Description
Book SynopsisEditors Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky have brought together essays that cover over 250 years and address a wide variety of ideas related to madness
Trade Review'This collection of essays is both an excellent introduction to madness and an opportunity to probe this fascinating terrain in depth.' -- Nigel Raab Left History vol 20:01:2016 '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
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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