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

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

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.

Endorsements/Review Excerpts

??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.?

Acknowledgments

Noteon Translation and Transliteration

Introduction:Approaching Russian Madness
ANGELABRINTLINGER

PARTONE: MADNESS, THE STATE, AND SOCIETY

1. ACheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine the Great and the Eighteenth-CenturyMelancholy Controversy
   ILYAVINITSKY
2. The Osvidetel’stvovanie and Ispytanie ofInsanity: Psychiatry in Tsarist Russia
   LIAIANGOULOVA
3. Madnessas an Act of Defence of Personality in Dostoevsky’s TheDouble
   ELENADRYZHAKOVA
4. VsevolodGarshin, the Russian Intelligentsia, and Fan Hysteria
   ROBERTD. WESSLING
5. OnHostile Ground: Madness and Madhouse in Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Gorbunovand Gorchakov’
   LEVLOSEFF

PARTTWO: MADNESS, WAR, AND REVOLUTION

7. TheConcept of Revolutionary Insanity in Russian History
   MARTINA. MILLER
8. ThePolitics of Etiology: Shell Shock in the Russian Army, 1914–1918
   IRINASIROTKINA
9. LivesOut of Balance: The ‘Possible World’ of Soviet Suicide duringthe 1920s
   KENNETHPINNOW
10. EarlySoviet Forensic Psychiatric Approaches to Sex Crime, 1917–1934
    DANHEALEY

PARTTHREE: MADNESS AND CREATIVITY

11. Writingabout Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887–1907
    ANGELABRINTLINGER
12. ‘LetThem Go Crazy’: Madness in the Works of Chekhov
    MARGARITAODESSKAYA
13. TheGenetics of Genius: V.P. Efroimson and the Biosocial Mechanisms of HeightenedIntellectual Activity
    YVONNEHOWELL
14. Madwomenwithout Attics: The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative Iurodivaia
    HELENAGOSCILO
15. A ‘NewRussian’ Madness? Fedor Mikhailov’s Novel Idiot andRoman Kachanov’s Film DaunKhaus
    ANDREIROGACHEVSKII
16. Methodsof Madness and Madness as a Method
    MIKHAILEPSTEIN

Afterword
JULIEV. BROWN

Bibliography

Contributors