprosu o zakonodatel’stve o dushevno-bol’nykh i psikhiatricheskikh uchrezhdenii,’ 592, reported by A. Golosov, Meditsinskoe obozrenie 66.2 (1906): 592–6. Tutyshkin, Obshchestvennyi vrach no. 9–10 (1917): 79, quoted in A.G. Ianovskii 1413. Ianovskii’s article begins in the genre of hagiography: ‘P. P. Tutyshkin was born in Kaluga in 1868. Having lost his parents at a young age, he was raised in an orphanage, but then was able to enter a gimnazium after all. Having set himself the goal of receiving a higher education, he went on to enrol in Moscow University. During the period of his university studies, P.P. Tutyshkin lived in very difficult material conditions, earning money through tutoring and simultaneously helping his two younger sisters receive an education. First P.P. Tutyshkin graduated from the department of natural sciences and then (in 1897) from the medical faculty’ (Ianovskii 1411). For more on Tutyshkin, see Brown, ‘Heroes and Non-Heroes’ 304 and Sirotkina, Diagnosing 127, 136, 221, 223.

Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887–1907 191 35 One psychiatrist, in arguing against the death penalty at the 1905 Kiev Second Congress of Psychiatrists, reminded his fellow doctors that because of the death penalty ‘we almost lost our great psychopathologist, Dostoevsky.’ See Meditsinskoe obozrenie 66 (1906): 842. 36 The soul, writes Daniel Todes, ‘was of little interest to either psychiatrists or physiologists, although some participated in polite exchanges of opinion with the philosophers of the Moscow Psychological Society’ (336). He continues: ‘These men ... approached the human psyche as a biological entity accessible to objective investigation and included psychology among the medical sciences ... For psychiatrists ... a broadly defined biological model satisfied their professional needs ... [B]y devaluing philosophical questions that seemed neither professionally nor politically pressing, psychiatrists could stake a claim on questions ranging from medical treatment to judicial adjudication of the mentally ill; and do so without causing any disruptive altercations within the profession or with the Church (343).

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11 ‘Let Them Go Crazy’: Madness in the Works of Chekhov margarita odesskaya

Anton Chekhov considered medicine to be his ‘lawful wife.’1 There is no doubt that medicine played an essential role in the writer’s life and work. At university, Anton and his brother Alexander planned to write an article entitled ‘The History of Sexual Authority from the Point of View of Natural Science’ (PSS: Letters 1: 63–6); after graduation, he collected material for a historical dissertation to be entitled ‘Medicine in Russia’ (PSS: Works 16: 277–356); and as a mature writer, Chekhov planned to defend his doctoral dissertation on the basis of his book Sakhalin Island. One of his late stories, entitled ‘A Dreary Story,’ even features an old, sick professor of medicine on his deathbed. In Chekhov’s life, literature and medicine coexisted and complemented each other. His medical practice presented him with material for many of his works, and a knowledge of natural science formed his worldview as a writer. A student of the professor of general medicine Zakhar’in, Chekhov transferred the principle of individualizing every case and phenomenon from medicine into literature.2 Indeed, Anton Chekhov maintained a great respect for Zakhar’in, whom he valued as highly in the field of medicine as he did Tolstoy in literature.3 The theme of Chekhov and medicine has been addressed previously by biographers, literary scholars, and doctors.4 However, in recent work by psychiatrists this theme has received a new turn. Contemporary psychiatrists look both at Chekhov’s works and the author himself as objects of psychiatric analysis. Thus Dr Mark Burno, in diagnosing Chekhov’s heroes, concludes that the characters reflect the mental state of their creator.5 Burno believes that Chekhov and many of his characters can be classified as psychasthenics – a clinical type first described by the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet6 – and gives a detailed sketch of this type,

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presenting quite convincing arguments in support of his diagnosis. Psychasthenics are characterized by a marked lack of confidence in themselves and their emotions. They compensate for this lack of confidence by restless mental activity and, if they are creative people, creativity. Psychasthenics are drawn to noisy groups, but they rapidly tire of them and long to be alone. People of the psychasthenic type frequently suffer from hypochondria, and they have a sharpened sense of the inevitability of death. All of these characteristics noted by Burno are consistent with Chekhov’s biography and in great part explain his behaviour. His uncertainty of the value of his own literary work,7 his fear of marriage, and his complaints in letters about his health, as well as his joyful, heartfelt invitations to friends to visit him, followed by a longing for solitude and an aggravated impatience with his guests – all of this fits the symptoms of a psychasthenic (see Tikhomirov). In his article ‘On Chekhov’s Psychasthenic Worldview in Connection with the Story “The Black Monk”’ (‘O psikhastenicheskom’), Burno shows that psychasthenic traits emerge in the behaviour of Chekhov’s heroes as well. The hero of the story in question, Master Kovrin, needs the encouragement of the black monk, who has convinced him that he is a unique person. Unfortunately for him, the ‘monk’ is a hallucination, and when the hero is ‘cured’ of his hallucinations, he becomes irritable, losing both his inspiration and his charm. Professor Nikolai Stepanovich, the hero of ‘A Dreary Story,’ has also recently been classified by psychiatrists as belonging to the psychasthenic personality type. Despite his status as a famous scientist respected by all, Nikolai Stepanovich experiences a torturous lack of selfconfidence. Chekhov’s own mental health has never before come under scrutiny. These medical specialists, however, present him in a completely different light, and they also illuminate the behaviour of his characters in that same medical light. If we leave aside the question of whether doctors should be analysing the deceased writer and his heroes, we can learn much from these specialists as we consider the more legitimate issue of how, in his own lifetime, Chekhov himself saw and portrayed the mentally ill and the doctors who treated them. The most famous of Chekhov’s works on the theme of psychiatry are ‘Ward No. 6’ (1892) and ‘The Black Monk’ (1894), both of which have been the subject of extensive literary scholarship. In examining the works, literary scholars have for the most part focused on artistic content, the characters’ philosophical and moral positions, and the author’s

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attitude toward his characters.8 It seems to me that it would be useful to look again at these works in the context of social psychiatry and in connection with the problem of ‘genius and madness,’ a truly burning question of the fin-de-siècle era. In my examination of ‘Ward No. 6’ I want to focus on Chekhov’s attitude toward the institution of psychiatry as a part of Russia’s social system at the end of the nineteenth century. In this sense, ‘Ward No. 6’ offers invaluable material on the history of social medicine, comparable to the testimony of zemstvo doctors about the condition of psychiatry in the Russian provinces of the 1890s. ‘Ward No. 6’ was written at a time when psychiatry in Russia was only beginning to take shape as an independent field within medicine. Psychiatrist Nikolai Nikolaevich Bazhenov helped found a hospital for the mentally ill in Riazan’ and left a description of his activities related to the reorganization of psychiatry in the Russian provinces (Four and a Half Years of Psychiatric Work in the Provincial Zemstvo, 1890). As Bazhenov wrote, ‘some ten years ago [i.e., around 1880] in the majority of Russian universities there was no clinical psychiatry; not only in the provinces, but even in population centres there were virtually no institutions which could call themselves hospitals for the mentally ill, although there were some unsatisfactory – in all aspects – homes for the mad, with a very limited number of beds. There were virtually no practising doctors who had an interest in this field of medicine and might have devoted themselves to it.’ Bazhenov noted that ‘the practice of Russian psychiatry owes its existence in large measure to the zemstvos’ (Chetyre 1, 11). One such zemstvo doctor, Pavel Arsen’evich Arkhangel’skii (1852– 1913), was commissioned by the zemstvos to review a number of provincial institutions for the mentally ill. Eventually to be the author of seventeen books on hospital design and administration, Arkhangel’skii took up the zemstvo challenge and investigated Russian institutions for the mad on a grand scale, even choosing to stay at the hospitals themselves in order to study them as closely as possible. His extremely detailed report described conditions in psychiatric hospitals of the Tver’, Novgorod, Saratov, Tambov, Kharkov, Riazan’, Poltava, Kherson, Tauride, and Kazan’ provinces as well as Moscow’s Preobrazhenskii Hospital. This report was published as a separate book in 1887 (Otchet). Chekhov had met Pavel Arsen’evich, then a well-known zemstvo doctor and the director of a model hospital in Voskresensk, some years earlier, when in 1884 the future writer came to practise medicine there after completing university (M.P. Chekhov 219). In 1887 Chekhov again met Arkhangel’skii and read the report in manuscript. After reading it, Arkhangel’skii was to

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recall, Chekhov asked the author: ‘Don’t you think it would be good to describe the prisons [in such detail] as well?’ (Sobolev 134).9 In his description of provincial hospitals constructed on the new model – which took into account the specifics of patients’ conditions – Arkhangel’skii showed that everything must play a role: the design of the hospital building, the choice of site, conveniences, nutrition, patients’ personal hygiene and clothing, distribution among wards, and quality of medical personnel.10 In the conclusion of his report Arkhangel’skii compared the new hospitals with the homes for the mad of the prezemstvo period. As an example, he pointed to an article by a Dr Shults entitled ‘The Care of Lunatics in Russia’ (Shul’ts), which reviewed the history of caring for the mentally ill in Russia and noted that ‘the insane were considered to be totally worthless people, and everything was done to protect society from such people’ (cited in P.A. Arkhangel’skii 288). Arkhangel’skii offered his own views on conditions in hospitals for the mentally ill in earlier times. For example, he wrote: ‘at the Tver’ zemstvo meeting of 1871 one of the councillors announced “that he would rather see the unhappy mental patients kept in cages than in the conditions they presently suffered.”’ A Doctors’ Conference of 1873 called one home for the mad ‘an undisciplined menagerie, in which animals are locked up and left to the mercy of fate’ (P.A. Arkhangel’skii, 290). Basing his judgment on many eyewitness accounts, Arkhangel’skii drew the following portrait of the pre-zemstvo ‘madhouse’: [I]t was a completely unsuitable place for maintaining the mentally ill, recalling a stockade, a prison, where there was no division of patients according to the nature of their illness – that basic principle of psychiatric administrative practice – as a result of which the uproar in the institution was continual, and at every step there were fights. It is not difficult to imagine what role a ‘tamer,’ using an apparatus recalling a horse’s harness, might play here. [There were also] poor provisions for the patients – all of this made the condition of the mentally ill even more terrible. Insufficient medical supervision, with doctors merely stopping by these departments or attending in some kind of unusual circumstances, meant that the patients were at the complete mercy of the warden and staff who, of course, did not spare their ‘fists.’ (P.A. Arkhangel’skii, 291–2)

There is no doubt that Arkhangel’skii’s descriptions and conclusions made an impression on Chekhov’s imagination. Then why, for his story ‘Ward No. 6,’ did Chekhov portray the horrific conditions of the past,

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which made his hospital seem like a prison, instead of the new, ideal conditions which had been created for mentally ill patients in certain hospitals during the period of psychiatry’s reorganization? The answer lies in Chekhov’s instinctive correlation of psychiatric hospitals and prisons. ‘Ward No. 6’ was written at a time when Chekhov had recently returned from his trip to Sakhalin Island and was still working through his impressions. In a letter to Men’shikov, Chekhov noted that in the book on Sakhalin he gave medicine its due (PSS: Letters 5: 262). In Sakhalin Island, along with descriptions of prisons and infirmaries, we also find a description of the condition of the mentally ill: The mentally ill, as I already mentioned, have no separate quarters on Sakhalin; while I was there some of them were quartered in Korsakov’s colony along with the syphilitics, and I was told that one even caught syphilis. The others, living freely, worked alongside the healthy, cohabited with them, escaped, and were convicted [of crimes]. (PSS: Works 14–15: 365)

Chekhov transferred his impressions of visiting infirmaries on Sakhalin into ‘Ward No. 6.’11 We might recall, for example, that when Ivan Dmitrievich Gromov was first sent to the hospital, he was placed in a ward for venereal diseases (Works 8: 80). Ward No. 6 – a place of isolation for people who were inconvenient for society – was not only organized like a prison but was in fact located across from the prison. A prison on an island from which it was impossible to escape, isolated from the rest of life, a prison where cruel physical punishments took place which humiliated the individual – this showed the impotence of the state in the face of crime. Medicine itself demonstrated an equal impotence in the face of mental illness, a basic inability to make proper diagnoses. Gromov says: But after all, dozens, hundreds of madmen wander about at liberty, because your ignorance is incapable of distinguishing them from healthy people. Why must I and these other unhappy men serve for everyone else, like some kind of scapegoats? You, the medical assistant, the warden, and all of your hospital scum are immeasurably morally inferior to each of us, so why should we be incarcerated instead of you? Where is the logic?

Dr Ragin answers thus: ‘Questions of morals and logic are irrelevant here. Everything depends on chance. He who has been put into the ward must serve, and he who has not is free, that’s all there is to it’ (PSS: Works

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8: 95). As this dialogue shows, in light of the weak state of psychiatry at the time, for Ragin the concept of a norm is perfectly relative; the norm is decided by society, and no one is safe; anyone might become a patient of Ward No. 6. Here Chekhov was polemicizing with those who had high hopes that zemstvo activity would improve social medicine. It seems that Dr Ragin’s thoughts about the condition of hospitals correspond to what Dr Chekhov observed with his own eyes on Sakhalin Island and later in Melikhovo, when he was doing the work of a zemstvo doctor. ‘The entire business of hospitals,’ Ragin observes, ‘is built on theft, squabbles, rumours, nepotism, and rude charlatanism, just as it was twenty years ago, and the hospital, as before, is an immoral institution, harmful in the highest degree to the health of the people’ (PSS: Works 8: 91). During a cholera epidemic in Melikhovo, Chekhov himself was able to experience the activities of the zemstvo. Here is what he had to say about them in a letter to N.M. Lintvareva: The cholera is fast approaching, but the zemsvto has only now ordered hypodermic needles and even enemas from Berlin. I have only one enema for twenty-five villages, not a single thermometer, and only a half-pound of carbolic acid ... Our zemstvo is slow to act, if cultured and complaisant. (PSS: Letters 5: 99)

Thus we can say that Chekhov was fairly restrained in his attitude toward zemstvo reforms of hospitals because he understood that this work did not have a systematic, universal character, and that the examples of model psychiatric hospitals presented in Arkhangel’skii’s report were isolated cases. Dr Ragin also knew about medical progress, but only from newspapers and journals: ‘Psychiatry with its contemporary classification, methods of diagnosis and treatment – it’s a total Elbrus in comparison with what used to be,’ the doctor said. ‘Now they no longer pour cold water on the heads of the insane, nor do they put them in strait-jackets; patients are treated humanely and even – as they write in the newspapers – are treated to plays and dances.’ (PSS: Works 8: 92)

But Chekhov emphasizes that the city in which Ward No. 6 is located is two hundred kilometres from the railroad, and thus the new achievements in psychiatry will not arrive soon. Indeed, they may never arrive at

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all. We, as readers, are to join in with Ragin when he notes sceptically: ‘They organize dances and plays for the insane, but they still don’t let them go free’ (PSS: Works 8: 92). Chekhov shows that neither psychiatry nor the existing social system as a whole is capable of offering the necessary aid, and everything happens according to Dr Ragin’s logic: ‘As long as prisons and mad houses exist, then someone has to be locked up in them.’ In the words of the doctor, society is invincible, as long as it ‘protects itself from criminals, the mentally ill, and all inconvenient people generally’ (PSS: Works 8: 96). As fate would have it, by the end of the story Dr Ragin himself turns out to be just such an ‘inconvenient’ person, and we can imagine that anyone might end up in such a situation as long as medicine, and more concretely psychiatry, remained in the role which Chekhov portrayed, that is to say as long as psychiatric institutions fulfilled the function of prisons. Upon reading the story, Chekhov’s contemporary Nikolai Leskov observed astutely: ‘In “Ward No. 6” all of our customs and characters are portrayed in miniature. Ward No. 6 is everywhere. It is Russia’ (Leskov 316). Chekhov’s story ‘The Black Monk’ was also written at Melikhovo in his post-Sakhalin period. It was at this time that Chekhov became interested in psychiatry. In Meshcherski, not far from Melikhovo, he had got to know the famous psychiatrist Vladimir Ivanovich Yakovenko, the founder of the best psychiatric hospital in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Chekhov sent patients to Yakovenko (PSS: Letters 5: 219).21 During work on the story in the spring of 1893, Chekhov complained in his letters about his own poor physical and psychological health and expressed a desire for solitude. Recalling his condition in a letter to Suvorin on 28 July 1893, he wrote: ‘In the spring I really did have a rough time. I wrote to you about it. Hemorrhoids and a disgusting psychopathic mood – and due to this, daily squabbling and my morbid desire to be alone’ (PSS: Letters 5: 216). The writer’s brother Mikhail also noted Anton’s nervousness: At Melikhovo Anton Pavlovich’s nerves were shot, probably from being overtired. He barely slept at all. As soon as he began to lose himself in sleep, he would be ‘yanked’ out of it, suddenly awaking in horror. Some strange force would throw him onto the bed, inside something would be torn out ‘by the roots.’ He would jump up and then not be able to fall back asleep for a long time. (M.P. Chekhov 295)

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It is clear from Mikhail Chekhov’s memoirs that there is much of the personal, the autobiographical, in the story ‘The Black Monk.’ Mikhail writes that Gaetano Braga’s romance ‘Leggenda valacca,’ as performed by Lika Mizinova, had a certain effect on Chekhov: ‘Anton Pavlovich found something mystical, filled with beautiful romanticism, in this song. I mention this because this romance had a great effect on the origin of his story “The Black Monk”’ (M.P. Chekhov 295). In the story, Kovrin participates in conversations about mirages similar to those which took place at Melikhovo, as Mikhail Pavlovich recalls: Then we began to speak about mirages, about how the rays of the sun are refracted in the air and so on, and as a result the question arose: could a mirage itself become refracted in the air and produce a second mirage? Clearly the answer is yes. And this second mirage could create a third mirage, and the third a fourth, and so on, ad infinitum. Consequently it is possible that the mirages now roaming the universe were created and reflect places and even people and animals from thousands of years ago. Is this not the origin of apparitions? (M.P. Chekhov 296)

