'"Madness (bezumie) is a language," Mikhail Epstein writes in his contribution to this wonderfully eclectic and wide-ranging volume. In the Russian literary tradition, that language has enjoyed high status: it was spoken by holy fools, saintly idiots, honest citizens incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, great poets in their capacity as prophets. In the post-Soviet period, this spectrum broadened to include de-ideologized studies of neurosis, depression, suicide, fan hysteria, shell shock, revolutionary trauma - all of which are discussed here by Russians from inside their own culture as well as by outsiders and bi-culturals. A fascinating book on that most difficult task: making cultural sense out of worlds and psyches designed to work on the far side of reason.' -- Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
Acknowledgments Note on Translation and Transliteration Introduction: Approaching Russian Madness ANGELA BRINTLINGER PART ONE: MADNESS, THE STATE, AND SOCIETY 1 A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine the Great and the Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Controversy ILYA VINITSKY 2 The Osvidetel'stvovanie and Ispytanie of Insanity: Psychiatry in Tsarist Russia LIA IANGOULOVA 3 Madness as an Act of Defence of Personality in Dostoevsky'sThe Double ELENA DRYZHAKOVA 4 Vsevolod Garshin, the Russian Intelligentsia, and Fan Hysteria ROBERT D. WESSLING 5 On Hostile Ground: Madness and Madhouse in Joseph Brodsky's'Gorbunov and Gorchakov' LEV LOSEFF PART TWO: MADNESS, WAR, AND REVOLUTION 6 The Concept of Revolutionary Insanity in Russian History MARTIN A. MILLER 7 The Politics of Etiology: Shell Shock in the Russian Army, 1914-1918 IRINA SIROTKINA 8 Lives Out of Balance: The 'Possible World' of Soviet Suicide during the 1920s KENNETH PINNOW 9 Early Soviet Forensic Psychiatric Approaches to Sex Crime, 1917-1934 DAN HEALEY PART THREE: MADNESS AND CREATIVITY 10 Writing about Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887-1907 ANGELA BRINTLINGER 11 'Let Them Go Crazy': Madness in the Works of Chekhov MARGARITA ODESSKAYA 12 The Genetics of Genius: V.P. Efroimson and the Biosocial Mechanisms of Heightened Intellectual Activity YVONNE HOWELL 13 Madwomen without Attics: The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative Iurodivaia HELENA GOSCILO 14 A 'New Russian' Madness? Fedor Mikhailov's Novel Idiot and Roman Kachanov's Film Daun Khaus ANDREI ROGACHEVSKII 15 Methods of Madness and Madness as a Method MIKHAIL EPSTEIN Afterword JULIE V. BROWN Bibliography Contributors
Angela Brintlinger is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University. Ilya Vinitsky is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania.
'The volume is a broad mosaic ... exciting and kaleidoscopic.' -- Elena L. Grigorenko PsycCRITIQUES 'A cornucopia of delights for specialists and generalists alike.' -- Scarlet Marquette Slavic and East European Journal 'The most comprehensive interdisciplinary survey of its kind.' -- Dmitri Shalin Russian Journal of Communication 'A series of fascinating essays that approach the problem of insanity in Russian culture from wide-ranging disciplinary angles.' -- Valeria Sobol The Russian Review "This collection is an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which the shifting discourse of madness offers a rich and varied lens through which to explore Russia's troubled experience of modernity." -- D. Beer Slavonic and East European Review/vvol88:03:10
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
