Awards

• Short-listed for Award for Best Book in Literary Scholarship 2019 (United States)
• Winner of AATSEEL Best First Book 2019 (United States)
• Winner of AATSEEL Book Prize 2019 (United States)
• Winner of AATSEEL Prize for Best First Book 2019 (United States)

Overview

What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story ""The Emperor's New Clothes."" In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.

Full Product Details

9780875807751

Table of Contents

Reviews

The inherent slipperiness of diagnostic categories such as 'schizophrenia' is the subject of Rebecca Reich's fascinating and impressively nuanced new study. * Times Literary Supplement *

This is a sophisticated analysis. Reich demonstrates the truly insidious nature of state-sponsored psychiatric discourse and practice after Stalin. Rather than a simple indictment, however, she accesses important primary and secondary sources to explore the complexity of defining 'madness' in this conformist society. --Angela Brintlinger, editor of Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture State of Madness is the first study to explore, for purposes other than moral condemnation, the use of punitive psychiatry against 'other-thinkers' and dissidents under late Soviet socialism. Without condoning the practice, Reich investigates the meanings attached to sanity and insanity, their deployment for political and literary purposes, and the way the idea of madness informs and inflects key literary devices. The result is a work of unquestionable significance. --Benjamin Nathans, University of Pennsylvania

This is a sophisticated analysis. Reich demonstrates the truly insidious nature of state-sponsored psychiatric discourse and practice after Stalin. Rather than a simple indictment, however, she accesses important primary and secondary sources to explore the complexity of defining 'madness' in this conformist society. -Angela Brintlinger, editor of Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture State of Madness is the first study to explore, for purposes other than moral condemnation, the use of punitive psychiatry against 'other-thinkers' and dissidents under late Soviet socialism. Without condoning the practice, Reich investigates the meanings attached to sanity and insanity, their deployment for political and literary purposes, and the way the idea of madness informs and inflects key literary devices. The result is a work of unquestionable significance. -Benjamin Nathans, University of Pennsylvania The inherent slipperiness of diagnostic categories such as schizophrenia [] is the subject of Rebecca Reich's fascinating and impressively nuanced new study. -Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

Rebecca Reich is an associate professor in Russian literature and culture at the University of Cambridge.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available