And finally, the black monk himself, according to Mikhail Chekhov’s testimony, came to the author at Melikhovo during an afternoon nap (M.P. Chekhov 296). Of course, these facts, brought out in Chekhov’s brother’s memoirs, are important for understanding the psychic state of the author of stories about the mentally ill, although he himself, as we mentioned above, did not admit that there was a connection between the story ‘The Black Monk’ and his own mental condition. Chekhov warned his future readers that ‘The Black Monk’ ‘is a medical story, historia morbi. It concerns megalomania’ (PSS: Letters 5: 262). Many of his contemporaries saw in the story only a portrayal of a mental illness and nothing else.13 For example, S.A. Andreevsky, in a review of the Chekhov volume Tales and Stories (Povesti i rasskazy), wrote: ‘“The Black Monk” gives us a deep and faithful study of a mental ailment,’14 and A.M. Skabichevsky noted that the story contained a ‘very interesting portrayal of the process of lunacy.’15 Psychiatrists find that the illness of Master Andrei Vasilievich Kovrin is presented with some precision (see Nikitin 7; Meve 96–112). As Igor Sukhikh has shown, Chekhov probably used S.S. Korsakov’s Textbook of Psychiatry (Kurs psikhiatrii), published in 1893, in working on the story, and the book remains in Chekhov’s library. The development of Kovrin’s

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illness corresponds exactly to Korsakov’s description. ‘We can hardly doubt that the author read and used [the textbook] during work on his “medical” story,’ writes Sukhikh (102–3). However, the story reflects more than just Chekhov’s autobiographical traits and medical interests. It also shares traits of the Romantic literary tradition, with its attention to extraordinary events and people who behave in unusual ways.16 In fact, the theme of ‘The Black Monk’ is surprisingly similar to Romantic author Vladimir Odoevsky’s ‘Sylphida’ (1837). In ‘Sylphida,’ as in ‘The Black Monk,’ the hero leaves the city for the countryside on the advice of doctors, in order to improve his health. Platon Mikhailovich, the hero of Odoevsky’s story, is, like Kovrin, an intellectual and reads a lot. However, while Kovrin is interested in philosophy and psychology, Platon Mikhailovich is interested in parapsychology: he studies alchemy and cabbalistics. The hero of ‘Sylphida’ is so entranced with his reading about people who commune with elemental spirits that it leads to hallucinations: he immerses himself in a beautiful fairytale world. Looking at a turquoise ring which has been thrown into a crystal vase filled with water, he begins to see a lovely sylph, and with her he travels to other worlds. During these visions the hero experiences happiness and inspiration, which, however, bring him to a state of total physical exhaustion. His treatment consists of broth baths and liquid medicines, in an effort to return him to life on earth. The treatment works and the hero returns to everyday life and even gets married – a process which brings him to total spiritual degradation. Before immersing himself in earthly material life, he blames his friend, who participated in the treatment, for ‘coarsening’ his sensations, ‘making them inaccessible to any other world.’ The story ends with Platon Mikhailovich becoming ‘a completely respectable man: he took up hunting with dogs and started a potash factory’ (Odoevskii, ‘Sil’fida’ 193, 194). In this way the hero’s insanity, as Odoevsky shows, was a Romantic hero’s temporary escape into another world far removed from the vulgarities of everyday life – a world not accessible to all. The story about Kovrin’s insanity recalls Odoevsky’s story. Even the legend about the mirage of the black monk, which is reflected in layers of the atmosphere and travels the entire world for a thousand years, recalls the alchemical legend of sylphs. Only the ending differs: in Odoevsky’s story the bitter irony is that the hero becomes a normal man, while in Chekhov’s Kovrin, after a long period of treatment and a return to everyday life, nonetheless dies happy, because the black monk, a messenger from another world, appears to him again before his death.

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The theme of madness was very important for Odoevsky, but it was not the clinical illness per se that drew his attention. Odoevsky was interested in the genius madman, such as, for example, Beethoven (and he explored this in his story ‘Beethoven’s Last Quartet’). Odoevsky’s madmen have exposed nerves, heightened sensitivity, and the talent of seeing and hearing that which is inaccessible to others. But for this gift a person has to pay: he loses those earthly joys available to ordinary people (as in ‘The Improviser’). In Odoevsky’s works the ecstasy of inspiration, creativity, and spiritual insight is perceived by ordinary people as insanity, and therefore, as is characteristic for Romanticism, the poetry of creativity and the vulgarity of everyday life are always set off against each other. Chekhov’s ‘The Black Monk’ can also be perceived as a total opposition of genius madmen and normal people of the crowd. The theme of the chosen one and the crowd has a tradition in Russian literature, especially in the works of Dostoevsky, and this was a topical question in art at the end of the nineteenth century. In addition, in late nineteenthcentury discourse the theme of genius and madness received new impulses: on one hand, a neo-romantic interest in the unusual personality superior to his surroundings, connected with the ideas of Nietzsche; and on the other hand, the neo-positivist refutation of the ‘cult of heroes.’ Clearly Chekhov learned of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra only after he had written ‘The Black Monk.’ Nietzsche’s work was translated into Russian in 1898, and the following year Vera Komissarzhevskaya sent Chekhov a copy of the book, requesting that he write a review of it. Chekhov refused, although he informed her that he read the book she had sent ‘with pleasure’ (see PSS: Works 17: 302). Earlier he may have read Nietzsche’s About Wagner and Wagnerism, published in Russia in 1889, along with other of the German philosopher’s works published in various newspapers and journals (see PSS: Letters 6: 395). Chekhov’s statement in a letter to A.S. Suvorin on 25 February 1895 demonstrates the writer’s great interest in Nietzsche: ‘I would like to meet such a philosopher as Nietzsche somewhere on a train or a steamship and talk with him through the night. However, I do not believe that his philosophy will last. It is not so much convincing as it is filled with bravado’ (Letters 6: 29). In all probability Chekhov’s attitude toward Nietzsche was complicated, but the general impression made by the philosopher was reflected in Chekhov’s works of this time, especially in ‘The Black Monk.’ Max Nordau’s book Degeneration, containing his medico-sociological research into extraordinary personalities, was also translated into Russian and fairly widely known in Russia.17 Chekhov knew this book as well

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as other of Nordau’s works, and in ‘The Black Monk’ we can hear a response to Max Nordau’s ideas.18 Nordau had dedicated his book Degeneration to Cesare Lombroso, the Italian psychiatrist and criminologist and author of ‘Genius and Insanity’ (with whose work Chekhov was also acquainted).19 Lombroso had developed the idea that unusually gifted people are often subject to nervous and psychological illnesses, and he came to the conclusion that many of the particular traits in the lives of people who are considered to be normal can in essence be explained by deviations of their organisms from the norm, i.e., degeneration. These include various phenomena of mental life: prominent talent, criminal tendencies, sexual perversion, and so on (Sementkovskii 12). Nordau, one of Lombroso’s disciples, wrote that in the mood of fin de siècle a psychiatrist could easily recognize traits of degeneration and hysteria. In Nordau’s view, degeneration was primarily connected to heredity. The development of civilization, the rhythm of life in big cities, the great flow of information – all of this led to exhaustion, psychopathology, and neurasthenia. Signs of degeneration, in addition to physical symptoms, included excitability, mental helplessness, depression, and mysticism. Psychopaths, Nordau said, tended to emphasize their extreme excitability and their great sensitivity to music, poetry, and the beautiful, which, in their opinion, differentiated them from the ignoramus ‘whose coarse nerves are incapable of comprehending beauty. These unhappy men,’ Nordau emphasized, ‘do not realize that they are proud of their illness and bragging about lunacy’ (Vyrozhdenie 35). Neurasthenics and psychopaths strive to be different from regular people. It is essential for them to identify themselves with geniuses, with people who transcend their surroundings. Nordau said that science had not shown that ‘every genius is definitely mad,’ or that every lunatic is a genius, but that specialists are capable of telling the difference between healthy geniuses and ‘the degenerate subject of a higher order.’ Further, Nordau made a very important distinction between the healthy genius and the ‘degenerate’: ‘Take from a genius that talent,’ the German psychiatrist reasoned, ‘which places him so high above the crowd, and he will still remain a very clever, active, moral, right-thinking person, who can honestly occupy any social position. But try to take a psychopath’s talent away, and you will have only a criminal or a madman who is incapable of doing anything in life’ (Vyrozhdenie 37). The description of Kovrin’s behaviour is surprisingly close to Nordau’s series of symptoms of a mad genius. The master in Chekhov’s story left the city for the country on the advice of a doctor, because he ‘was

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exhausted and had upset his nerves’ (PSS: Works 8: 226). He works a lot, smokes cigars, and drinks wine (these particular behaviours in psychopaths and neurasthenics were also noted by Nordau). Kovrin inherited his talents from his mother, and her illness – tuberculosis – was also part of her legacy to him. ‘Kovrin listened to music and singing greedily, and grew faint’ (PSS: Works 8: 232). His hallucinations also appear to him following the excitement caused by music. He is easily stimulated, sensitive to the scent of flowers, and falls into states of euphoria, irritation, and depression with equal ease. It is essential for Kovrin’s sense of self-worth to identify himself as an unusual person, a genius. The black monk instils in him ideas about his being chosen, about his being superior to the crowd and to ordinary people, and this makes him quite happy. After experiencing these hallucinations, Kovrin feels a surge of strength, inspiration, and the ability to work and love. Chekhov, like Nordau, showed that if one takes away from a mad genius that which makes him different from others, then nothing remains: when Kovrin undergoes treatment, and that which made him interesting disappears, he becomes easily irritated, captious, coarse. And how did medicine consider the case? How did those around the sick man react? In this story Chekhov again wanted to show the helplessness of contemporary psychiatry, which used the same methods to treat all kinds of nervous and mental illnesses, not differentiating between them in any way. Kovrin is prescribed bromide preparations,20 warm baths, fresh air, and a structured regime throughout the day. We can recall that Dr Ragin prescribed for Gromov cold compresses for his head and laurel-cherry drops, and added that ‘one should not interfere when people are going insane’ (PSS: Works 8: 80).21 In Chekhov’s story the conflict between a hero inspired by his hallucinations and his family, who try to treat him and return him to ‘normal life,’ becomes acute in the highest degree. Master Kovrin reproaches his relatives for treating him: ‘I was going mad, I had megalomania, but at least I was cheerful, energetic, and even happy, I was interesting and original. Now I am more rational and respectable, but I am the same as everyone: I am a mediocrity, and life is boring to me’ (PSS: Works 8: 251). Chekhov showed that neither medicine nor society is prepared to understand that genius and madness can combine in one person. For example, Tania Pesotskaia, reproaching her husband for ruining her life, killing her father, and destroying their beautiful garden, writes to him in a letter: ‘I took you for an unusual man, a genius, and I fell in love with you, but you turned out to be insane’ (PSS: Works 8: 255).22 Society is inclined to see in a mentally diseased person a weak-minded idiot who

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should be isolated. Chekhov brings us to the question of whether they should really be treated at all, if there are no means or methods of treating the mentally ill, and no differentiation between illnesses or individual treatments for each concrete case. A part of this bitter truth lies in Kovrin’s words: ‘How lucky were Buddha and Mohammed, or Shakespeare, that their kind relatives did not treat their ecstasy and inspiration’ (PSS: Works 8: 251). Although Chekhov is unable to answer the question unambiguously of what one should do with mad geniuses, he quite clearly shows that society and the family are too aggressive toward the patient. In the words of Kovrin, who went through treatment, sounds a reproach to those who claim to know what to do in this situation, including Max Nordau: ‘The doctors and kind relatives will in the end make certain that humanity will grow dull, mediocrity will be considered genius, and civilization will perish’ (PSS: Works 8: 251–2). Chekhov, like other doctors of his day, does not know the proper treatment, but he insists that there is no simple solution to the problem, no one prescription that can be used in all cases.23 Unable to solve the problem, Chekhov simply highlights its urgency. Since Chekhov did not express his view of the problem definitively – for which, by the way, he was criticized by his contemporaries24 – there can be many interpretations. To sum up, we must say that Chekhov was probably not with those who looked at the question of genius and madness from a neo-Romantic stance, that is to say those who opposed the chosen ones to the crowd. After all, it is not only Kovrin who suffers in the story; his loved ones do as well. His father-in-law Pesotsky dies, the beautiful garden is ruined. In contrast to Chekhov, the romantic Odoevsky was only interested in the hero’s suffering. However, Chekhov does not seem to offer a good alternative: one can have inspiration and ecstasy, bordering on pathology, or a healthy life among a herd of ordinary people. This is, in essence, the choice the black monk offers. Chekhov does not identify himself with his characters and frequently disperses his own thoughts among many heroes. But Chekhov is also not with those who, approaching the problem from a positivist stance, dethrone the mad genius. In his works about the mentally ill, Chekhov acts not only as an artist, but also as an innovator in the area of social medicine, confronting society with real problems of his time which he was the first to raise. Though the content and atmosphere of the stories ‘Ward No. 6’ and ‘The Black Monk’ may differ greatly, they are brought together by the fact that in both stories Chekhov demonstrated the helplessness of medicine and society in the face of mental illness, as well as people’s

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intolerance toward those who differ in any way from their own understanding of the norm. In these stories are incarnated Chekhov’s talents as a doctor, artist, anthropologist, and even historian of medicine. Translated by Angela Brintlinger

NOTES 1 From Chekhov’s letter to A.S. Suvorin, 11 September 1888: ‘I feel more cheerful and satisfied with myself when I admit that I have two businesses, and not one ... Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my lover. When one bores me, I spend the night with the other’ (PSS: Letters 2: 326). Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 30-i tomakh (Moscow, 1975), contains 18 volumes of Works and 12 of Letters, conventionally referred to separately. 2 On this point see Kataev (87–97). 3 ‘I liken Zakhar’in to Tolstoy,’ Chekhov wrote to A.S. Suvorin on 15 October 1889 (PSS: Letters 3: 264). 4 See Bel’chikov; Friche; Khizhniakov; Geizer; and Meve. These last three works are notably flawed by the traits of vulgar sociologism characteristic of the approach to literature in the USSR during this time period. Contemporary scholarship includes Burno and Voskresensky; Burno and Sokolov; Korostelev; and G. Arkhangel’skii. 5 It is important to note that Chekhov himself, in a letter to Suvorin on 25 January 1894, wrote that one should not identify the author with the mentally ill hero of his work: ‘It seems that I am mentally healthy ... Just because an author portrays a mental patient, it does not mean that he himself is ill. I wrote “The Black Monk” without any depressed thoughts, upon cold reflection’ (PSS: Letters 5: 265). 6 The French psychologist, philosopher, and psychiatrist Pierre Janet (1859– 1947) developed his doctrine of psychasthenia in his Les Obsessions et la Psychasthenie, 1903. Psychasthenia is called ‘Janet’s disease.’ 7 Here is a characteristic statement of Chekhov’s on this account, in conversation with Bunin: ‘Do you know for how many more years I will be read? Seven.’ ‘Why seven?’ I asked. ‘Well, seven and a half.’ ‘... Nonetheless, they’ll read me for another seven years, and I have even less time to live: six years.’ See Bunin 485–6.

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8 In Russian the theme of ‘unsociability and physical, moral and spiritual self-isolation’ connected with mental illness has been research by Kluge. Radislav Lapushkin, analyzing ‘Ward No. 6,’ focuses on the theme of the hero’s tragic guilt. See also Gurevich 95–9. British scholar Ronald Hingley notes that in ‘Ward No. 6,’ as in many of Chekhov’s other works of the 1880s (‘Typhus,’ ‘The Name-Day,’ ‘Ivanov,’ ‘A Dreary Story’), Chekhov’s perceptive portrayal of illness and the psychological state of sick people is masterly. Hingley also argues that Gromov and Ragin, the antagonists of ‘Ward No. 6,’ reflect the author’s own psychological state at different times of his life (Hingley 102–12, 158). 9 Also quoted in A.P. Chudakov’s commentaries to ‘Palata No. 6’ in Chekhov, PSS: Works 8: 446–7; G. Arkhangel’skii 178–9. 10 Psychiatrists have attested to this as well. See Bazhenov, Chetyre, and also V.I. Iakovenko, who themselves took part both in building psychiatric hospitals and in equipping them with services and conveniences. See M.M. Iakovenko 51–75. 11 Roskin has pointed to the connection between ‘Ward No. 6’ and Chekhov’s Sakhalin impressions: ‘We can speak of “Ward No. 6” as a story dictated by Sakhalin ... It was first and foremost on Sakhalin that Chekhov saw wardens like Nikita, people behind bars, and much else’ (215–16). 12 See E.M. Sakharova’s commentaries to ‘The Black Monk’ in Chekhov, PSS: Works 8: 491–2. See also Iakovenko 61, 73–4. 13 See Sakharova’s commentaries to ‘The Black Monk,’ in Chekhov, PSS: Works 8: 493–4. 14 17 January 1895, Novoe vremia no. 6784. Cited in Sakharova’s commentaries in Chekhov, PSS: Works 8: 494–5. 15 17 February 1894, Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta, no. 47. 16 Kluge also points out the connection between ‘The Black Monk’ and the Romantic tradition 56. 17 The following editions appeared in Russian translation: Maks Nordau, Dvizheniia chelovecheskoi dushi (Psikhologicheskie etiudy) (Movements of the Human Soul [Psychological Etudes]) (Moscow, 1893); Nordau, Bolezn’ veka. Roman (The Illness of the Century. A Novel )(Moscow, 1893); Nordau, Vyrozhdenie (Degeneration) (St Petersburg, 1894). See Chekhov, PSS: Letters 5: 533–4. 18 Sakharova points out the connection between ‘The Black Monk’ and the ideas of Max Nordau in her commentaries to the story (Chekhov, PSS: Works 8: 492). 19 Chekhov refers to Lombroso in the story ‘Zadacha’ (‘The Task’) and in the first version of the play Chaika (The Seagull). 20 The doctor in the story ‘Pripadok’ (‘An Attack of Nerves’) also prescribes

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21 22

23

24

bromide for the hero, the student Vasiliev. Happily, the bromide helps. It is interesting as well that one of Chekhov’s dogs was named Bromide. The title of my essay, ‘Let Them Go Crazy,’ is a paraphrase of Ragin’s statement. Sukhikh interprets this statement of Tania’s as an instance of ‘the phenomenon of “vertical thinking,” i.e. an attempt to evaluate a person according to a previously prepared, abstract moral scale,’ which Chekhov himself rejects. See Sukhikh 113. Kataev has written much about the fact that in his works Chekhov says that it is not the solution to the problem but the correct asking of the question that is important. Skabichevsky wrote: ‘the reader takes no idea, no conclusion away from all of this.’

