Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Angela Brintlinger ,  Ilya Vinitsky
Publisher:   University of Toronto Press
Imprint:   University of Toronto Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.30cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 22.80cm
Weight:   0.560kg
ISBN:  

9781487520205

ISBN 10:   1487520204
Pages:   344
Publication Date:   19 October 2015
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

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

Reviews

.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 '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

Author Information

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.

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