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

The Russian geneticist and polymath Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson (1908–9) characterized himself as ‘a generator of ideas.’ Toward the end of his life, he recreated the context of some of these ideas in a series of letters he wrote to the daughter of a deceased friend. In one letter, he recalls the inception of the idea to which he would devote much of his last decade. ‘I had thrown myself into the furthest breach – the study of human genetics. In 1969, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, I stumbled upon the mechanism of potential genius.’1 Until the end of his life, Efroimson strove to get his ideas about the biological origins of genius into print, but only a few bowdlerized articles made it past Soviet censorship. His ideas are intriguing in their own right, but his struggle to make them heard tells us something about what can happen in the collision between a scientific theory and a hostile regime. Efroimson’s case resulted in a paradox: by attempting to demystify the enigma of genius, he himself was cast in the role of a ‘mad genius’ seeking to challenge the established social order. A growing body of scholarship attests to the strategies used by Russian artists on the one hand, and the Russian medical community on the other, to wrest control over the discourse of madness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But who had authority over questions of madness in the late Soviet period? The era of psychiatric incarceration in the Soviet Union began in the late 1950s, and continued, despite the public outcries of human rights activists and Soviet dissidents, into the Gorbachev years. The practice of diagnosing political and social dissidents as ‘insane’ and institutionalizing them for treatment – which included a horrifying array of mood- and mind-altering drugs – would seem to indicate that in the final decades of the Soviet

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Union, the regime had seized control of one of society’s most insidious weapons: the right to decide who is mad and who is sane.2 In response, as they had a century earlier, both writers and scientists endeavoured to reclaim – and rewrite – the lines of demarcation between madness, illness, and creativity. This chapter examines one notable instance of rewriting the history of madness and creativity, this time in the language of population genetics and the biochemistry of cognitive functioning.3 I focus on the work of the Russian geneticist V.P. Efroimson, who lived the last two decades of his life in a stance of sustained confrontation with the state’s interpretation of mental health.4 His argument for a biochemical understanding of the mechanisms of genius is both a radically biologizing account of individual creativity and, perhaps counter-intuitively, one of the most utopian philosophical protests against Soviet doctrines of human nature. To anticipate the direction of my interpretation, we should note the paradoxical form of Efroimson’s dissident humanism, which seeks to demystify and thoroughly Darwinize the connection between pathology and genius, while simultaneously erecting a vision of future humanity in which talent and creativity flow like milk and honey. In a typical passage, he writes: ‘The “normal” human brain has enormous reserve capacity and potential, which needs to be developed, purposefully stimulated, and given the opportunity to become actualized in the creation of works of great talent, and even genius’ (16).5 In the necessarily schematic introduction to his work that follows, I try to highlight the ways in which the scientific discourse of pathology and the utopian discourse of ‘transhumanism’ are intertwined in Efroimson’s book The Genetics of Genius. The full exposition of Efroimson’s theory of genius – which he edited down to about 360 pages of prose written for a general audience – was not published until 1998. A second edition of the book was released in 2002, carrying the title of the original manuscript: The Genetics of Genius: Biosocial Mechanisms of Heightened Intellectual Activity. The Genetics of Genius forwards a view of human nature that valorizes exceptional creativity as the sane and healthy condition of the extraordinary human mind, and thereby partially reinstates a conception of the genius as a harbinger of a more enlightened form of humanity. The utopian thrust of Efroimson’s argument amounts to the following proposition: potential talent and creativity – sometimes even true genius – is inborn. This innate capacity for brilliance is far more prolifically distributed throughout the human gene pool than our existing genius mythologies would lead us to believe. A better understanding of the biological

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underpinnings of heightened intellectual and creative functioning will allow scientists and humanists of the future to construct a society that maximizes our human potential. Efroimson himself referred to his theory as a form of Julian Huxley’s ‘transhumanism’ and insisted that an interdisciplinary ‘science of genius’ was acutely necessary in our era of rapidly proliferating information.6 In The Genetics of Genius, the main goal is to substantiate a causal link between some organic pathologies and vastly enhanced mental activity, while stopping short of making a connection between genius and madness. In other words, Efroimson resurrects the unfashionable concept of ‘genius,’ not as a Romantic metaphor for madness, but as a social and biological fact. Simultaneously, he severs the connection between insanity and the genius’s strange or visionary behaviour. The latter may seem to mimic the behaviour of the insane, but this is only a way of adapting to an unreceptive environment. Indeed, the author characterizes his own environment – Soviet socialist society – as dangerously unreceptive to the development of creative talent. It is easy to see why Efroimson’s manuscript was not published in his lifetime. Taken as a whole, it consists of an extended argument against two sacred cows of Soviet ideology: the ‘Blank Slate’ view of human nature, and the Marxist view of history moved by inexorable social and economic forces. Efroimson’s theory seeks to establish that (a) great talent and creativity have a heritable, biological component and (b) the iconoclastic, paradigm-breaking actions of highly creative individuals are not evidence of madness, but of the capacity of our species to think its way out of social and environmental apocalypse.7 Efroimson reiterates some of the strategies used by Russian psychiatrists a century earlier to promote a biological view of exceptional creativity that will bolster his larger philosophical framework for social and political reform. Brintlinger has identified these strategies as (1) introducing a new scientific language to describe madness, rather than relying on literary or folk language; (2) self-consciously identifying one’s work with trends in international (Western) science; and (3) rewriting the history of madness and creativity in such a way that the scientists become the heroes of their own narrative. Following Brintlinger’s outline, I will describe how Efroimson’s prose recapitulates these strategies in the scientific and political context of the 1970s and 1980s: (1) he gives the generally educated lay reader a theory of the origins of genius in the new scientific parlance of molecular biochemistry and population genetics; (2) he cites Western corroborators of his theory with admiration, and

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does not hide his evident familiarity with proscribed, untranslated, or generally inaccessible Western scientific literature (including Freud in the original German, numerous French and British authors, and almost all the major American scientific journals);8 (3) he substantiates his theory of the biochemical origins of genius with over 120 ‘minipathographies’ of men (and a few women) who most frequently appear in the historiometric literature that correlates genius with either gout or manic-depressive disorder. Although he never admits to any evidence of his own likely diagnosis of borderline mania-depression (cyclothymia), the composite picture of genius that emerges from the narrative arc of these pathologies is an autopathography – a likely portrait of the author himself. In the following pages, I give a description of Efroimson’s theory, as it is presented in The Genetics of Genius (section 1) and an analysis of the pathographies (section 2), indicating where they recapitulate the strategies of earlier Russian psychiatric writing. In conclusion, I will suggest tentatively that Efroimson’s work reflects a return to the utopian thrust of the ‘holy fool’ tradition in late Soviet popular science writing. 1: The Heritability of Human Traits The fate of genetic science in the Soviet Union is fairly well known in its general contours. Russian biologists had advanced to the forefront of international science by the end of the nineteenth century, most notably in research demonstrating the physiological basis of psychic phenomena. Ivan Pavlov won a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work on the physiology of digestion, and then continued to study neurophysiological processes and their relationship to behaviour after the Revolution. In short, the door was open philosophically (as well as experimentally) for understanding psychic activities, such as desire, memory, and intellectual inspiration, as part of the natural world, subject to the objective methods of the natural sciences. In the decade following the Revolution, Russian scientists actively participated in research that would lead to the establishment of what is now called ‘the modern synthesis’: the reconciliation of Darwin’s theory of evolution with the mathematical (and later molecular) understanding of how traits are inherited genetically (see Adams, ‘Founding,’ ‘Towards a Synthesis,’ ‘From Gene Fund,’ and ‘Sergei Chetverikov’). Along with the American ‘lords of the fly,’ who were starting to map fruit-fly chromosomes in T.H. Morgan’s laboratories at Columbia and Caltech, the Moscow biologists grouped around Nikolai

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Koltsov’s Institute of Experimental Biology (and later Moscow University) helped lay the foundations for twentieth-century genetic science.9 This situation changed dramatically around 1930, which historians refer to as the year of the Great Break, or the inauguration of a set of drastic measures that would launch a Cultural Revolution. The familiar aspects of Stalin’s Cultural Revolution are the push for rapid heavy industrialization, the collectivization of agriculture, and the intensified persecution of ‘bourgeois experts’ in technical and academic fields. What this meant for the field of biology, roughly speaking, was that in the debate over the role of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in human development, the ‘naturist’ position was by and large associated with those geneticists (and their students) whose views had been formed in tandem with Western European theories. After 1930, Mendelian genetics and the further elaboration of chromosomal theories of inheritance were soon under siege by Trofim Lysenko and his supporters. It was also at this juncture that all theoretical investigation into the biological origins of human behaviour was proscribed. Instead, a radically environmentalist (i.e., ‘Blank Slate’) view of human nature won out over other, competing views. In other words, the same complicated manifestations of personality and behaviour for which scientists had hoped to find genetic clues were now considered to be scripted solely by social and environmental factors. Thus, when Efroimson began intensive work on The Genetics of Genius in the early 1970s, he meant to resurrect the tradition of linking the biological and social components of human behaviour that had been pioneered by his mentors in the 1920s. In the opening pages of the book, Efroimson boldly confronts his implied ideological critics by declaring that geniuses are born, not made. Later on he will refine his premise to show that only the potential for genius is inborn, whereas the development and actualization of that potential is in large part ‘made’ by society. Nevertheless, to counter the over-emphasis on the social determinants of behaviour, he would place an explicit emphasis on factors influencing the heritability of traits. Of particular importance to his project would be both the promise and the limitations of ‘heritability’ itself, in regard to the particular human traits he deemed of paramount importance – exceptional capacity for creative and intellectual work (genius) and the capacity for moral and ethical behaviour. Efroimson devoted a separate study to the latter, noting that in defining genius, ‘one cannot rely on ethical criteria, because history has produced more than one evil genius, who turned out to be on the side of reactionary

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forces or who ... caused tremendous harm by attempting to force history into too fast a tempo’ (72). Efroimson began to scour the historical literature for biographical material on the world’s most commonly acknowledged geniuses. In a chapter on Efroimson in Heroes and Villains of Russian Science, S.E. Shnol’ tells us that ‘in 1983–4 I used to visit Vladimir Pavlovich in his home, writing down what he had to say about his life and about science. I was amazed by his archive, especially a card catalogue with thousands of entries – data about the medical, social and psychological features of a great number of historical personages’ (Shnol’ 281). In The Genetics of Genius, Efroimson sets out to persuade his readers that although ‘both the presence of a genius and the form his contributions take are readily explained by the confluence of many external factors ... very little room is left for examining his unique internal qualities. Therefore, one must be able to show that it is precisely these internal qualities that ultimately play the decisive role in the manifestation of genius’ (21). Further on he reiterates, ‘We can consider it an established fact that under equal and generally favourable conditions of development, the significance of inherited factors in the variability of giftedness increases tremendously. Our task is to discover the genetic factors that can determine such a brightly distinguishing trait as exceptional talent, or even genius’ (74). Among the genetically determined pathologies he finds overrepresented in the population of eminent men are gout, manic-depressive disorder, Marfan Syndrome, and Morris’s Syndrome.10 There is a long history of the cultural representation of gout as a disease of eminence.11 The association between gout and superior wit fell out of fashion in the twentieth century, when both the medical and the cultural terrain shifted. It can be argued that the characteristic gouty genius – gloomy, relentlessly goal-oriented, persistent – succumbed to a different vision of genius – flighty, inspired, and mysterious. The latter was reflected in a medical diagnosis of neurasthenia, or later, maniadepression.12 Medical advances also helped make gout less visible in the cultural imagination: by 1963 a new, effective treatment for the symptoms of gout had been made available.13 How and why did Efroimson try to resurrect the now unfashionable connection between gout and genius? Gout is caused by a disorder in purine metabolism, resulting in elevated levels of uric acid in the blood (hyperuricaemia). The unabsorbed uric acid may provoke the formation of very painful sodium urate crystals in the foot or knee joints, a situation

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cartoonists have often lampooned as a fat man with a ‘screaming’ big toe. In 1955, a scientist from MIT published a short article in the American journal Nature, in which he suggested that uric acid may well act as a cerebral stimulant, like the purines theobromine (found in chocolate) and caffeine. The author also noted that of all the mammals, only the higher apes and human beings have lost the ability to completely metabolize uric acid. He suggested that the development of the human cerebral cortex evolved along with a gene constellation that allows retention of uric acid in the blood (Orowan).14 Efroimson developed this hypothesis further, to suggest that if uric acid follows a similar metabolic path to caffeine, it will act as a ‘doping mechanism’ in the affected person, and function as an internal cerebral stimulant. His conclusion: in and of itself, having gout does not guarantee the slightest bit of intelligence. However, in a person of considerable intelligence, talent, skill, and social opportunity, the ‘doping’ effect of gout may provide the motor for the kind of extraordinary mental drive and persistency that characterized the creative activity of famous personages who had gout. Manic-depressive (bipolar) disorder (MDD) is not related to gout in any way. Its clinical symptoms are extreme mood swings, which are usually seasonal and show a marked periodicity. MDD does not generate hallucinations or a completely delusional sense of reality; rather, especially in its less severe forms, the person’s consciousness remains quite clear and normal. It is not so much the mental state, but the mental ‘tone’ that changes. In a hypomanic phase, a person will exhibit a quickened rate of associations, rapid and prolific thought processes, selfconfidence, and lack of normal inhibitions. As the manic state becomes more severe, it results in a breakdown of coherence in thought and behaviour patterns. Manic phases alternate with periods of severe and at times prolonged depression. Symptoms of clinical depression (which in MDD is periodic, not obviously tied to an external stimulus) include suicide attempts, withdrawing from the social environment, and a lack of motivation to perform simple tasks. MDD runs in families, but with incomplete penetrance. There is a 50 per cent chance of getting it (or not) from a carrier parent, but it may skip generations in terms of the actual expression of the disease, and it will be expressed in some people as mania-depression, in a very few people as a tendency toward hypomania only, and in many people as a tendency to strong periodic depression, with no manic phases. Like all diseases caused by a poorly understood constellation of genes and environmental triggers, it cannot be diag-

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nosed retrospectively with complete authority. Nevertheless, Efroimson presents data about people of eminence that strongly suggest periodic alternation between severe depressions and functional (in fact, highly functional) phases of hypomania. The hypothesis presented in The Genetics of Genius emerges as follows: any biochemical or hormonal disorder that can be shown to have the ‘side-effect’ of stimulating the subject’s mental energy, and that can also be genetically inherited, fulfils the two preconditions for explaining the heritable part of exceptional human intellectual ability. The four disorders he investigates – gout, mania-depression, Marfan Syndrome, and Morris’s Syndrome – are not in any way related to each other, nor can any one of them be directly associated to superior intellect. Rather, their statistical preponderance in lists of accomplished people suggests that there are non-environmental mechanisms that determine a measure of mental drive. Efroimson labelled these biochemical mechanisms a form of cerebral ‘doping,’ implying that elevated levels of uric acid in the blood, or whatever chemical imbalance occurs in hypomania, serve as a kind of constantly stimulating ‘doping’ mechanism for the brain. There was no single test that could prove the efficacy of the proposed biosocial mechanisms of genius. In Efroimson’s hypothesis, there are no specific ‘genius genes’ to be found, only a probable biochemical condition that has a genetic basis. To further complicate matters, the existence of the condition (gout, manic-depressive disorder, or others) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of genius. Yet, he was convinced that the disorders he had identified contributed significantly to the emergence of genius that would have otherwise remained fallow. In order to prove the validity of his idea, Efroimson would have to show how it provides a probable framework for understanding the phenomenon of genius in history. He would present his evidence in the form of short pathographies. The pathographies are short biographical sketches that focus on the subject’s ostensible illness. In the central chapters of The Genetics of Genius, Efroimson distils his research into chronologically arranged biographical sketches of eminent historical figures who were afflicted with either gout (hyperuricaemia) or manicdepressive disorder. Eighty-nine figures fall into the first category, beginning with Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) and ending with Kaiser Wilhelm I (1797–1888). Thirty-two figures fall into the second category, beginning with Torquato Tasso (1544–94) and ending with Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961). In a separate chapter, he examines ‘dynasties’ of concentrated talent that emerged in Europe when prominent families

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benefited from a combination of inherited giftedness, selective marriages, and highly privileged social positions. 2: Pathographies and Their Subjects What do the pathographies look like? They combine available data about the subject’s family history, emphasizing evidence of heritable biochemical conditions (for instance, tracing the pattern of goutafflicted males in Pushkin’s family), with anecdotal historical and biographical illustrations of the subject’s drive and creativity. They are grounded in the premises of behavioural genetics (ethology) and biochemistry, but they inevitably form an overarching narrative about the role of the relentless, inspired, obsessive visionary in history. What does this particular narrative say about the author’s own biases, and about the ideological milieu he wants to confront? Certainly Efroimson’s pathographies of eminent historical individuals contain many of the elements present in early nineteenth-century Romantic paradigms of the mad genius. The mad genius has a childhood marked by unusual circumstances, an ability to ‘break through to the other side’ of reason and consciousness to discover valuable truths, and a reckless or defiant disregard for established authority and the conventions of common sense.15 In Efroimson’s pathographies, however, these elements of the ‘mad genius’ myth are translated into the discourse of late twentiethcentury biological science. The visionary is not mad after all; rather, he or she represents the power of a population to renew itself with the formidable resources of the human mind. Childhood Although an insistence on the crucial importance of childhood experience may seem paradoxical to an argument that begins with the premise that genius is inborn, it is fundamental to Efroimson’s larger project of challenging the social status quo. Thus, wherever the data are available, Efroimson highlights the exceptional nature of the genius’s early upbringing and impressions of the world. Furthermore, the importance of an anomalous childhood experience in releasing the potential of the future genius is demystified and given a place in the framework of ethology (study of animal behaviour). The famous ethologist Konrad Lorenz had coined the term Praegung (‘imprinting’ in English translations) to describe the process by which, during a critical interval very

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early in a young bird’s development, it will become ‘imprinted’ – irrevocably – upon an object (normally, but not necessarily, the mother) that serves to release certain of its instinctual behaviour patterns. Efroimson uses ‘impressing’ instead of ‘imprinting’ to evoke Lorenz’s theory while positing his own theory of how human creative potential is ‘released.’ For many creatively endowed individuals, a striking impression in childhood serves to ‘release’ the peculiar form or expression of latent talent. He cites as an example an episode conveyed in the memoirs of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the formidable poet of Russian Futurism. Mayakovsky describes a moment in his pre-Revolutionary schooling when he nearly failed an exam because he didn’t recognize the ancient Church Slavic origins of the word oko (‘eye’). Accordingly, the power of childhood impressing is summed up in Mayakovsky’s claim to have once and for all conceived a hatred of all things ancient, all things church-related, and all things Slavic. This was a hatred which ‘determined my Futurism, my atheism, and my internationalism’ (Efroimson 39).16 Efroimson’s pathography of Abraham Lincoln includes an equally vivid account of childhood ‘impressing’: ‘According to a few sources, in his youth Lincoln was deeply shaken by the sight of an auction in New Orleans, where he witnessed the sale of a young mulatto woman. It was this moment that gave rise to his “Annabelle oath” to dedicate the rest of his life to the emancipation of the slaves’ (202). The defining moment for the weak and severely asthmatic Theodore Roosevelt, according to Efroimson’s pathography, was a childhood fight on the playground, during which the other children were so scornful of Teddy’s helplessness that they didn’t even bother to hit, they just held off his ineffectual blows with their hands at arm’s length. This moment set into motion the physical and mental reserves that enabled TR to become a fabled statesman. The point is not a Freudian moment in Efroimson’s scientific paradigm; rather, in an analogy to how ‘imprinting’ functions in the other animal species, the critical (and wholly unpredictable) incident of ‘impressing’ functions as a kind of release lever that precipitates the form and direction of the highly talented individual’s strivings for fulfilment. The most commonly cited anomaly of childhood that is invoked in Efroimson’s pathologies is not the picturesque incident of dramatic ‘impressing’; rather, it is the advantage of a privileged upbringing and superb education. Unfortunately, for most people throughout most of history, this advantage has been an anomaly of birth and status. The pathographies dwell on the importance of educational opportunity and training to ensure that the crucial leap between ‘potential’ and ‘devel-

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oped’ talent is made, and they do so in the precise language of evolutionary genetics: ‘Among the dynasties of Russian talent, such as the intertwined families of the Pushkins and Tolstoys, an external environment that allowed genotype to become fully expressed as phenotype was made possible by the high quality of marriages – often arranged within the small circle of people of the same social status in a milieu of exceptional intellectual and artistic opportunities and expectations’ (261). In other words, the preponderance of eminent historical figures among white men of Europe’s privileged families is interpreted as the scientifically predictable outcome of concentrating good genes in a great environment. The conclusion is not that the category of ‘genius’ is therefore a racist one, but that the ‘privilege’ of educational opportunity and intellectual encouragement should not be an anomaly, but rather the most fundamental premise of every society, without which untold numbers of potential talents – among them women, dispossessed minorities, peasants – will be wasted in the struggle for daily existence. The notion that a good educational environment stimulates intellectual achievement was axiomatic (although not properly implemented) in Soviet society. What was challenging was the notion that we owe it to our biological potential as a species to find ways to release the untapped, undeveloped reserves of mental energy hidden in unpredictable currents of the gene pool. The proof that these hidden reserves exist was also biochemical: every so often the coincidence of pathology (e.g., mania) and genotype would express itself phenotypically in the stunning accomplishments of the manic-depressive ‘genius.’ Inspiration In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Goscilo reminds us, the mad person’s conduit to the secrets of another world involved the cessation of reason via dreams, drugs, epileptic fits, and so forth. In Efroimson’s conception of genius, on the contrary, the conduit to breakthrough creativity is predicated by a genetically inherited chemical imbalance in the body. The pathographies thoroughly de-romanticize and biologize the secret sources of inspiration and creative will. In the pathographies of manic-depressive individuals, it is the biochemical condition of hypomania that fuels the affected genius’s ability to ‘break through’ to another world, or at least to otherworldly feats of intellect and endurance. There are no drugs, no alcohol, no trances, no mush-

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rooms, no involuntary fits. Rather than exacerbating the imbalance with other intoxicants or squandering it in a debauched lifestyle, the manicdepressive genius portrayed in his pathographies is a man who has yoked reason and will to the energy provided by his physiological mania. If the people Efroimson selected as examples of his theory did in fact use drugs and alcohol, the pathographies do not record this fact as relevant to what the person achieved. Furthermore, the periodic deep depression experienced by the bipolar genius is not mined as a source of more profound understanding or sensitivity to the human condition. The pathographies interpret cyclical cessations in an artist’s work as pathology, but not as a creative and intuitive ‘madness’: Although periods of depression following a surge of creativity may appear to be a natural lull that allows the artist or scholar or inventor to gather new ideas, knowledge, and impressions, or to overcome contradictions, or to reorient creative energies in a new direction, preparing for the next surge of productivity ... in fact, the periods of depression are debilitating moments of doubt, apathy, and escape into trivial tasks, which in these periods seem daunting. (145)

Thus, his empirical interpretation of pathology and creativity records depression as primarily one thing: a state of mind that renders the victim incapable of accomplishing even the smallest tasks. The chicken comes before the egg here – the biochemically induced depression prevents the artist from producing anything, not vice versa. The implication is that pathology is morally neutral: in a hypomanic phase creative potential can be actualized, and in the depressive phase (or genuinely manic phase) creative work ceases. Thus, madness as melancholy, romantically construed as generative of great insight, is dismissed as (almost) irrelevant to the artistic process. Nevertheless, an abundance of seemingly random details included in the pathographies betray the author’s familiarity with the artistic power of great suffering. The pathography of Russia’s famous ‘artist of madness,’ Vsevolod Garshin, includes the following detail: ‘During periods of depression [Garshin] became as helpless as a child, unable to perform even the most ordinary tasks ... The expression on his face was so stamped with doom, that it was from this face that Repin began his sketch for the portrait of the Tsarevich Ivan, fatally stabbed by his own father, Ivan the Terrible’ (165).

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Alienation from Conventional Society Evidence of the ‘madness’ often attributed to genius has more often than not been the genius’s reckless disregard for society’s conventions and the will of authorities. We began with the premise that it was Efroimson’s purpose to sever the connection between political dissidence and clinical insanity, and thus to protest the very policies that frightened him more than the prospect of a second term of hard labour (the first had been served in 1933–6). In 1948, he had submitted a meticulously researched document to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, in which he accused Lysenko of destroying Soviet agriculture. When he was arrested in 1949, the official charge was for something else – a trumped-up case of ‘slandering the Soviet Army.’ Enraged by this ploy to keep his damning report on Lysenko – all three hundred pages of it – out of a KGB file that would be marked ‘keep indefinitely,’ Efroimson staged a hunger strike and insisted that he be tried precisely for his exposé of Lysenko’s scientific falsifications. The prosecution responded by ordering a psychological evaluation of the prisoner. Efroimson was well aware of the implications of an insanity verdict: ‘As a psycho, I’m nothing, but as a mentally competent person [ne psikh] I can still carry on the struggle’17 (kak psikh, ia nikto, a kak ne psikh, mozhno eshche borot’sia). How is the genius’s mad defiance of authority and convention translated into sane and healthy behaviour, normalized by the language of science? What, ultimately, is the connection between madness (bezumie) and genius? Efroimson is quite blunt in his assessment of this connection: it doesn’t exist. ‘Few questions have provoked more trivial, dilettantish, pseudo-scientific nonsense,’ he declares. Borrowing once again from the discourse of evolutionary biology, he describes the similarity between the genius’s behaviour and the insane person’s behaviour as a phenomenon of convergence – subject to the same environmental pressures, two unrelated organisms will evolve similar structures or behaviours. Fish and dolphins both have fins. Geniuses and madmen both singlemindedly pursue a vision that to others seems fictional. Geniuses and madmen both make associations between wildly divergent images and concepts. Geniuses and madmen both hearken to an inner voice that propels them more strongly than the chorus of commonsensical voices heard in surrounding society. Efroimson’s writing thickens the line between the psychopath who suffers genuine delusions and the sane, rational, highly creative, and driven individual. Neither the clinically

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insane nor the faux creatives (brooding genius behaviour is always in fashion somewhere) mark the course of history with their art, their theorems, their military strategies. The titanic concentration and force of mental will it takes to produce the works of Pushkin or rearrange the map of Europe (Napoleon) expresses itself as ‘insane’ behaviour, when in fact, according to Efroimson, it is the realization of what the human mind can do, given the right combination of innate giftedness, environmental opportunity, and the still-elusive variable of inherited biochemical stimulus. Conclusion The scientific claims about gout and mania-depression in The Genetics of Genius have been superseded by a new generation of neurological models (none of which has found the elusive connection between organic pathology and brilliant thinking). Ultimately, though, Efroimson’s philosophical agenda bypasses pathology and proposes a mechanism of developing innate creativity that is at once much more mundane, and much more utopian: can we come up with ‘pseudophenocopies’ that mimic the effects of a hypomanic surge or gouty will to succeed (without the gout)? As he continued to revise and expand The Genetics of Genius, Genetics and Pedagogy, and The Genetics of Ethics and Aesthetics in the last decade of his life, Efroimson reiterated his call for a culture that acknowledges the ‘biological given’ of great potential talents doled out generously by nature herself. Even more importantly, he believed that natural selection has also worked to ensure that most human beings are possessed of an innate ethical compass (as well as aggression, and other competing instincts). At his own psychiatric interrogation he made the following impression on his doctors. The defendant provided the following information about himself: developed normally as a child, has always been very goal-oriented, persistent, somewhat nervous, impatient, prone to taking offence ... [The defendant] has never undergone psychiatric treatment or been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. Our examination of the patient revealed the following: physically the defendant is in good shape, although slightly malnourished ... Psychologically, the defendant is in full command of his consciousness, correctly assesses his environment and his personal circumstances. He is friendly, polite, easily engages in conversation, provides consistent and coherent information about himself, and expresses himself well. He speaks enthusias-

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tically about his scientific views, insists repeatedly on the veracity of his views, and gives detailed accounts of his scientific investigations, which he considers to be of utmost importance. He claims to be mystified by the reason for this psychiatric evaluation, and insists upon his mental health, although he admits to some emotional instability. He views his current situation critically, is somewhat depressed by the circumstances and worried about their outcome. His demeanour while in the institute has been correct, modest, undemanding, betraying a certain heightened sensitivity and emotional volatility. Intellectual functions are fully intact. No psychotic episodes. Based on the above, the committee concludes that Efroimson, V.P. does not suffer from any mental illness [dushevnoi bolezn’iu ne stradaet], but is an unbalanced [psykhopaticheskii] individual. As a mentally sound person [nedushevnobol’noi] Efroimson, V.P. is fully competent to stand trial for the criminal acts that are attributed to him. There is no need to prolong his stay in our institute.18

In living his life, he was acting out his model of genius, without claiming any biological motivation for doing so. Thus, the theory of ostensible hereditary mechanisms of genius is overshadowed by the lived possibility that non-genetic factors of one’s biography, including a desire for social justice, can be powerful motivators of mental energy. Efroimson continued in the tradition of his early twentieth-century mentors, who pioneered studies in population and evolutionary genetics without ever losing sight of their human application. Efroimson’s theory of genius, with its unquestioned assumption that more genius is a good thing, seems naive today. Yet in the context of twentieth-century Soviet history, his idea also reaffirmed the merit of asserting a utopian ideal at a historical moment most opposed to that ideal.

NOTES 1 V.P. Efroimson, 6 November 1988. One of a series of seven letters to Tatiana L’vovna Ferri, dated 31 October–6 November 1988. Private archive of E.A. Keshman, Moscow. I am grateful to Elena Keshman, to whom Efroimson bequeathed his personal archive, for her passionate and intelligent responses to every query. 2 For an interesting discussion of this point, see Thiher, who reminds us that the authority of some priestly or medical group to control madness dates back to prehistoric times. Evidence of holes bored into skulls to ‘remove

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madness’ suggests that someone literally had power over the mad person’s body. From the beginning, though, there was also a literary – imaginative – diagnosis at work: ‘the conjuring up of a worldview that imagines perforating heads will release stones, demons, or whatever is supposed to be contained within’ (1). The search for a demonstrable causal relationship between organic neurological dysfunction and creativity (or madness) has picked up speed and a dizzying interdisciplinary nomenclature in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The disciplines of cognitive psychology, biological psychiatry, brain neuroscience, and ‘applied creativity’ all speak to the problem of linking pathological brains and brilliant minds. His opposition took many forms. In 1976, he was forced to retire as head of the Genetics Department of the Moscow Institute of Psychiatry when he protested against the incarceration of dissident General Pyotr Grigorenko in an MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) psychiatric hospital. Efroimson’s Genial’nost’ i genetika (‘Genius and Genetics’), a posthumously published composite volume, includes the text Genial’nost’ i genetika (‘Genius and Genetics’), Pedagogicheskaia genetika (‘Genetics and Pedagogy’), a reprint of the 1971 article Rodoslovnaia al’truizma (‘The Genealogy of Altruism’), the text of an interview with the author by Keshman, and a biographical sketch and bibliography. All translations are mine. Page numbers refer to this 1998 composite volume, which I will refer to as The Genetics of Genius, the title of the original manuscript. In an essay entitled ‘Transhumanism,’ the British biologist and philosopher Julian Huxley extolled the possibility of ‘man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.’ For the latest directions in scientific studies of creativity and ‘moments of brilliance,’ see the cover story ‘Unleashing Creativity’ in Scientific American, May 2005. In an interview with Keshman, Efroimson cites the example of physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov as the embodiment of twin imperatives of ‘genius’ and ‘ethics’ upon which the survival of the species depends. ‘There will always be enough [ethical] geniuses to pull humanity back from the abyss ... I am convinced that [like creativity] the striving toward ethics is also an innate trait, embedded in the fabric of humanity through the processes of natural selection’ (The Genetics of Genius 493). When Efroimson returned from his second gulag term in 1955, he was still proscribed from scientific work. He found a position as bibliographer in Moscow’s Library of Foreign Literature, then under the direction of Margarita Ivanovna Rudomino. Rudomino defended her hiring practices with

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verve: ‘If you can find me a person who reads and translates fluently in six languages, is willing to work for a bibliographer’s salary, and does not have a prior arrest under Article 58, show me that person’ (personal communication, Keshman). Two of the most useful general accounts of the early twentieth-century origins of behavioural genetics in the West are Jonathan Weiner’s excellent book on Seymour Benzer, Time, Love, Memory, and Robert E. Kohler’s Lords of the Fly. Marfan Syndrome is an inherited connective-tissue disorder that affects many structures, including the skeleton, lungs, eyes, heart, and blood vessels. People with Marfan disorder appear tall, thin, and elongated, with unusually long limbs. Efroimson considers Abraham Lincoln, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles de Gaulle, and Kornei Chukovsky as probably affected by Marfan Syndrome. Morris’s Syndrome, also known as de Quervain’s Syndrome, is an exceedingly rare condition of complete testicular feminization (the commonest form of male pseudohermaphroditism). It is an X-linked recessive trait and cannot be passed on (the women who have it are sterile). Efroimson finds evidence in the historical records that suggests Joan of Arc had Morris’s Syndrome. The list of imputed gout sufferers is as long and distinguished as its contested explanations. The ancients had described and recognized the condition and attributed it to both real and mythological figures: Achilles, King Priam, and Oedipus all were afflicted with gout. The history of Western science is also populated by men with gout, including Galileo, Newton, Bacon, Leibniz, Linnaeus, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Darwin. Western philosophy seems to owe something to gout – Erasmus and Kant; Western literature counts Coleridge, Carlyle, Browning, Lord Byron, Joseph Conrad, and many others. Efroimson is particularly struck by the presence of gout where it would seem to be the greatest hindrance to success, namely on the battlefield. To lead troops when afflicted by a condition that makes moving about ‘like walking on eyeballs’ implies a formidable willpower. Historical literature attests to the gouty condition of Alexander the Great, Oliver Cromwell, Peter the Great, Otto von Bismarck, and the Russian general Alexei Ermolov. The latest literary disease in fashion seems to be autism: see Morris. Allopurinal lowers uric acid levels and therefore alleviates the symptoms of gout. It also decreases the incidence of kidney stones (another common symptom of elevated uric acid in the blood). There is still no cure for gout, which, on the contrary, seems to be on the rise in the developing world. Orowan suggests that the potentially detrimental loss of a gene constellation

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that fully metabolizes uric acid was counterbalanced by the positive effects of cerebral stimulation that gave the highest primates a certain advantage. Thus, the evolution of the human brain occurred in tandem with the evolution of incomplete metabolism of uric acid. In the present volume of essays, Andrei Rogachevskii’s article draws our attention to the conjunction of madness and childishness in Dostoevsky’s characters. The romanticizing of the mad genius in contemporary American film still relies on this trope, such as the childlike portrayal of the schizophrenic mathematician in the movie A Beautiful Mind. Helena Goscilo cites the ‘atypical childhood’ as one of the primary features of the iurodivyi’s hagiography. Efroimson quotes Mayakovsky without any further attribution to the source. Efroimson, letter to Ferri, 6 November 1988. Act No. 220, psychiatric assessment of the defendant Efroimson, Vladimir Pavlovich, 20 October 1949, AFSB, d. 10561, 1.111.

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13 Madwomen without Attics: The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative Iurodivaia helena goscilo

Much Madness is divinest Sense. Emily Dickinson When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation. Truman Capote God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise ... Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians

Sham and Shaming Folly At least since Plato, the perceived intersection of artistic creativity and religious fervour at the higher level of madness has begged the question of reason’s secular, prosaic limitations. The Russian tradition ascribes to a ‘fine madness’1 both the enigma of self-denying and self-degrading spirituality (evidenced in hagiographies and the philosophy of Grigorii Skovoroda and Vladimir Solov’ev), and the flights of poetic exaltation inaccessible to the average being ‘circumscribed’ by reason: i.e., the image of the artist conceived by Plato, and extended, among others, by Schelling, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, Hoffmann, Pushkin, and Odoevskii. In this presumptive, under-theorized equation between irrationality and (almost invariably male) metaphysical/demiurgical superiority,2 to defy or reject sanity, social conventions, the material world, and phenomena subject to positivist verification by definition means to possess genius or to enact faith, to ally oneself with spirit or transcendence, and to ‘live in

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God,’ the Ultimate Creator. As the church’s canonization of various acclaimed iurodivye (fools in Christ) indicates, that precept, however alien to Protestantism, was compatible with Russian Orthodoxy and Russia’s unorthodox popular beliefs.3 It testifies to the vitality of antiempiricism in Russian philosophical thought, which regularly exalted the esoteric over the lucidly systematic.4 Plato’s concept of artistic creation as a fugitive mental derangement (formulated in Ion and The Phaedrus)5 acquired an especially positive valence during Romanticism, whose representatives elevated the ‘paranormal’ state of creative inspiration to direct contact with the divine – a privileged condition beyond rational comprehension, hence deemed comparable to concealed sanctity or epiphanic religious experience. These exalted views, shared by Shelley, Mickiewicz, Hugo, and the Symbolists (all indebted to Neoplatonism for their concept of the poet as seer),6 found ardent expression in such meta-poems as Pushkin’s ‘The Poet’ (Poet) and ‘The Prophet’ (Prorok), where miraculous transformation in perceptual and expressive capabilities and such phraseology as ‘sacred lyre’ (sviataia lira) and ‘divine word’ (bozhestvennyi glagol) constitute not only a poetic conceit, but also an aesthetico-philosophical credo conflating art with metaphysics. What enabled the analogy between poetic inspiration, on the one hand, and sacred electiveness, on the other, was the posited common ground of divine intervention, transcendent vision, and insoluble paradox7 – that is, a radical disavowal of a putative norm hypothetically attainable by everyone through logic, empirical observation, and communal imitation. The purportedly sublime deviation from conventional desiderata and praxis articulated itself most dramatically in the anomalous figure of the holy fool or fool-in-Christ (Khrista radi iurodivyi/aia; in Greek, salos). Narratives of holy foolishness model their ‘saintly’ protagonists on the paradigm of Christ (imitatio Christi) – a peripatetic mode of existence, indifference to possessions and physical comfort, impenetrable speech (parables) and enigmatic behaviour, self-denial and mortification of the flesh, visions and miracles – but without the guarantee of subsequent retroactive exegetical incorporation into an official religious schema. Scholarship has interpreted iurodivye in one of three ways: as God’s elect; as clinically certifiable lunatics; and as cynical performers of manipulative, histrionic scenarios. The sceptical extreme received its most extensive airing in the bilious accounts of the historian and ethnographer Ivan Pryzhov (1827–85), whose mid-nineteenth-century publications debunked iurodivye as half-witted, avaricious dissemblers (Thompson 55–6).

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Probably the most eloquent and impassioned (if overly credulous) apologist for iurodivye was Pryzhov’s near-contemporary, the Orthodox priest Ioann Kovalevskii, who summarizes the phenomenon in polar opposite terms: These renowned wanderers, inspired by an intense jealousy and passionate love of God, voluntarily not only renounced all the comforts and benefits of earthly life, the advantages of social life, the people closest to them, and their blood relatives, but even repudiated, with complete inner selfawareness, the very thing that distinguishes humans among live beings – reason – voluntarily assuming the appearance of a madman, and sometimes of a morally fallen person who knows neither decency nor sense of shame, and sometimes permits himself seductive acts. (Podvig iurodstva 7)8

What attributes – causing even proponents of iurodstvo to mention shame and moral slackness – distinguished iurodivye? Unexpectedly, in light of their allegedly spiritual function, overwhelmingly physiological ones: iurodivye favoured nakedness, or filthy rags as covering; neglected hygiene and propriety by exposing customarily tabooed body parts, wallowing in filth, and relieving themselves in public; wore heavy chains and items resembling trinkets; and indulged in obscene gestures. They frequently suffered from fits not unlike hysteria or epilepsy, lacked physical co-ordination, and spoke incoherently or offensively.9 Such characteristics hardly accord with traditional ideals of holiness and certainly contravene the canonical iconography of the fleshless, tranquil Christ. Kovalevskii, however, contends that iurodivye possessed gifts of healing, prophecy, and inexplicable insight, but simulated madness and actively sought public humiliation so as to foster humility – their own and others’.10 Georgii Fedotov concurs. Adducing the monk Theodosius, cofounder of the Pechersk Monastery in Kiev, as an early exemplar of kenosis, Fedotov singles out ‘social humiliation or degradation’ as the motivation he shared with iurodivye such as Isaac (121),11 who enacted ‘sham folly’ for the sake of a humbling mortification that would purify him of all pride and possible renown: ‘Not wanting human glory, he began to do foolish things and to annoy, now the abbot, now the brothers’ (148). From a purely secular perspective, such aberrant conduct explains why these Christ-clones manqués seemed to corroborate the veracity of Christ’s claim that his kingdom is not of this world (‘Ne ot mira sego’ ). Conduit to that ‘other world’ appears in literary works of the nine-

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teenth and twentieth centuries principally as psychological and physical conditions predicated on the cessation of reasoning processes: inspiration, dreams, insanity, drunkenness, drug-induced hallucinations, and involuntary spasms, as evident in a tidal wave of such Künstlernovellen as Vladimir Odoevskii’s Russian Nights (Russkie nochi) cycle and Nikolai Gogol’s ‘Nevskii Avenue’ (‘Nevskii prospekt’), in Fedor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie), Idiot,12 The Devils (Besy), and The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy), Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Sasha Sokolov’s School for Fools (Shkola dlia durakov), Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line (Moskva-Petushki), Friedrikh Gorin’s That Very Munchhausen (Tot samyi Miunkhausen), and Svetlana Vasilenko’s Little Fool (Durochka).13 A few of these works (e.g., Doktor Zhivago, Shkola dlia durakov) dovetail the iurodivyi paradigm with that of the ‘divinely’ endowed/ ordained artist in a process facilitated by their overlapping topoi. Among the several dozen cases of iurodstvo inventoried by Kovalevskii, Fedotov, and Thompson, men overwhelmingly preponderate. That gendered discrepancy likewise informs canonical literary narratives (i.e., male-authored texts) about creative genius, whose instantiations comprise an exclusively male world. Mikhail Epstein adheres to this tradition inasmuch as his contribution to this volume likewise treats only inspired or clinically diagnosed madmen. Rather than analysing the cultural politics of such an imbalance, I wish to pinpoint the value-freighted differences along gender lines in literary inscriptions of artists and iurodivye. The Crazy Creatrix In depicting ‘the crazy creatrix’ ignored by the canon, women writers have tended to literalize the metaphor of superior non-reason as genuine or potential clinical insanity. Notable cases in the nineteenth century include the musically gifted Zoia in Mariia Zhukova’s ‘House on the Peterhof Road’ (‘Dacha na Petergofskoi doroge,’ 1845) and the tubercular visionary poet Aniuta in Elena Gan’s pointedly titled story ‘Futile Gift’ (‘Naprasnyi dar,’ 1842). Though thwarted love ultimately plunges Zhukova’s protagonist into increasingly frequent bouts of madness, in her hypersensitive, artistic psyche the capacity for profound and singular passion indissolubly blends with her pantheistic unity with nature and above all her remarkable affinity and talent for music (‘Music alone can convey our feelings’; ‘Zoia moved in the realm of sounds’ [Zhukova 266, 294]). Zhukova inscribes the former in Zoia’s ecstatic outpourings (‘all nature is full of sympathy’ [272]), in an overly direct parallel drawn

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between Zoia’s figure and the form of a fuchsia tree (‘a sapling, tall, graceful, like Zoia herself’ [290]), and in extensive elaboration of the floral symbolism that equates fluctuations in Zoia’s psychological state with the blooming and withering of the fuchsia flowers she always wears or carries. From the outset Zoia’s unique purity and innocence (denoted by her invariably white dresses) distinguish her as an outsider in a mundane, pragmatic society. That alienation paves the way for her subsequent iurodivaia-like inexplicable ‘strangeness’ and unconventional behaviour (the epithet strannaia becomes Zoia’s characteristic leitmotif). Throughout, the text construes her visionary remoteness from the everyday world of so-called normalcy in emphatically spiritual, inner-oriented terms: ‘She moved among people like an angel, borrowing nothing from them. What was in her soul? No one knew’ (268). Zhukova’s notion of art as an illuminating expression of the divine culminates in the tragic consequences of Zoia’s prefigured eventual death, which erases music and ‘higher vision’ from the world of the text: Her demise causes Karl Adamovich, the great music teacher enraptured by her marvellous singing and piano-playing, to fall forever silent: ‘now he sings nothing and, apparently, sees nothing of anything surrounding him’ (322).14 Both sublime sight and sound vanish, plunging the satirically depicted milieu of Zhukova’s tale into the vacuous mediocrity of exclusively earthly concerns.15 Zoia’s literary sister Aniuta – pale, perpetually clad in white, associated with flowers, introspective melancholy, and symbolic poses (‘her hands were folded crosswise’ [Gan 116])16 – likewise worships nature (‘God’s world’) and suffers from the madness of the elect, complicated by the Romantics’ favourite disease of tuberculosis. Gan’s ‘Futile Gift’ shares with numerous narratives of the era recourse to the trope of tuberculosis as shorthand for blessed and cursed distinction. Susan Sontag in her original Illness as Metaphor (1977) insightfully pinpoints the multiple concepts and features inhering in tuberculosis as trope that coincide with the cherished values of Romantic aesthetics and mode of thought. In the cult of TB, the ‘edifying, refined,’ mysterious affliction, with its dramatic and visible symptoms of ‘extreme contrasts,’ accelerates life, ‘highlights it, spiritualizes it.’ Yet it also entails ‘disintegration, febrilization, dematerialization.’ A disease of the soul, it manifests itself in an ardour that, paradoxically, leads to the dissolution of the body. The myth of a transfiguring consumption, as Sontag rightly contends, marked an episode in the ancient idea of melancholy as the artist’s disease (when the theory of the four humours had currency) and it provided a model for

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bohemian life (Sontag passim).17 Even as literature and music richly explored this nexus of body, soul, creativity, and a non-conformist modus vivendi, the early deaths from tuberculosis of the British poet John Keats (1795–1821) at age twenty-six and the gallicized Polish composer Frederyk (Frédéric) Chopin (1810–49) in his thirties debatably corroborated the myth of the febrile artiste maudit, consumed by the inner fire of fateful genius.18 Within this contestable but literarily productive yoking of disparate categories, Gan’s conflation of spirituality, illness, and creative inspiration assumes the form of a weighty rhetorical question: ‘Who of us hasn’t pondered the sad story of those few but ever glorious people who, burning themselves out in the impulse to the beautiful, lived and perished as martyrs to their emotional powers, bequeathing to the world that got to know them too late only the sparks of their genius, which embody the divine on earth?’ (110; italics mine). Gan not only aggrandizes the provenance, ‘sacred nature,’ and role of art, but situates Aniuta as poet in the Russian religious tradition of kenosis by endowing her with hagiographic traits and displacing her eloquent holy-fool image onto a commonplace apperception of her persona: ‘Even as a child she wasn’t like all the other children; since childhood she was called iurodivaia by the neighbours’ (118). Ridiculed, humiliated, and considered deranged (much like the iurodivye), Aniuta expires on the pyre of all-consuming genius, figured as consumption – a malady in which abrupt shifts between euphoria and despair, frenetic energy and languid passivity, apparent lucidity and complete incomprehensibility externally correspond to the radical shifts of disposition in those certified as insane. Approximately half a century later, when genetic contamination constituted one of the era’s dominant obsessions, Mania El’tsova, the Terpsichorean heroine of Anastasya Verbitskaya’s blockbuster novel Keys to Happiness (Kliuchi schast’ia, 1908–13), similarly shows early symptoms of her mother’s medically diagnosed dementia.19 Mania’s putative madness – observable especially in pendulum swings in mood that have no rational justification – is inseparable from her spellbinding dancing, her yearning for absolutes, and her capacity for ‘infinite’ love. Madness, maximalism, and genius constitute the indivisible trinity presiding over the novel, which concludes with the double suicide of Mania and her rapist lover, Nelidov.20 Blithely disregarding suicide’s violation of religious principles, Mania casts her ‘testament’ to her husbandly lover Steinbach in the intertwined discourses of madness and religion: ‘Carry out all the things that you and I dreamed and argued about in the Tyrol.

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So what if it’s utopian! So what if it’s madness! Be mad! Don’t fear the ridicule of the mob!’ (Verbitskaya 288).21 ‘Death has swung open the prison gates for me and the breath of infinity is already blowing in my face, and my eyes have a premonition of eternal light’ (289). Both author and heroine unmistakably prize madness as a mark of superiority in an epistemological and ontological system removed from the norms of ‘this world.’ In fact, precisely what passes for madness in this world is a prerequisite for ascent into ‘the other.’ Their significant differences notwithstanding, all three female-authored narratives end with their protagonists’ premature, over-detemined deaths – as if existent social structures cannot accommodate the anomaly of the crazy creatrix. Like the sorceress and the hysteric theorized by Catherine Clément in ‘the Guilty One,’ the ‘mad’ woman artist serves as cathartic spectacle but is excluded from normative integration into society’s mainstream, and therefore must be textually eliminated. The abreaction or the expulsion of the foreign body by the hysteric and the sorceress that Clément deems central to their ‘theatre’ has its analogue in the crazy creatrix’s artistic product or the iurodivaia’s mysterious delivery of a child whose paternity typically remains ambiguous or unknown. The immemorial misidentification of males with spirit, intellect, and cultural production, on the one hand, and women with body and biological reproduction, on the other, partly explains not only the devolution of creative inspiration into psychobiological aberration, but also a tropological feature unique to literature’s female iurodivye. That feature entails the related motifs of rape and pregnancy,22 and to compare the contrasting ways in which Dostoevsky and Svetlana Vasilenko handle this topos is instructive. In Crime and Punishment the moneylender’s halfsister, Lizaveta, is meek, childlike, ‘almost an idiot,’ and, according to a conversation Raskol’nikov overhears, ‘always pregnant’ (pominutno [byla] beremennaia) (Dostoevskii, PSS v 13-i t 6:54). The virginal Mar’ia Timofeevna in The Devils, with the holy fool’s standard gift of clairvoyance and Delphic speech, fantasizes about having borne a child. And, culminating the pattern, The Brothers Karamazov’s mute ‘idiot,’ Lizaveta Smerdiashchaia – a meek-eyed, barefoot wanderer, who subsists on water and black bread, sleeps in dirt on the ground,23 and deposits at the church door everything donated to her – not only becomes (forcibly?) inseminated, presumably by Fedor Karamazov, but actually gives birth to Smerdiakov in the bathhouse. In all cases the iurodivaia is an ‘innocent,’ associated with pregnancy, and, like the femme-artist in women’s fiction, dies in the course of the novel. (Lizaveta Smerdiashchaia does not

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survive childbirth; indeed, she only figures in the Vorgeschichte chapter that establishes Smerdiakov’s origins.) All three symbolic figures incarnate the potential for redemption/regeneration, yet ultimately prove ineffectual. The remoteness of this paradigm from contemporary Russian women’s impregnated iurodivye may be gauged by Svetlana Vasilenko’s violated, pregnant holy fools. They include the extraordinary ‘Tsaritsa Tamara’ of ‘The Death Gene’ (‘Gen smerti,’ 1990s) and Ganna, the child-protagonist of Vasilenko’s novel Little Fool (Durochka, 1998) – a work subtitled, not accidently, ‘novel-hagiography.’ Like traditional iurodivye, Tamara seems to court debasement and ridicule: by earthly standards, she represents what cliché would dismiss as ‘the dregs of society.’ Vasilenko’s text, however, engages not the social but the spiritual, and by its standards Tamara qualifies for sainthood, inasmuch as her entire life consists of repeated copulation motivated primarily by compassion for the sinful, scorned, and suffering (imitatio Christi regendered). Her twelve (sic) pregnancies, which end in abortions, symbolize the principle of resurrection, for which death is a prerequisite. The attempts of her antipode, Natasha, to overcome death through scientific research (a linear proposition) contrast with Tamara’s open readiness to give herself in an act that has the capacity to prolong life (the cycle of reproduction). In other words, the iurodivaia in Vasilenko replicates the Virgin Mary’s mythical role through an anomalous procreation charged with salvific powers: at the bold conclusion of ‘The Death Gene,’ Tamara not only ‘converts’ Natasha, but leads the world’s unfortunates to paradise (‘Having removed their caps, they entered paradise as people enter their own home’ [Durochka 333]). Here, as elsewhere, Vasilenko opts for a metaphysical ending, unhesitatingly culminating her narrative in a gynocentric miracle that forces the reader to confront the text on a different plane of signification and to reread the meaning of earlier events from a changed (and incomparably more charged) perspective. Vasilenko’s prize-winning novel, Little Fool, ends on a kindred note as the mute, heavily pregnant, miracle-performing itinerant Ganna ascends to heaven, preserving humanity from nuclear disaster and giving birth to the sun that heralds a new and better world: Nad’ka was giving birth to the sun ... The sun lay in the sky like a newborn baby in swaddling clothes and gazed at the new world spread before it. And suddenly I realized that there would be no war, that today Nad’ka had saved us ... There would be no death! (Durochka 126)

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Throughout the narrative Vasilenko endows Ganna/Nad’ka the holy fool (durochka) with the classic traits of the iurodivye : atypical childhood (her convention-bound parents rid themselves of her by literally sending her ‘down the river,’ à la Moses), extraterrestrial innocence, endless peregrinations, enigmatic gestures and behaviour, acceptance of constant public humiliation, ability to endure intolerable pain and suffering, indifference to comfort, possessions, and physical decorum (she vomits, urinates in bed, on the street, and so forth), religious visions (the Virgin Mary appears to her, in a revision of the Annunciation, to inform her that she is ‘chosen’), and the ability to perform miracles (she heals the sick and crippled by a mere touch). This purported mute with ‘the impassive face of an icon’ (Shamara 126) sings God’s praises in an angelic voice, in an allegorical scene becomes the ‘parent’ of three orphans named Faith (Vera), Hope (Nadezhda), and Love (Liubov’), participates in rituals involving fish, crucifixions, visions, transubstantiation, and miracles, and after sundry symbolically saturated peripatetic torments (e.g., wandering in the desert) is rescued by twelve fishermen, whose names coincide with those of the apostles.24 These superabundant paradigmatic signs of holiness should not mislead readers into misperceiving Little Fool as the Russian equivalent of Bible-thumping bromides on late TV shows for the credulous and cretinous. Vasilenko richly complicates the novel’s narrative and conceptual framework through regularly intercalated motifs from folklore and historical legends in what ultimately emerges as a risky, historicized, latterday myth of gendered salvation. On the speculative, purely discursive level, the Ganna of the 1930s, reincarnated as Nad’ka25 during the 1960s, also figures as the Tartar Khan Mamai’s daughter, Tuba,26 and metamorphoses into a fish, a mermaid, and ‘a river tsarina.’ In her various hypostases Ganna traverses boundless expanses not only along the horizontal axis, but also along the vertical – from the riverbed and the underworld to the heavens. Through an extraordinarily intricate series of chronotopes, which constantly juggle the time/ space co-ordinates, Vasilenko fuses a recognizable historically grounded narrative of the Stalinist 1930s and the early 1960s under Khrushchev with embedded tales about Russia’s medieval history, skilfully working these strands into the encompassing genre of hagiography. If at first glance that blend of genres recalls Dostoevsky’s novels, and particularly The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov, Vasilenko’s treatment of gender decidedly does not. Whereas Ivan Shatov’s brutal murder annihilates any positive consequences of Mariia Shatov’s similarly symbolic pregnancy

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and parturition on Nativity Street inasmuch as Mariia and the baby die, the concluding apotheosis of Ganna actualizes the promise inherent in her name (Nadezhda), of hope for a more humane future. Mariia Shatova is ultimately an episodic character in a narrative driven by male action;27 Ganna is the alpha and omega of a novel whose title adverts to her cultural provenance and meaning. Other women writers, such as Tatyana Tolstaya, have relied on the iurodivaia paradigm to create female protagonists whose purported madness productively conjoins creativity with anomalousness. For instance, the idiosyncratic behaviour, unappealing physical appearance (‘black mouth,’ missing teeth, goose-pimpled flesh), nakedness, ravishment, and unverified (fantastic) peregrinations of the likewise double-named Sveta/Pipka in Tolstaya’s ‘Fire and Dust’ (‘Ogon’ i pyl’,’ 1986) testify to her iurodivaia credentials, even as the mysterious power she exercises over others, especially men, through her logic-defying stories (Scheherazade, as one awed listener implies) and her ambiguous celestial ascent in the form of a flame place her firmly among the crazy creatrices. Nina Sadur likewise blends folklore with religious myth while transgendering scenarios from Gogol’ and paradigms associated with Dostoevsky’s fiction. Her novella Permafrost (Vechnaia merzlota, 2001) features a iurodivaia-like female protagonist, Elena (in Greek, ‘light’), marked out by her ‘white’ appearance, eternal youth, and miraculous role of lactating Virgin Mother to an extraordinary baby boy unambiguously paralleled to the infant Christ.28 A more complex vision of verbal creativity and unorthodox sacred maternity in the context of a transfigured world informs Sadur’s significantly titled The Garden (Sad, 1997), which similarly proceeds from a sui generis perspective fusing folklore and myth with gynocentrism.29 No other author, however, has matched Vasilenko’s profound, multi-faceted transvaluation of this gender-specific topos. For those attentive to gender issues, the inestimable significance of Vasilenko’s symbolic revision not only of Dostoevsky’s female iurodivye but also of the hackneyed reduction of women to matter (i.e., flesh) is the potently consequential synthesis it effects: Vasilenko’s iurodivaia embraces the compassionate Virgin Mary and the exemplary Jesus Christ; she ‘immaculately’ procreates (body) and saves (spirit), enabling humankind to enter the divine kingdom – a terminus ad quem that the mysterious madness of the traditional male iurodivyi never vouchsafes his devotees and spectators.30 Celluloid female artists and iurodivye similarly divide along the gender lines of their directors, as a brief glance at two recent films confirms.

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Partly with the aid of embedded narratives, which result in a quartet of madwomen, Aleksei Uchitel’s pointedly titled Giselle’s Mania (Maniia Zhizeli, 1995)31 anchors women’s creative talent – instantiated in the renowned ballerina Ol’ga Spesivtseva32 – in a madness that embraces the notorious Charcot-certified nineteenth-century equation of women with hysteria (men hurl the imprecation of ‘hysteric’ [isterichka] at both Spesivtseva and her contemporary counterpart):33 deranged women become contained/institutionalized by authoritative males whose vaunted wisdom, professional training, or unassailable reason brings female disorder under the reassuring power of the Symbolic order. Loosely based on Spesivtseva’s real-life amours and eventual dementia (she ended her days in a New York insane asylum), the screen melodrama34 dwells on her reputed habit of sleeping her way to the top and on the posited connection between female artistry and febrile lunacy. To emphasize that link as a timeless, universal ‘truth,’ Uchitel’ creates a double in the fictional modern-day ballerina who not only becomes unhinged but also may reincarnate Spesivtseva.35 Although Uchitel’ originally planned a documentary on the ballerina, he ultimately made a feature film instead. In the transition, Uchitel’ abandons empirically grounded individuation for reductive, if not downright facile, generalization, presenting artistic women as both hysterics and destructive whores – the latter identity articulated by the obese, huge-breasted performer who recites vulgar misogynistic verses before the film credits unfold. In the film’s closing sequence Anton Dolin, one of Spesivtseva’s most famous partners, tells the catatonic ballerina that he wishes she would simply dissolve and disappear, a wish the real-life Spesivtseva professionally realized.36 In vivid contrast, Larisa Sadilova’s Happy Birthday! (S dnem rozhdeniia!, 1998),37 which largely relegates men to buffoonery and irrelevance in life’s major processes, glorifies women as God’s earthly agents, entrusted with the painful but essential task of procreation. Without minimizing the physical and emotional hardships of birthing (even when the camera focuses elsewhere, howls issuing from the labour ward periodically punctuate the soundtrack), Sadilova transforms it into a sacramental act, chiefly through the depiction of the iurodivaia Liuda, who, like Dostoevsky’s Lizaveta, ‘is pregnant all the time’ and annually gives birth to children whom her mother adopts and whose paternity the film never definitively establishes.38 Apart from repeated pregnancies, Liuda shares with the classic female iurodivaia constant movement (between the maternity home and the nearby madhouse of which she is an inmate); the gift of special insight (she rightly calls the philandering male doctor

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‘bad’); a tenderness for people and animals; indifference to social humiliation; a penchant for scabrous remarks (about her enthusiasm for ‘fucking’ and the dimensions of her husband’s reproductive equipment); an apartness (symbolized by her solitary attic, whereas other recent mothers lie in the communal ward); and an artistic streak, manifested in the dancing with which she entertains the women in the ward. A bearer of joy and comfort, she attempts to divine the nature of human happiness – a mystery that links the scene of her eating apples with that of her feeding them to the goats in the garden troped as Eden.39 Furthermore, her ease with animals and her professed love of sexual intercourse and consequent multiple birthing connect her to the purebred bitch who, with the demise of the old maternity home, is transferred with her litter to its new location. In short, Liuda as ‘God’s chosen’ (her solitary space is ‘closest to heaven’) emerges as the embodiment of continuity, renewal, and life – which the film unequivocally genders and celebrates throughout the narrative and via the title that provides the film’s conceptual signpost. On the basis of some of the most original Russian women’s recent fiction and film, then, one may provisionally conclude that women find no tenable solutions to eternal or contemporary problems in political agendas, social programs (the traditional province of males), or fantasies about the fairy-tale prince. Males are irrelevant or secondary for female authors and directors, who posit the iurodivaia as a means of salvation, through her capacity not only to suffer in a spirit of selfsacrifice, but also to create a new world order by means of logic-defying procreation.

NOTES 1 Symptomatically, A Fine Madness (1966) was the title of a film directed by Irvin Kershner, starring Sean Connery as a radical poet whose idiosyncratic behaviour evoked iurodivye and was intended to signal his genius. 2 Mariia Zhukova and Elena Gan authored the female variants of this scenario, to which I shall return. 3 Tatyana Tolstaya’s essays (Pushkin’s Children) reveal a kindred evaluation of Western, and especially American, rational analysis. 4 In contrast to the Western tradition, and particularly to British empirical thought, Russian philosophy addressed primarily religious and metaphysical questions.

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5 For a discussion of Plato’s theory and its relevance to actual poets’ madness, see Mikhail Epstein’s chapter in the present volume. 6 Aristotle’s concept of the poet as the artificer could not have been at greater odds with Plato’s notions, the two representing the formal (Aristotle) versus the ideological (Plato) approach to literature and art. On the ramifications of this polarity, see Erlich. One of Mikhail Bakhtin’s major strengths and appealing traits is his ability to think across this binarism. See The Dialogic Imagination. 7 Ewa Thompson likewise identifies binary oppositions as central to what she labels ‘the holy fool code’: wisdom/foolishness, purity/impurity, tradition/ rootlessness, meekness/aggression, and veneration/derision (Thompson 16). For more on the holy fool, with a focus on a specific individual, see Krueger. 8 Podvig iurodstva is an expanded version of Kovalevskii’s original edition, published in 1895 and titled Iurodstvo o Khriste. 9 Both Fedotov and Thompson adduce the parallel between iurodivye and the folkloric Ivan Durak (Ivan the Fool). Fedotov maintains: ‘The iurodivyi is as indispensable to the Russian Church as his secular version: Ivan the Fool, is to the Russian folktale. Doubtlessly, Ivan the Fool reflects the influence of the saintly iurodivyi, just as Ivan the Prince is modeled after the saintly Princes’ (cited in Thompson 127). Thompson persuasively argues a parallel between iurodivye and shamans. Her under-appreciated study, teeming with far-reaching insights based on impeccable research, has no anglophone equal on the subject of iurodivye. 10 In such a reading, iurodivye resemble the clowns and buffoons who speak Truth in disguised, vulgar form. Both Thompson and Harriet Murav have noted that (Bakhtin-indebted) analogy. See Murav, Holy Foolishness. 11 Fedotov deems the love of humiliation a goal of ‘heroic saints’ – iurodivye (209). 12 On the ‘saintly innocence’ of Prince Myshkin, the eponymous protagonist of Dostoevskii’s Idiot, see Andrei Rogachevskii’s discussion in the present collection. 13 For more examples, see Thompson 125–58. 14 Both Zhukova’s and Gan’s protagonists worship their significantly older male ‘teachers,’ who in the symbolic framework of both works represent a beloved divinity and function as lesser surrogates for God as dispenser of genius. 15 In the heavy-handed conclusion, a female voice (presumably, that of Zoia’s practical friend Mary) floating from a luxurious carriage that passes the distraught Karl Adamovich summarizes the superficiality of a non-Zoia’ed existence by fussing about the purchase of a hat (Zhukova 322).

The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative Iurodivaia 239 16 Like Zhukova, Gan relentlessly resorts to a religious vocabulary, analogizing her heroine with angels, conveying the transports of her ‘soul,’ and so forth. 17 Probably the best-known bohemian death via tuberculosis in Western culture is Mimi’s in Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème. Verdi’s Dumas-based La Traviata, with its expiring Violetta, slights the artistic aspects of bohemia to focus on its demimonde implications within high society. 18 Such a view of art credits a higher power with dispensing miraculous gifts at the price of longevity (‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away’), which the heroic age of ancient Greece formulated as the option between a long, unspectacular existence and the short but glorious life of a military hero – precisely the choice offered to Achilles. According to some scholars, young women were particularly vulnerable to the epidemic of TB in the midnineteenth century, ‘often dying at rates twice as high as those of men of their age group’ (Ehrenreich and English 112). 19 The diminutive version (Mania) of the protagonist’s given name (Mariia) surely alludes to her predisposition to psychological extremes, repeatedly attested by her actions in the novel. For an analysis of how Mania’s literary image crystallizes cherished fin de siècle values and ideas, see the introduction to Verbitskaya, xi–xxix. 20 For the connections between rape and female ‘madness,’ see Chesler. 21 In pitting the mob against the divinely inspired elect, Verbitskaya echoes Pushkin’s metapoetry and the aesthetic philosophy of the Symbolists, who revived and developed that strain in Pushkin’s verse. 22 These twinned elements play a focal role in Verbitskaya’s novel, for Mania’s daughter, Nina, results from Nelidov’s rape, which Verbitskaya treats with a blithe inconsistency matched only by her heroine’s. In a flourish of transgendered rhetoric, male writers often refer to their works in terms of pregnancy and birth. See, for instance, Aleksandr Pushkin’s lines in Evgenii Onegin: ‘Go then to the Neva banks, / Newborn creation’ (Idi zhe k nevskim beregam,/Novorozhdennoe tvoren’e) (PSS 4:30). 23 The relationship between the iurodivaia and the earth/ground emphasizes her role of sacred mother (Mat’ syra zemlia), of cosmic beginnings and mysteries. Rape (which in Durochka is accompanied by murder) profanes the ‘temple’ that affirms life and resurrection, and thereby in a symbolic sense represents sacrilege. On the rich role of Mat’ syra zemlia in this connection see the fascinating study by Vyacheslav Ivanov, A Study in Dostoevsky. 24 See ‘Editor’s Introduction: Zone, Ozone, Blood, and Ascending Hope,’ in Vasilenko, Shamara xi–xxii. 25 The diminutive of Nadezhda (Hope). 26 The historical background here is the invasion and occupation of medieval Russia by the Tartars (1240–1480).

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27 Mariia, too, has no permanent home, tends to hysteria (‘He [Shatov] thought that she had gone mad’ [599]; ‘Mary started calling him back hysterically’ [608]), and never reveals the paternity of her child, though the text strongly suggests that Stavrogin impregnated her. See Dostoevsky, The Devils. 28 For commentary on the novella, see Sarsenov et al. 29 For a helpful reading of the novel, see Sarsenov. 30 Zhivago’s poems inspire his readers’ belief only in the promise of resurrection; the crucifixion-like death of Erofeev’s Venichka offers no salvation, and so forth. 31 The echt-Romantic ballet (1841), with Adolphe Adam’s music and libretto by Vernoy de Saint-Vernoy, Théophile Gautier, and Jean Coralli, features the fragile peasant girl Giselle, the betrayal of whose love for Count Albrecht drives her into insanity and death. Spesivtseva’s physical appearance and dancing style ideally qualified her for portraying the inevitable doom of beauty and passion. For a concise summary of her career, see Russkii balet. 439–40. 32 Partner of Nijinsky and Dolin, friend of Balanchine and Diagilev, Ol’ga Spesivtseva (1895–1991) was dubbed the Red Giselle (later the title of a ballet staged by the St Petersburg Ballet theatre under Boris Eifman’s direction) by contemporaries after becoming identified with the role in 1924. She experienced a breakdown in 1942 partly on its account. The film traces the dubious personal aspects of her career and the significance of the lovelorn Giselle in Spesivtseva’s emotional upheavals. Galina Tiunina, who won several awards in 1996 for best screen debut in Uchitel’s take on Bunin’s life, His Wife’s Diaries (Dnevniki ego zheny), plays both Spesivtseva and the institutionalized madwoman the ballet dancer observes so as to gain insight into Giselle’s breakdown. 33 I thank Karin Sarsenov for acquainting me with this film. 34 Uchitel’s transformation of the film into a feature was prompted by Spesivtseva’s death during its shooting. 35 The doubling and mirroring devices in the film imply both a generalized, undifferentiated creative womanhood and gendered narcissism. The madwomen include the fictional Giselle, Spesivtseva, the madwoman in the asylum she observes (also acted by Tiunina, hence a reflection of the ballerina), the film-within-the film Spesivtseva as the Red Giselle, and the contemporary ballerina, who mirrors Spesivtseva! 36 Spesivtseva’s persona plays variations on the femme fatale, who, as men repeat throughout the film, destroys those around her.

The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative Iurodivaia 241 37 My gratitude to Irina Makoveeva for sharing with me not only information about Sadilova’s films, but also her perceptive article, ‘The Chronotope of the Maternity Home.’ 38 Though a woman in the ward explains that Liuda’s equally ‘mad’ husband impregnated her, the film leaves open the possibility of the male doctor’s having been responsible. A sexual opportunist, he makes overtures to a series of the home’s female personnel, and, moreover, when Liuda discovers him in flagrante delicto with one of the nurses, her distress and rhetorical question, ‘How is she better than I?’, imply more than a professional relationship with him. 39 Sadur’s Sad likewise inscribes a metamorphosed Eden critical to the novel’s notion of a New Wor(l)d.

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

Since the first publication of Fedor Dostoevsky’s Idiot (1868), ‘a charge ... [has been] advanced time and time again – that [its] characters were all psychopaths and hence irrelevant to the real world of normal people’ (Terras, Idiot 10). However, in 2001 two works of art, in different media, independently and almost simultaneously revisited the novel, using it as a basis for a relentlessly ironic description of post-Soviet Russia populated with colourful New Russian characters (the so-called novye russkie or nouveaux riches).1 What made Dostoevsky’s psychopaths suddenly so relevant to twenty-first-century Russia that they had to be given a fresh makeover that in fact amounted to a whole new lease on life?2 It appears that the topic of madness becomes specially relevant in times of profound social transformation, when people are trying to come to terms with the violation of established norms.3 A brief study in comparative cultural psychopathology, juxtaposing Dostoevsky’s exploration of madness with Mikhailov’s and Kachanov’s contributions to the same topic, will illuminate what has changed in post-Soviet (as opposed to nineteenth-century and Communist) Russia and what remains the same. Dostoevsky’s Idiot is about an imaginary second coming of Christ, personified by Prince Myshkin, who is ridiculed, persecuted, and ultimately crushed by the Russian society of the 1860s, just as his predecessor in Judea was centuries ago.4 Myshkin is therefore an unlikely ‘positive hero’ (polozhitel’nyi geroi) conjured up primarily for the edification of the Russian youth. However, as Dostoevsky’s didactic intent had been somewhat disguised to increase the novel’s artistic value, his message was not altogether easy to unravel.5 The theme of madness (in the most general

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sense of the word, i.e., a mental abnormality) as it is represented in the novel can serve as an example of how confusing Dostoevsky can be. It is natural that madness would play a major role in a book entitled Idiot (this, of course, being not only an expletive, but also a medical and clinical term referring to an individual with damaged mental faculties). The main character in the novel is seriously ill. He suffers from epileptic fits, or the falling illness, which eventually makes him insane.6 However, as he is also undoubtedly meant to be a ‘positive hero,’ it seems that the author is implying that insanity is a positive quality. To complicate the matter further, virtually every character in the novel, at one point or another, is called either insane, or mad, or an idiot, or gaga, or bonkers, or simply stupid7 – is the reader to understand that they are ill too?8 And if so, does their mental disorder automatically make them if not exactly role models, at least redeemable characters? In other words, when the moneylenders Biskup and Kinder are said to ‘have nearly gone mad’ (chut’ s uma ne soshli) (Dostoevskii, PSS v 30-i t 8: 134),9 should we conclude that Dostoevsky, whose contempt for moneylenders is well known, is here treating these two with sympathy? If we look at the distribution (per character) of all the terms used in the novel that come under the semantic category of madness (whether they are neutral, pejorative, euphemistic, or medical), the picture does not become any clearer. Various characters make claims about their own and/or other characters’ madness, only to retract these claims and then make fresh ones again with unbelievable ease.10 The authorial voice does not bring much order into this chaos either, as the reader is confronted with Dostoevsky’s trademark polyphonism,11 which studiously avoids the disclosure of the ‘ultimate truth’ and thus adds to the confusion instead of resolving it. In such circumstances the notion of madness according to Dostoevsky begins to look fairly meaningless.12 In his recent article on madness in Idiot, Karen Stepanian has suggested that Dostoevsky describes two different types of madness: (1) holy foolishness (iurodstvo; or clowning with a tinge of God-serving ‘otherworldliness,’ beneficial to others), and (2) Devil-induced insanity (which is damaging to others). This might well be the case, but still, in relation to the characters in Idiot, which one is which? When Ferdyshchenko is referred to as ‘ass’ (osel ) (by himself and General Epanchin) and ‘jester’ (shut) (by the narrator), does this make him a ‘holy fool’?13 When the ex-boxer Keller is called ‘mad’ (sumasshedshii) (by the narrator), does this make him a dangerous character? And does

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he therefore belong to the same group of characters as the Epanchin sisters, who are all called ‘mad’ by their mother? In order to shed light on Dostoevsky’s position, I would like to draw attention to the additional component of childhood/childishness/childlike behaviour, which is repeatedly linked to the theme of madness throughout the novel – for example, in the story of the poor seduced Swiss girl Marie (‘one’s soul heals in the presence of children’ [cherez detei dusha lechitsia] [58]), as well as in the case of Rogozhin’s mother, whose conduct is very much like that of a saint and who is characterized by her own son as follows: ‘she’s lapsed into dotage completely’ [literally, has become just like an infant] (sovsem kak mladentsem stala) (178). My contention is that if at some point in time a character is compared to a child in one way or another, as well as called mad, either by him/herself or others (including the assessments originating in the third-person narration), this is a sign that while a (self)-destructive streak might overpower this character’s other qualities, ultimate spiritual salvation is in the end not completely denied to the character.14 For instance, no matter how repulsively the group of young ‘nihilists’ demanding money from Prince Myshkin is portrayed, Ippolit Terent’ev is singled out from it because he is practically the only one in the group who is referred to as both ‘odd’ (strannyi ) and ‘a boy’ (mal’chik) (243).15 This despite the fact that he himself, when speaking on behalf of the whole group, disagrees with both characterizations in advance and exclaims ‘we are not children’ (my ne deti) (227) and ‘we are no fools’ (my ne duraki ) (228). Naturally, mere words do not exhaust the artistic possibilities at Dostoevsky’s disposal: for example, when Rogozhin kills Nastas’ia Filippovna and goes insane, Prince Myshkin tries to calm him down by stroking his hair and cheeks, i.e., by treating Rogozhin more or less like a distressed child. Subsequently, Rogozhin survives the bout of madness and is convicted, and there is a strong chance that he will return from the labour camp a reformed man. It is interesting to establish whether the link between madness and childhood is preserved in the recent remake of Idiot (2001) by one Fedor Mikhailov (obviously a pseudonym derived from Dostoevsky’s patronymic).16 It appears at first that the remake is dramatically different from the original. The action takes place in Moscow and Peredelkino, not in St Petersburg and Pavlovsk. The chief protagonist is not a prince but a relative of the cosmonaut Iurii Gagarin, and he returns home not from Switzerland but from the United States. Befittingly for his reincarnation as a typical New Russian entrepreneur, Rogozhin is renamed

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Barygin (a derivative of baryga, a ‘ruthless businessman’). The Epanchin family are rechristened the Panchins.17 Instead of Aleksandra, Adelaida, and Aglaia, the Panchin sisters are called Viktoriia, Valentina, and Vera. Gania Ivolgin gets a new first name, Dania, and Nastas’ia Filippovna becomes Nadia (presumably because their original full names, Gavriil and Anastasiia, are too old-fashioned for present-day Russia, just like two out of three first names in the case of the Epanchin sisters). As for Ferdyshchenko, he comes back to haunt the reader as Kherashchenko (the ‘backside’ associations, caused by his original surname being reminiscent of perdet,’ ‘to fart,’ have been replaced by ‘front’ ones, kher being Russian for ‘prick’). In Mikhailov’s twenty-first-century version of the novel, the picture of the dead Christ by Hans Holbein has been replaced by Salvador Dali’s Last Supper; Sasha Gagarin (formerly Lev Myshkin) is not a gifted calligrapher but a designer of screensavers, Nadia Barashkova is a photomodel, and Ippolit is dying of AIDS, not of consumption. There are also a few references to Soviet and post-Soviet culture, such as a quotation from the novel Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev (Twelve Chairs, 1928) by Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, and from Kak zakalialas’ stal’ (How the Steel Was Tempered, 1933) by Nikolai Ostrovskii, an allusion to the film Asia Kliachina (1987) by Andrei Konchalovskii, a mention of the newspaper Moskovskii komsomolets, the popular song ‘Zemlia v illuminatore’ (The Earth [Can Be Seen] Through a Porthole), the eye surgeon Sviatoslav Fedorov, 1927–2000 (instead of Dostoevsky’s contemporary Dr Sergei Botkin, 1832–89), and so on (Mikhailov 42, 46, 51, 90, 97). Unlike Dostoevsky’s characters, those depicted by Mikhailov copiously use expletives (so-called russkii mat) and the second-person singular forms of pronouns and verbs when addressing each other (which, inter alia, testifies to the damage done to the culture of human relationships in the Soviet Union under the pretext of the democratization of society). In addition, Mikhailov’s book is much shorter (there is no time for lengthy novels in the twenty-first century) and a much greater role in it is given to third-person narration. Hence, in contrast to Dostoevsky’s poetics, the narrator becomes omniscient and often pronounces judgments and offers the reader blunt explanations of the characters’ motivations. This makes Mikhailov’s Idiot a fairly tedious read,18 but otherwise the book is an example of a modernization without any major change of goalposts, so to speak. Its message remains very much the same: truth is not with the moneybags, but with the outcasts who do not behave in accordance with society’s values because they find these values morally

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unacceptable. In response, society treats these outcasts as lunatics, although it is society itself which is out of order.19 After comparing madness-related vocabulary in both books,20 it becomes obvious that although the overlap approximates 50 per cent or slightly less, the basic link between madness and childishness, on one hand, and the viciousness or decency of the characters, on the other, is preserved more or less intact and fulfils exactly the same function for Mikhailov as it did in Dostoevsky’s novel.21 Such a superficial update (or ‘upgrade,’ as the publisher Igor’ Zakharov himself calls it [D. Korsakov]) has been achieved, of course, by a mechanical substitution of certain things (using the ‘find and replace’ option) in the text of Dostoevsky’s novel available on the Internet in text format (this is apparently how Mikhailov wrote his Idiot, according to the information disseminated by the press upon the novel’s release). One might think of Mikhailov’s Idiot as a rather uninspiring in-joke that is four hundred pages too long.22 However, it had a print run of ten thousand copies, as did Lev Nikolaev’s Anna Karenina, while Ivan Sergeev’s Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Children) came out in five thousand copies, so there seems to be a surprising demand for this sort of thing.23 Apparently, in post-Soviet Russian society there is a stratum (presumably led by the highbrow intellectuals who lost out in the 1990s redistribution of prestige and wealth) that supports the view that true pillars of the society are not those who are rich and have political clout, but quite the opposite kind of people (contrary to the recently emerged saying ‘If you are so clever, why are you so poor?’ [Esli ty takoi umnyi, pochemu ty takoi bednyi?]). After all, Dostoevsky the artist had always been on the side of the ‘insulted and injured,’ and Mikhailov’s Idiot serves primarily as a reconfirmation of what Dostoevsky stood for and what some present-day ‘losers’ seem to take comfort in. The film Daun Khaus is another re-examination of Dostoevsky’s novel, undertaken almost simultaneously with Mikhailov’s attempt but leading to an entirely different result (to the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence that one influenced the other).24 In the film, we find a much more radical modernization of Dostoevsky’s Idiot than we saw with Mikhailov’s cosmetic changes. Although the characters’ names have not been altered (though the place of action has – the film is set in Moscow), all that remains of Dostoevsky is the bare bones of the plot. The scriptwriter Ivan Okhlobystin (who also plays the part of Rogozhin) takes full advantage of Dostoevsky’s sporadic black humour25 and the ‘stories within a story’ with which Idiot abounds.26 In the film these stories are told in flashbacks which regularly interrupt the main storyline and make

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the whole sequence of images look like a ninety-five-minute-long videoclip, with a soundtrack to match.27 Some auxiliary characters are accorded a rather prominent role. Rogozhin’s brother, for instance, who is barely mentioned in the book and never makes a personal appearance, is shown several times, first as a sniper trying to kill Rogozhin when he arrives from Switzerland (to get rid of a rival heir), then as a skater thrown off the Lenin Hills ski-jump, and afterwards as a convalescing patient watching porno films in a hospital bed. Not only the Rogozhin brothers but also Ippolit Terent’ev is turned into a New Russian mafia man who buys a hand grenade to commit suicide in front of his fellow gangsters. When the grenade does not explode, his enraged associates beat him to death for his ‘insufficiently conscientious attitude toward [the fulfilment of] the chosen task’ (za nedobrosovestnoe otnoshenie k postavlennoi zadache). Such little twists, which transform Dostoevsky’s original almost beyond recognition, are plenty. Completely at variance with the fact that in the book Prince Myshkin is either celibate or impotent, or both (this detail was strategically important for Dostoevsky, as it was meant to boost Myshkin’s saintly image), in Daun Khaus Myshkin (Fedor Bondarchuk) is only a virgin, and he loses his virginity after having premarital sex with Aglaia on the rooftop of a high-rise building in Moscow city centre. There is a hint that Nastas’ia Filippovna (played by Kachanov’s wife, Anna Buklovskaia) is bisexual (she undoubtedly fancies Gania Ivolgin’s sister Varia), and she treats the Security Council member Totskii,28 Myshkin, and Rogozhin so badly that when Rogozhin finally shoots her (!), the audience feels a sense of relief. After the murder, instead of losing his mind, Rogozhin calmly cuts off Nastas’ia Filippovna’s legs, roasts them and invites the unsuspecting Myshkin to a meal. As for the topic of madness, in the film it is related to drug abuse. Myshkin confesses that he used to be a drug addict, and, although he claims that he has been cured, his vision of the world is definitely druginfused. As he puts it himself, ‘I can get high without taking any stuff’ (menia pret naiavu bez vsiakogo kompota). Thanks to computer graphics, the audience has an opportunity to share Myshkin’s visions, such as butterflies the size of a seagull, Moscow as a futuristic city, and so on. In fact, even Dostoevsky’s most frequently quoted idea from Idiot, ‘beauty will save the world’ (krasota spaset mir) is presented on the screen as a shining neon sign forming part of Prince Myshkin’s hallucinations. In other words, it appears that Daun Khaus’s message is that only madmen can seriously suggest that beauty is capable of saving anyone or anything (incidentally, the words ‘beauty won’t save anyone’ (krasota ne spaset

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nikogo) appear on the blurb of Mikhailov’s book, though they have nothing to do with its content, which despite its modernization is decidedly and faithfully Dostoevskyan). In the film, the concept of childishness as a component of madness is preserved, but just like everything else it is permeated by irony and sarcasm: e.g., the evidence that Prince Myshkin found a soulmate in Aglaia is demonstrated in a scene when both characters urinate together in the open air, as innocent children might do, in the Lenin Hills park. Similarly, General Ivolgin attempts to create a false childhood memory for the Prince by saying to him: ‘Do you remember how I washed your dirty bum under the drinking water taps in Baden-Baden?’ (Pomnish’ , kak ia tvoiu zhopku obosrannuiu myl v pit’evykh fontanchikakh v Baden-Badene?). Unlike in Dostoevsky, the childishness may not carry any redeemable quality for Kachanov.29 Everyone and everything is laughed at (and, admittedly, humour in the film is not in the best possible taste).30 There is hardly any doubt that Daun Khaus belongs to the artistic mode of steb, defined by the film critic Viktor Matizen as ‘game- and parody-like mythmaking that uses once-sacred cultures of the past as its basis’ (parodiinoigrovoe mifotvorchestvo na nekogda sakral’nom materiale proshlykh kul’tur) (‘Steb’ 62).31 According to Matizen, ‘irreverent remakes’ (parodiinye rimeiki) represent a variety of steb, which is characterized, among other things, by the provocative nature of the games that the artist is playing with the audience,32 but also by the artist’s grand ambition to create a new reality from the fragments of the old one (Matizen calls this ambition a ‘desire to redesign the world’ [zhelanie peresozdat’ mir]; see ‘Steb’ 59–61). Although it is far from clear which new reality Daun Khaus is trying to create, it is obvious that Roman Kachanov is much more extreme than Fedor Mikhailov in his rewriting of Dostoevsky,33 as, in contrast to Mikhailov’s reverence toward the Russian classic and unwillingness to change much in Idiot’s original message, Kachanov’s film boldly pokes fun at the Dostoevsky canon itself for being the sacred cow it has become. What’s more, Kachanov’s madcap retelling of Dostoevsky’s book about madness is arguably a better response to the maddening changes that the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s have introduced into the lives of ordinary Russians than that of Mikhailov.34 Perhaps the fact that Daun Khaus is aiming not at the Soviet Union’s (by now rather obsolete) ideological clichés but at the (arguably) best ideology that imperial Russia had to offer should be interpreted with optimism. Kachanov’s version of Idiot might well have a therapeutic significance, as it is trying to help its audience break free from the vicious cycle of so-called eternal Russian questions, such as ‘Who is to

A ‘New Russian’ Madness? Mikhailov and Kachanov 249

blame [for Russia’s sordid state of affairs]?’ ‘What is to be done [to improve it]?’ and ‘When and from where will salvation come?’ By laughingly parting with Russia’s past the authors of Daun Khaus might be making a contribution toward Russia’s healthier future. From a different perspective, Kachanov’s and Mikhailov’s efforts can be seen as high culture’s attempts to reinvent itself in a situation when it no longer commands the respect of readers and viewers, who seem to have set their hearts on pure entertainment in preference to serious discussions of moral issues. Has post-Soviet society gone mad, abandoning time-honoured values as a result, or is it refined, sophisticated individuals who have been hopelessly out of touch with reality and therefore insane all along? This might prove to be a ‘new Russian’ eternal question that will haunt us for years to come.

NOTES 1 This widespread recent phenomenon has spawned fiction, essays, popular jokes and even cookbooks. See, for instance, Povoliaev; Faibisovich, 9–15; Kulikov; and Metelitsa and Fomina. 2 Cf. also Vladimir Bortko’s 2003 attempt to televise Dostoevskii’s Idiot in ten episodes; for reviews see Prusenkova; the editorial ‘Schast’e ot uma’; and Moskvina. 3 As any Russian psychiatrist would confirm, the number of psychiatric patients increases exponentially during times of transition. 4 In his recent thought-provoking study, however, Børtnes asserts that ‘Dostoevsky in the figure of Prince Myshkin has given us a mock-Christ ... a Gegenbild of Christ, an Anti-Christ in the Nietzschean sense’ (32–3). 5 Dostoevsky admitted this in autumn 1874 when working on the novel Podrostok (‘A Raw Youth’). He reminded himself to ‘avoid the mistake, made in The Idiot ... of describing (many of the) secondary events in a fragmentary, insinuated, romance-like manner, and dragging them out over a lengthy extension [of the novel], both in the narrated action as well as in individual scenes, yet without giving any explanations at all, just guesses and hints, instead of explaining the truth directly. Being mere secondary episodes, they weren’t worth such concentrated attention on the part of the reader; on the contrary, they actually tended to obscure, rather than to clarify, the principal objective, precisely because the reader, diverted to a side road, could very well lose the main road and get all confused in his attention’ (Notebooks for ‘A Raw Youth’ 236–7). 6 It is perhaps worth mentioning that to many psychiatrists the ‘case of

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7 8

9 10

11 12

13 14

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Myshkin ... seemed clinically remarkable for its time chiefly in the detailed descriptions of premonitory moods and ecstatic aura with religious overtones’ (Rice 206). For statistical data on all the synonyms for ‘idiot’ used by Dostoevsky in the novel, with the context for each application, see Ando et al. As Nikolai Leskov put it in his review of Idiot, published in Vecherniaia gazeta of 1 January 1869, ‘every [character in the novel], as if by choice, is possessed by a mental illness’ (vse, kak na podbor, oderzhimy dushevnymi bolezniami). Quoted in Dostoevskii, PSS v 30-i t 9: 415. Hereafter the quotations from this edition of Idiot are given with page references in the text of the chapter and in the appendices. See appendix 1, based on the data obtained from the first two parts of the novel. Curiously enough, professional psychiatrists believe that the indiscriminate public use of madness-related terminology (reproduced in several works by Dostoevsky) is typical of the everyday situation in modern Russia too. Such usage is aimed at discrediting extraordinary individuals and excluding them from a ‘normal’ community. See Kuznetsov and Lebedev 6. On Dostoevsky’s polyphonic mode of artistic thinking, see, for example, Bakhtin, Problems, and Krasnov. Cf. ‘Very often the conclusions of Dostoevsky’s characters [in Idiot] about each other’s madness are groundless ... These conclusions look more like metaphors referring to actions performed in a state of exaltation’ (Bogdanov 346).This is probably because Dostoevsky rarely provided his characters with clear symptoms of a psychiatric disease, preferring to concentrate on borderline cases instead (see Kuznetsov and Lebedev 155–6). He was well aware of the relativity of normalcy, as the following statement demonstrates: ‘Quite a few people suffer precisely from their healthy physical condition. Being convinced beyond all doubt that they are normal, they are afflicted by terrible self-conceit and shameless self-aggrandizement, which sometimes go as far as the belief in their own infallibility. These healthy people are ... gravely ill, they need a doctor’ (Dostoevskii, PSS v 30-i t 26: 107). On the Orthodox Christian concept of ‘holy foolishness’ and its transformation in Dostoevsky, see Murav, Holy Foolishness; and Børtnes 18–34. Cf. the critic Nikolai Strakhov’s letter to Dostoevsky of mid-March 1868 about Idiot: ‘This is how I understood your message: wisdom is open to childlike souls but is closed to the “wise” and the “sensible”’ (Dostoevskii, PSS v 30-i t 9: 411). More specifically, the critic Akim Volynskii’s thoughts on the character of Nastas’ia Filippovna have been summarized as follows: ‘because she is childlike and pure at heart, she will at last be saved’ (Terras 12). On the healing power of pleasant childhood memories in Dostoevsky, see Kuznetsov and Lebedev 218–19.

A ‘New Russian’ Madness? Mikhailov and Kachanov 251 15 Except for Keller, whose ‘child-like trusting nature’ is noted by Prince Myshkin (257). 16 When on 1 April 2003 I contacted Mr Mikhailov at the e-mail address given on page 4 of his book ([email protected]), asking him to disclose his real name, he replied that it was ‘Kh. Z. Sobachii.’ 17 On the symbolism of surnames in Idiot, specially on those of Rogozhin and the Epanchins, see Kurganov 19–27, and Passage, Character Names 68–9. 18 See Shpakov, and Ivanova 166. Some critics, however, thoroughly enjoyed the book, e.g., Voznesenskii. 19 As Bakhtin noted, ‘the theme of madness is often used ... to rid oneself of the world’s false truths and to acquire a clearer vision of the world’ (Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i 342). 20 See appendix 2. For a representative list of madness-related synonyms in the Russian language, see Elena Dryzhakova’s chapter in the present volume. 21 Cf. ‘My main aim was NOT TO CHANGE ANYTHING except for periodspecific features [primety vremeni]’ (‘Fedor Mikhailov – o svoei knige’). It is not clear on what grounds it has been claimed that the ‘modern version of The Idiot is ... openly polemical vis-à-vis the original’ (Boguslavskaia 165). 22 Cf. ‘The size of the black-and-grey book was suspicious: given their poor reputation, no one would write that much for the New Russians’ (L’vova). 23 As an astute commentator on twenty-first-century Russia observes, modern Russian fiction has not yet produced a gallery of human types, similar to those in Russian classical literature, that would guide the reader toward a better understanding of himself and of the situation around him (see Limonov 35–6, 252). In such circumstances, it is only natural to try and recycle some of those classical fictional characters for modern consumption. It is hardly surprising that Mikhailov’s Idiot is not a one-off project but forms part of a series called Novyi russkii roman (The New Russian Novel), which includes Anna Karenina by Lev Nikolaev (a new version of Tolstoy’s 1877 novel) and Otsy i deti by Ivan Sergeev (obviously a remake of Turgenev’s 1862 Fathers and Children), both released by the Zakharov publishing house in 2001. For a review of Nikolaev’s and Sergeev’s novels, see Zolotonosov; Uritskii; and Zagidullina. The Sergeev novel, by the way, is attributed to Sergei Shargunov, winner of the Debiut-2001 literary prize and the youth leader of the Motherland party. 24 For a discussion of this problem, see Kukushkin and Rogov. 25 Cf., for instance, Ippolit making fun of a neighbour’s child who got frozen to death (329, 338), as well as Lebedev’s comment on the story about a twelfthcentury cannibal who consumed sixty monks and six ‘lay children’ or so: ‘in my personal opinion, a child is not nourishing enough; it may even taste

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26 27

28 29

30 31

32 33 34

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sickly sweet, hence it does not satisfy your hunger but only leaves you with pangs of conscience’ (315). For a full version of the script see http://www.ezhe.ru/data/vgik/oidh.html. According to Okhlobystin, the khaus in the film title comes from the term ‘house music’ (whereas the daun obviously derives from Down’s syndrome, with its symptom of diminished intelligence). Although perfectly legitimate in their own right as loan-words, daun and khaus, when put together, form something resembling a ‘pseudo-anglicism’ (on this term, see Dunn 94–5), with a possible meaning of sumasshedshii dom (madhouse). The film critic Alla Bossart suggested that daun khaus ‘should have reminded [the viewers] of “downtown” but didn’t.’ Other interpretations link daun with the dancefloor expressions ‘getting down’ or ‘boogieing down’ (Susanna Pellinen, personal communication; it is curious that breaking into break dance every now and then serves as a manifestation of Myshkin’s abnormality in the film) and khaus with ‘chaos’ (Angela Brintlinger, personal communication; see also Polupanov). This character is played by the former Russian Playboy editor Artem Troitskii; it is curious that Totskii is renamed Troitskii in Mikhailov’s version of Idiot. This might have something to do with a Freudian rebellion against the father figure. Roman Kachanov’s father, also named Roman Kachanov, directed the four-part animation series about Crocodile Gena (Soiuzmul’tfil’m, 1969–83), which has been a staple of Soviet/Russian children’s television programs ever since. See Kichin; for a more enthusiastic response, see Kuznetsova. Among other examples of steb, Matizen names Viktor Pelevin’s novella Omon Ra (1992) and the films Traktora (Tractors, 1990; directed by the Aleinikov brothers), Dva kapitana-2 (Two Captains-2, 1992; by Sergei Debizhev) and Komediia strogogo rezhima (A Comedy in a Top Security Labour Camp, 1992; by Vladimir Studennikov and Mikhail Grigor’ev). For Matizen’s positive review of Daun Khaus, see ‘Bondarchuk-daun v Okhlobystin-khause.’ For additional material in the steb mode, see Adamatskii. On the evolution of the notion of steb, see Sergeeva III. According to the film critic Kirill Razlogov, steb is a ‘provocative happening’ (Matizen, ‘Steb’ 61). The film critic Katerina Tarkhanova even called the film an ‘anti-adaptation’ (anti-ekranizatsiia). Yet another definition of steb, by the film critic Aleksei Erokhin, is ‘an adequate response to inadequate life conditions’ (adekvatnoe otnoshenie k neadekvatnoi deistvitel’nosti; Matizen, ‘Steb’ 62).

Appendix I: Madness-Related Vocabulary in Dostoevsky’s Idiot [Page numbers are from F.M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 t, vol. 8 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), parts 1 and 2 of novel. Bold type indicates denials that a character is mentally handicapped or unstable.] Self-assessment (including reported speech)

Other characters’ assessment (including ‘characters’ zones’ and references to other people’s opinion made in one’s direct speech)

8>b2\ ;ZT84>

R"FHZ, BD4Bа*84 ,(@ $@:,2>4 F*,:":4 42 >,(@ F@&F,< B@RH4 4*4@H" (25), b >, 4H\Fb >4 >" 8@,2*@D@& (32), 8"8@6 0, b 4*4@H H,B,D\ H,B,D\, 8@(*" b F"< B@>4Z6 4*4@H (230)

`D@*4&Z6 (14, by Rogozhin), *JD"R@8 / *JD"8 / *JD"R,FH&@ (18, by the Epanchins’ servant; 218, euphemistically, by Keller; 250, 266, and 268, by General Epanchin’s wife), BD@FH@&"H (45, by General Epanchin), F@&,DT,>>Z6 D,$,>@8 / &4* … >,FR"FH>@(@ D,$,>8" (44, by General Epanchin; 63, by Shneider; 233, by Gania Ivolgin), RJ*"8 (46 and 152, by General Epanchin’s wife), $@:\>@6 / $@:,2>\ (47, idem; 235, by Doktorenko), @F,: (48–9, by Adelaida and Aglaia Epanchin), 4*4@H / 4*4@H48 (64, by unspecified ‘others’ as reported by Prince Myshkin; 67, 74 and 75, by Gania Ivolgin; 86 and 141, by Nastas’ia Filippovna; 89, by Ferdyshchenko; 142, by Totskii; 217, by Keller; 237 and 268, by General Epanchin’s wife; 249, by Ippolit; 264, by Aglaia Epanchina, as reported by her mother), @:JN (86, by Nastas’ia Filippovna), FJ 74N@H (157), F8@>LJ24:Fb 8"8 *,FbH4:,H>46 "2&":4 4*4@H@< … ^H@H R,:@&,8 F,$, >" J\8J >J0>@ (138 and 144, by Nastas’ia Filippovna), @> J0 >, $D,*4H :4 / FJ\846 (144, by Nastas’ia Filippovna), >, FHZ*4HFb 8"8 *JD"8 (152, by General Epanchin’s wife), &Z b 2" "2Z&"`H 4*4@H@< 4*4@H@, B@>4 C@(@04>

b *JD"8 F H@$@6 &@FH\ (191, by Prince Myshkin)

9,$,*,&

Г">b 3&@:(4>

RH@ b ,V, R4> (,>,D":\T" +B">R4>"

F,FHDZ +B">R4>Z

Third-person narration’s assessment (not excluding reported speech and ‘characters’ zones’) RJH\ >, @*JD,: (134), JH" $Z: & >"FH@bV,< $D,*J (136)

$,2J"b J:Z$8" (145)

8"8 B@:@JZ6 (139) *JD" (69, 210, 236), b HJH F J"6*4 (237)

F@&,DT,>>Z6 D,$,>@8 / R4>"

*JD" (69, by her mother), FJ $@:\>@6 & 2"&,*,>44 S>,6*,D"

B@ H@:\8@ J0"F>@ FHD"*": (58, by Prince Myshkin)

;"D4 J b >,H @FHD@J,D": 3&@:(4>

(:b0J 8"8 B@:@JZ6 (93)

7,::,D

% 8"0*@6 (>,&:4&@6 &ZN@*8, !(:"4 … BD@(:b*Z&":@ FH@:\8@ ,V, R,(@-H@ *,HF8@(@, >,H,DB,:4&@ T8@:\>@(@ (205)

8"8 $,2J"b (62, by Prince Myshkin)

K,D*ZV,>8@

7@:b 3&@:(4>

Third-person narration’s assessment (not excluding reported speech and ‘characters’ zones’)

@F,: (117, by General Epanchin)

F""*,b>>Z6 ,@$ZR"6>"b BD"&*4&@FH\ (257, by Prince Myshkin)

B@2&@:b:@F\ 4(D"H\ D@:\ TJH" (117) B@FH"D":Fb ,V, $@:,, @*JD"R4H\ F&@, B@:@0,>4, (92)

N@N@H":4 8"8 FJ" b ^H" *JD\ >"T:" (136), F J>"b (251, by Evgenii Pavlovich)

">(:4R">8" & F&,H:@-(@:J$@< 74>*,D 4 #4F8JB

F@&,DT,>>@ 8"8 $Z F J@ D,$,>@R,8 (168, by Lebedev)

)@8H@D,>8@

Third-person narration’s assessment (not excluding reported speech and ‘characters’ zones’) H@R>@ &,HD,>"b *JD@R8" (92)

H@0, RJH\ F JZ6’ 3BB@:4H G,D,>H\,& , *,H4 (227), , *JD"84 (228), , & B@:>@< D"FFJ*8, …, " B@ FP,< FH":" (178, by Rogozhin) NB: a proof that for Dostoevsky the notions of ‘madness’ and ‘childhood’ are related, hence ‘madness’ might have a positive quality. *JD"8 (207, by General Epanchin’s wife) H,$b ,V, &ZF,R\ @ (=still a child, 238, by General Epanchin’s wife), 4b, B@ F&@,6 BD@FH@H, (229, by Prince Myshkin), b F"< H@0, $Z: & H"8@< B@:@0,>44 *@ @HX,2*" & S&,6P"D4`, H"80, :,B,H": $,FF&b2>Z, F:@&" (229, i.e. like an idiot, euphemistically, by Prince Myshkin), $@:\>@6 (235, by Prince Myshkin),

Third-person narration’s assessment (not excluding reported speech and ‘characters’ zones’) &B"&T"b & F@&,DT,>>@, *,HFH&@ (185)

8"8 4< HJH 8"8 >"* *JD"8@< >"F4\(4, RH@ @>4 F:@&>@ @*JD,:4. E"< D,$,>@8, " J0 :,2,H & D@FH@&V484 (137, by Nastas’ia Filippovna), 8H@ >, B:,>4:Fb $Z 4>@(*" ^H@` 0,>V4>@6 *@ 2"$&,>4b D"FFJ*8" (149, Totskii on Nastas’ia Filippovna)

Third-person narration’s assessment (not excluding reported speech and ‘characters’ zones’)

A ‘New Russian’ Madness? Mikhailov and Kachanov 259

List of characters (in order of appearance)

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Appendix 2: A Comparison of Dostoevsky’s Idiot and Mikhailov’s Idiot (bold face indicates expressions in common in both novels) I. F.M. Dostoevsky, Idiot (page numbers are from F.M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 t, vol. 8 [Leningrad: Nauka, 1973], first two parts of the novel only) Mental/Psychological Deviation from the Norm (a) Medical and neutral terms, some of which can be used pejoratively: 4*4@H (the title, 25, 64, 67, 74, 75, 86, 89, 141, 142, 217, 229, 230, 237, 249, 259, 264, 268), `D@*4&Z6 (14), $@:\>@6 / $@:,2>\ (28, 47, 188, 192, 235), >,2*@D@& (32, 75), RJ*"8 / RJ*"R8" (46, 69, 152), B@>"b (=FHD"*":,P, 58, 251), B@>Z, H`N (89), F J, @*JD,: (134), *JD\ (136), F:@&>@ @*JD,:4 (137), *JD"R,FH&@ (250), (:JB,>\846 (144), D"FFHD@,>" (@:@&@6 (173), JD@*48 (264), BD@FH@L4:b (266, 268), TJH (117, 268) Childlike Behaviour D,$,>@8 / F@&,DT,>>Z6 D,$,>@8 / &4* >,FR"FH>@(@ D,$,>8" / ,P (142), >b>\8J "*@ (138, 144), *,HF8"b *@&,DR4&@FH\ (257), F""*,b>>Z6 ,>@D"RJ*4: etc. (36, 55, 122, 144, 146, 151, 202, 226), *,$4: / *,$4:\>Z, / *,$4:\>Z6 / *,$4:\R48 etc. (37, 50, 61, 136, 182, 183, 184, 185, 209, 223), B@:>@, @HJB,>4, (38), F@&,DT4H\ RH@>4$J*\ F@&F,< J0 $,2J@, (29), $,2J@ ,, 2"N@H,: (30), 8D,H4> (61, 72, 183), FJ4, (123), >,>@DZ6 (as in >@D,2*@D@& (176), BF4N4R,F84, 2"$@:,&">4b (182) (b) Euphemisms and concealment: B@8DJH4: B":\P,< J &4F8" (18), H@(@ (22, 111, 123, 144, 145), B@ F@FH@b>4` 2*@D@&\b (26), ‘FJ@,’ F@FH@b>4, (39), FHD">>@ (@&@D` / FHD">>@, / FHD">>@&"HZ6 / FHD">>@ &,*,H F,$b (42, 84, 93, 152), BD@FH@&"H / BD@FH"R@8 / BD@FH@6 / BD@FH@*JT4, (52, 189, 190, 216), F&@4 … @F@$,>>@FH4 (69), :,R4H\ b F@$4D",H,F\? J0 8@(@ $Z … (73, Dania Ivolgin to Gagarin) (c) Colloquial expressions, slang, and expletives: >, &F, & B@Db*8, F (@:@&@6 (5), 2"84*@>Z $Z&"`H (24), B@H,DbH\ (@:@&J (31, 120), @F,: (38), *JD"R@8 / *JD"8 / *JD"P8"b / *JD" / *JD\ / *JD,H\ / *JD4H\ etc. (15, 51, 55, 109, 157, 168, 171, 172, 174, 182, 183, 191, 196, 197, 208, 223, 224, 226), (:JB,>\846 (117), B,>H`N (74), @$":*,H\ /

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@$":*,:4 (74, 81), @T":,: (84), *JD*@< (112, 115, 196), F&4N>J:"F\ (120), JH"b (158), R@8>JHZ6 (168), BD@FH@L4:b (183, 226), >,*@J@8 D,$,>@8, *"0, 0":8@ ,(@ (34), D,$,>@8 (208), >"FH@bV46 D,$,>@8 (49, Shneider about Gagarin), &Z BD@FH@ D,$,>@8 (51, Gagarin to Panchin’s wife), b D,$,>@8 4 2>"` ^H@ (51, by Panchin’s wife), 8"8 D,$,>@8 (100, Kherashchenko to Nadia Barashkova’s guest), F"< D,$,>@8, *,HF84 (87, " J0, :,2,H & FB,8J:b>HZ (109, by Nadia Barashkova), B@ B@-*,HF84 *,HF846 207), B"P">, :,B,H, ,P (115, Barashkova about Gagarin), 8"D"BJ2 (199, Panchin’s wife about Kolia Ivolgin),